Advertisement If you’re looking for a bloated monstrosity that used to be lean it’s hard to beat. In the beginning iTunes primarily did one thing — playing music — and did it really well. Today iTunes plays music, movies, podcasts, manages iPods and iPhones, manages software for your iPhone and iPod touch and of course functions as a store for music, movies, TV Shows and iPhone software. Which is great, if you want to do all those things on your work computer.

QuickTime Player can record a movie from your camera, or record the screen of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. It can also record audio from a microphone or record the screen of your Mac. What are the best music players for OSX? Works on Linux, OSX and Windows. Simple audio player with the bare necessities See More.

But I do want is to play music, which brings me to Cog. This bare-bones alternative to iTunes does one thing and one thing well: play music. The states that programs should do one thing and do it well, a sentiment I largely agree with. Cog works this way where iTunes fails.

Getting Started With Cog Of course you need to begin by downloading Cog, and going through the usual Mac installation process. Installing is done in the usual Mac manner, which I won’t rehash.

Then you just need to fire up the program. You’ll quickly notice that there is no library like there is in iTunes; rather, the user drags music to a playlist in order to hear it. You can do this from the Finder, or, if you prefer, from Cog’s folder drawer. Using the drawer is easy.

Hit Command+D to bring up the drawer. By default, this will show you the “Music” folder on your Mac. You can browse your music and drag folders you want to listen to the playlist to add them. This allows you to quickly make a playlist and then get back to work. But I don’t have any music in my “Music” folder; I store all of mine on a network drive (my box). That’s okay; the drawer folder is easy enough to change. Click “Cog” on the menu bar followed by “Preferences.” The “File Drawer” tab will allow you to set the drawer to show any folder you please.

You’ll also notice a few other basic things to configure, including your shortcut keys. Beyond this, however, Cog pretty much just plays music. Supported Formats Simplicity isn’t the only reason to use Cog, of course; another thing that makes it a great alternative to iTunes is that it also supports far more codecs than iTunes.

Apple’s default player supports only MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC (.m4a) and Apple Lossless. Cog, on the other hand, supports many different formats, including some obscure ones. Here’s the run-down from the Cog website: • Ogg Vorbis • Mp3 • Flac • Musepack • Monkeys Audio • Shorten • Wavpack • AAC • Apple Lossless • Wave/AIFF • Video Game (nsf, gbs, gym, spc, vgm, hes, and more!) • Tracker (it, s3m, xm, mod) • m3u and pls playlists • Cue sheets Conclusion I find Cog refreshing compared to the likes of iTunes, which has become too large for it’s own good. I think Apple should seriously consider offering a program that simply plays music and another program for managing iPods and iPhones. This would greatly reduced the footprint of iTunes for those who just want to play music.

This is unlikely to happen, however, because Apple’s built its brand on the simplicity of managing iPods using iTunes. It’s ironic that this simplicity is directly responsible for iTunes being needlessly complicated, but such is life. Do you guys think iTunes is too big, or am I just a crazy Ubuntu type obsessed with simplicity? Could you see yourself using, or does iTunes work well for you? As always, I’d love it if you let me know in the comments below but be gentle, this is my first Mac article! Explore more about:,.

Overview Foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows 8/7/Vista/XP. It supports a large number of audio file formats including MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND and more with additional components. With it, you can custimize user-interface, organise metadata, files, and folders.

In addition, foobar2000 supports for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats using the converter component. If you just switched to Mac from Windows system, you may also want to run Foobar2000 on your Mac to take care of music playing on Mac, but only disappointed to find that there is actually no Foobar2000 for Mac. In fact, you are only one of those who search for Foobar2000 for Mac or at least a Foobar similar for Mac, or Foobar replacement for Mac or Foobar alterntaive for Mac. TechiSky will introduce several Foobar for Mac alternatives and their shortcomings in the following. • • • • Free Foobar for Mac Sierra/El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks Alternatives • Cog: is a free OS X music player with lots of audio formats supported such as Ogg, Musepack, Monkeys Audio, Shorten, Musepack. Cog cannot convert CD or audio formats. Though the latest version developed in February, 2009, many OS X Lion users reported it works well in OS X Mountain lion.