Recommendations for music players for macOS
Hi everyone!
I've been using Vox for about a year now to listen to music and while there are some good qualities to it, I'm honestly fed up with the lack of volume normalisation and having to constantly adjust my volume manually (There's heaps years old of threads on their forums requesting or complaining about this). So here I am looking for a replacement and was wondering if anyone has a setup that I could copy. Here are the requirements that I have:
- I can stream my own music library of high quality music (FLAC format).
- It provides volume normalisation.
- I can set my whole library to shuffle.
- Native macOS client.
I've been doing some looking around and so far the most likely solution will be for me to set up a Gonic server at home and use Strawberry Music Player on my laptop. A close second contender was Youtube music but they don't provide a native client and I currently use a combination of keyboard shortcuts and applescripts to manage playback (I found media keys insufficient but that's a topic for another post).
I am currently paying a subscription fee for Vox so I don't mind if I have to pay for the new player, I'd prefer a service like that for ease of use rather than rolling out my own.
Update
For posterity I'm posting what I ended up doing. I tried Roon and while it looked and felt amazing, the ability for streaming out of home is very limited, it's intended to stream within a local network. It appears you can only do remote streaming to a mobile device and requires a custom port to be forwarded, I wanted to put this behind a reverse proxy but was not able to do that (Seems it's not supported).
I did not try Plexamp, after all the work I did to get Gonic set up properly it felt like I was doing too much work myself to pay for a solution. Ideally I wanted something that would "just work" even if it wasn't free but no solution did that. If I had access to a free trial I would have probably tested it as well.
I already had Gonic working within my home network going into this but setup of it is still trivial. The bulk of the work came in setting a dynamic DNS set up, and a reverse proxy (NPM) inside my network to provide HTTPS support with Letsencrypt certificates for Gonic (It's only HTTP). I spend too much time trying to have a secure setup (Crowdsec + Cloudflare) but after ditching that, I'm still happy with it and looking at logs it does not appear there's any significant risk to my network (I'm also using a geoip block to outright block requests from some countries).
As far as clients go, I settled with Strawberry. Tried the following:
- Sonixd: It had limited hotkey functionality and doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore.
- Submariner: Did not work.
- Clementine: Current version crashes on launch, rc version complaints about wrong credentials when connecting to the server.
Any interest in using Plex and Plexamp? I've been using Plexamp as my primary music client for the better part of a year and I have literally 0 complaints. They have a client for macOS (and iOS and Android etc etc), the client is super configurable and just works tremendously well. It's very responsive (as in "responsive design") on desktop; you can full screen it or make it phone screen sized and it'll hide and show information/interface as needed. You need Plex Pass to use it, which is $4.99/month, $39.99/year, or $119.99/lifetime.
Plexamp is a great music client. I use it as my main playback app with both iOS and Android. The desktop version might be cross platform (not sure) but it runs great.
Jellyfin/Gelli do this as well. I prefer Subsonic servers and clients though.
Thanks, completely overlooked Plex since in my mind it was a video streaming service. I don't use Plex at all so will lose out on the other benefits of the pass. Pricing is still better than Vox so it should be worth it.
The keyword to look for here, especially for your own collection, is 'ReplayGain'. It's trivial to run a program that appropriately calculates the value to dump in metadata for players to implement.
Yup, I know that Gonic passes ReplayGain tags along and from what I've read Strawberry player supports it. Vox neither provides normalisation themselves nor support ReplayGain tags unfortunately.
On my LAN I'll just use sshfs to mount my server's music on my laptop and play direct from there using Strawberry.
I will throw out a suggestion for Roon. It’s a considerable premium over Plex and Vox monthly pricing, but you do get advanced software EQs and filters, streaming to other devices, rich metadata, and strong control over how your library is displayed. You do need an active internet connection for it to work. You can also stream your files when out of the house using a companion app, which is great if you have stuff that’s not available on streaming services.
Hey thanks so much for the recommendation, this looks great and I'll be trialling it out! My main concern is with the core, they claim you need a really powerful machine and I'm not sure what I have at home would be sufficient, hopefully it is.
Oh nice! I really like Roon. The remote app on my iPad sometimes gives me a bit of trouble, but just kicking the app and reopening is always sufficient.
So I have a pretty basic Dell laptop as my core. This is the CPU: Intel i7-7500U (4) @ 3.500GHz
It’s just a 4-core laptop cpu. I run convolution DSP filters on my main stereo and regularly watch the processing speed. It’s around 25x for 96kHz 24-bit audio. So 1/25th of a single core is in use constantly. If you are streaming to multiple endpoints, decoding DSD, and doing DSP, then yeah you may need some horsepower. But running CD quality with DSP filters or EQ is really minimal processor load.
I think that in general the recommendations for a more powerful system or aimed at users that are less familiar with hardware. If I recall, really big libraries only need a machine with 16 gigs of ram and a decent i7 processor according to the doc.
Ah sounds like I should be alright then. I was hoping to chuck it on my NAS but might be a bit much since it's already doing a bunch of other stuff, though not anything that requires the processor constantly or consistently. I'm only planning to ever run one client at a time so I should be fine I think. Thanks so much for your input.
Give foobar2000 for mac a swing. I use FB2k on my media center but use this on my mac for all of my media tagging, sorting, etc. Its fairly basic, but it has everything you actually need.
Thanks for the suggestion but I don't think this would work for me. From what I'm reading there's no support for streaming out of the box and the one plugin that can be used to stream using subsonic is no longer maintained.
depends on the streaming -- if its a playlist hosted on a site to stream, you can add a location (e.g. somaFM) -- but yeah, keep it in mind and check it out every so often to see how it goes. The Windows version is the best audio player going.
I love FB2K on Windows. Thanks to the plugin archetechture it is the single most versitile music player out there while also being the perfect balance of feature-rich and lightweight. To my knowledge it is the only player that can properly decode HDCD data even if it's stored in a compressed format (as long as it's lossless like FLAC). And what other music player has the ability to play music through your choice of VST effects? The tagging and file renaming capabilities are also perfect for people like me who prefer to manually manage their music catalog.
That being said the lack of support for most of the plugins for mac make it less than ideal on that platform.
I've yet to find anything better for organizing audio files in bulk. I love it so much -- both Windows and MacOS are good for this. I think the mac version is slowly getting there, but I rarely chat in that channel.
I run FB2K on Linux via Wine and most plugins work flawlessly (foo_upnp used to work like a champ but then started hanging on me a couple years back, I just use Plex for remote UPNP now)
Swinsian is probably going to be your best bet.
Soundjam. Wait, what year is it?
Swinsian has served me well. One of the few apps I’ve happily parted money for. Very similar to an iTunes interface. Very minimal setup required. It has replay gain built in, too. It’s not as customisable as foobar but other than a lack of visualisations it’s perfect.