This will probably be flamebait, but I feel it must be said. I’ve even resurrected this old fossil to make the point.

All music players available for OS X suck.

To be clear, we’re talking only about free software, not necessarily just FOSS. I refuse to pay for your inferior music player, unless it’s by donation or coding effort.

How dare I besmirch the Mighty Glowing Apple with this claim that something about the user experience is inferior? I only have a few requirements. A sensible user interface, proper ID3 tag management (including disc numbers!), media key support when the app doesn’t have focus, last.fm integration or pluggability, and syncing of playlists to mobile devices of all types. These are not hard to accomplish. In fact, with the exception of the last two, I would hardly call a media player ‘complete’ that lacked any of them.

So where do the current OS X offerings stand?

iTunes

• Its reputation precedes it. Also, Apple, will you please stop changing the UI for no reason?
• No Android syncing (or for that matter, no syncing with anything that’s not an Apple product).
• No last.fm integration.
• No connections to remote DAAP shares. Way to cave to big media.
• Media key hijacking. I found an elaborate process to prevent iTunes from starting itself if it’s not running and a media key is pressed, but this should never, never be necessary.

doubleTwist

• No media key support (though this is more Apple’s problem than doubleTwist’s – but hey, other apps get it right).
• Automatic import of everything iTunes. Please grow up and become an independent player. I will import my iTunes library and playlists if I want to.

Cog

• No support for disc number – tracks from different discs on the same album are not correctly sorted.
• No native last.fm support, and no plugins available.
• No syncing capability.
• No bells and/or whistles.

Songbird

• Runs like a dog for no apparent reason. An operation as simple as ripping one track from a CD easily takes well over a minute. That would have been acceptable…in 1998.
• Overall instability and unpredictability. When I ask you to “Manage my music collection”, I don’t mean “make an exact duplicate copy of every file, appending ‘-1′ between the filename and extension”. I don’t care how much sense that makes based on what I’ve ‘asked for’ – your configuration options are stupid and wrong.

amarok via fink

• Difficult to install, and I’m sure as difficult to update. If I wanted most of KDE, I’d have installed gentoo on this laptop and been done with it.
• Ugliness.
• Instability.
• Please just get on with releasing version 2 for OS X.

Clementine

• Note: this is by far the preferable music player of all those listed, as the developers don’t claim that it’s finished. It’s here because I have just two major complaints.
• Strange media key support. I have to turn on what…? Accessibility options? Well, maybe.
• No disc number sorting.
• Weird library update anomalies.
• What version of ID3 are you using, anyway?

So my options, for now, seem to be to suffer through using Clementine, with its tendency to do weird things with tags and sort my music incorrectly; or go back to using iTunes, as Apple seems to want to force me to do, but then I’d need to find a separate syncing app for my Droid. And all of those suck, too.

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