Cog - Free and Open-Source Local Only Music Player
Cog is a free and open-source
music player that can read and display metadata from dozens of formats,
including AAC, MP3, ALAC, FLAC, Ogg, and WMA. It features playlists,
ratings and a mini player. No data from the app is sent to the Internet.
Your listening habits don't become data for some privacy sucking
mega-corporation.
In the spirit of detaching from big tech as much as possible, I looked for a full-featured music player for my collection of songs and albums in various formats. I needed something robust enough to handle over 30K files without choking. Since the songs in my music folder all have the correct metadata already, I didn't need the ability to edit it. The initial import took some time, but it is a process that doesn't have to be repeated.
Cog reads files where they exist on your disk. It's perfectly able to use music files already in your iTunes library, if you have one, or it can read from other locations, including external drives.
Cog is a versatile audio player with global hotkeys, and desktop notifications. You can shuffle both albums and tracks, repeat single songs, albums, or even whole playlists. It can play music from the internet, including livestreams and hosted files. It even supports Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) using FFmpeg. It can also get live metadata updates from continuous streaming servers, like Shoutcast, Icecast, Ogg Vorbis comments, and timed ID3v2 packets, if the streamer uses them. Furthermore, it can even show you a cue sheet, which is like a list of songs in the order they’ll play. It can also show you album artwork for each song, both inside the cue sheet and outside. It can store album artwork in different formats, like JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, or AVIF. It also has a graphic equalizer and a spectrum visualization in the toolbar or a separate window. And if you have a sound device that supports spatial audio, it can use that too. It also has multiple MIDI synthesizers, including the system synthesizer (which works with SoundFonts or the system GS bank) or BASSMIDI (which needs SoundFonts). It supports a number of audio formats, including some that you might not have heard of before, including obscure game and console formats
Cog is available on the developer's websiteand in the Mac App Store. If you are running an older version of macOS, you can download versions that work with them too.
Thanks to @dhry@mastodon.social for the tip on this app.