I use a lot of different music players. If I’m using a Mac, I will typically have my music collection organized in iTunes (and will almost exclusively use it for my listening), since iTunes makes it so easy to find a particular song out of a rather large music library. Sometimes, however, I’ll use Quicktime Player, since I don’t always want to add a particular song to my library, but just listen to it. Sometimes, however, I’ll have to look for another player, because of a couple formats that I use a lot that iTunes and Quicktime Player don’t support.
Two of my favorite bands are The Grateful Dead and Phish. One of the characteristics those bands have in common is that they both allowed their fans to record their concerts, and to trade them with other fans. As the Internet gained in popularity, one of the “standard” ways of sharing concerts (copying them to cassette tape, and later to CD, and mailing the show to the recipient), was changed to simple downloading, sometimes via http (such as with Archive.org), and other times via bittorrent (via etree). Standard audio files are extremely large (roughly 10 MB per minute of audio), which means that a concert from either of these bands (which typically lasted between 2.5-3.5 hours), close to 2 GB! That’s large, and even with high speed access, not all that easily done.
The two main audio formats developed to “combat” this problem were SHN (Shorten), and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). These algorithms allow users to shrink the audio files (such as via zip), without actually losing any data (such as what happens when an audio file is converted to mp3). Compression ratios are not as good as mp3, wma or ogg (which will often be only 10 percent the size of the original), but will cut the original file in half, which is large improvement, and has the added advantage, when expanded, of being identical to the original.
Unfortunately for most Mac users, Quicktime and iTunes do not support playback of SHN or FLAC files. To add a song you have downloaded in one of those two formats, the files need to first be converted to something iTunes does support, such as AAC or MP3 (which are both lossy formats), or AIFF or WAV (which, as mentioned before, are quite large). There have been efforts to produce a Quicktime component that would allow Quicktime Player and iTunes to play FLAC files, and it works, but without all the features one would expect (such as tagging or scanning support).
So what are music lovers to do? Thankfully, a program I’ve been keeping my eye on, called Cog, has finally reached a point where I am comfortable writing about it, as well as using it!
Cog is the work of Vincent Spader, and it is truly a wonderful program. It is similar, in some respects, to Quicktime Player, in that it doesn’t intend to act as a music organizer, as iTunes does. It is simply an audio player. But it differs from Quicktime Player in that it is playlist based, so if you have a folder of songs you want to play, you don’t need a .pls or .m3u file to play them at once. Simply drag the files or folder onto Cog’s window or icon, and Cog plays them! It also reads tags, so you are able to see the song, artist, album, genre, length and track number of each track.
Although it isn’t a music collection manager, it does have browsing abilities, via the browser panel you can see to the left of the main window in the attached screen shot. This allows users to constantly have their music visible, so searching for music isn’t difficult at all.
And, as mentioned, if you use FLAC or SHN, then Cog is one of the only, and in my opinion the best, player for the Mac. In addition, it plays all the audio formats Quicktime can play, so that means your MP3, AAC, AIFF and WAV files will play out of the box. And if you’ve downloaded the Flip4Mac Quicktime component, you can play WMA files too. Add a Vorbis component? Play Ogg Vorbis as well.
Cog is still only at version 0.6, but in my mind is definitely ready to be a full-time player for most people. It is fast, easy to use, and while it may not be able to sync songs to your iPod, allow you to play songs purchased from the iTunes Store, or convert your music to other formats, as a player it’s top notch. Cog is completely free and open source, and can be downloaded from here. If you’re willing to live on the edge, you can download the source code here, or a nightly build of the program (which may contain bugs), from here.
