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Here is the list of players I’ve tested to listen to music on OS X.

Plain iTunes

It’s not a bad sound definitely. Usability shines. I just love the checkbox next to each songs, so I can just pick the favorite ones and iTunes will only play through them and I can still see the entire album entries as well in case I want to check them out or missed anything.

iTunes with afplay

‘afplay’ is a command line program that comes with the OS by default since 10.5 to play audio files but since it’s a command line program, it’s not very useful alone in terms of usability. But with this free AppleScript application (Page in Japanese [translation], direct donwload link here – Requires OS 10.6 - Unzip and run ‘iTunes_Sync_afplay_q1′. You can rename it as ‘afplay’ and toss it in the Application folder.), iTunes’ audio becomes clearer just like when switching the play mode to WASAPI under Windows. Once run, it will synchronize against iTunes interface without the need to run ‘afplay’ on the console. The downside is that you cannot change the time position while playing but otherwise it doesn’t put much restriction but just upgrades the iTunes audio.

iTunes with Pure Music

Pure Music (shareware but demo download is available) is another ‘add on’ style to iTunes that upgrades the sound quality but using the iTunes interface for every other part of the music playback. It certainly adds clarity to the sound.

To me, the interface was way intrusive, despite the sound being good enough I didn’t like how it gets in the way that does not have a simple interface but otherwise, it plays nicely with memory playback mode and follows the iTunes time position tracking as well.

iTunes with Amarra Mini

Amarra (again shareware but demo download is available) is probably a more well known addition to iTunes that upgrades the quality of the playback. I’ve only tried Amarra Mini since that was enough for my need. It had a less cluttering interface and sound quality was good, probably better than Pure Music in my opinion, but the real downside is that some of my Apple Lossless files got refused to be played under Amarra engine but just went back to iTunes engine as a fallback for unknown reason, (The site says some files aren’t supported) so that alone is sad when some of your favorite songs can’t be run under Amarra engine.

Audirvana

Audirvana is another open source free standalone player which just aims to play audio at high quality on OS X. And it does a good job at it that I think it compares very well against the sharewares mentioned above but the real problem is that its playlist functionality is way too minimal, it doesn’t even save the list on relaunch that it’s only good when you know which song you want to listen to when you launch it. Which means, there’s a room for improvement, or perhaps when someone incorporates the sound engine of this into a better interface, it could shine.

Play

Play is an open source standalone audio player and does a decent job of getting a reasonable sound. It supports wide range of file types to begin with, so you don’t really need anything to start playing ALAC/FLAC/etc. It has somewhat useful interface for playing bunch of files but not as good as iTunes’.

Cog

Cog is another open source standalone audio player and has quite a minimal interface, which is rather elegant. Audio quality is on par.

VLC

Yes, everyone’s favorite VLC is on every platform, but the audio quality is basically just average…

MPlayer OS X Extended

MPlayer is a well known open source multimedia player in the open source world. This is a port for the OS X which is quite user friendly without clutters and does a good job doing what it is for as a multimedia player. Do not confuse with the other MPlayer for OS X, which seems abandoned some time ago. And boy does this sound awesome as an unexpected welcome. In fact, it sounds the best out of all the players I’ve tested and I’m amazed. It’s probably good to set the volume level at about 1/4 on the interface. This feels like it’s worth spending double on audio devices… if I’m not exaggerating. Not a lot of people mention MPlayer as part of audio player comparison but this is certainly worth a shot. But don’t expect high on the play list functionality… At least it does remember what I’ve added between relaunches, so you can just keep your favorite ones remembered. And another problem for me is that it cannot basically play 96000kHz / 24bit files. Again, only if someone would improve on the usability front as an audio player.

I hope I covered all of the possible players worth using.

Update – 2011 January 28th

Ecoute

I just found out another audio player worth mentioning. It has a beautiful interface and can load the iTunes library, so you don’t have to import any files manually. It has global hotkey to manage the playback as well.

The audio quality is somewhat average, which is too bad because otherwise it’s pretty much just awesome even it’s $10.

Vox

And here’s another player very much worth mentioning. This one is even free and what’s hot is that it sounds as good if not better than iTunes. To my understanding, the sound that comes out of it is not as expressive and loud but naturally clearer, so it feels easier. And on top of that it has a very simple and good looking interface EXCEPT how do I manage a playlist??? I can pick a folder to load an album of songs but that’s all I can find… (There are similar requests on the forum and it seems it’s planned) Otherwise, this is very very nice.

From the way it has memory playback support planned, it’s good to know the author cares about quality playback.

DoubleTwist

I have actually heard about it a while back but forgot about it.

The interface seems very polished much like the iTunes’ and the great part is that the audio quality is great too. The type of audio this makes is somewhere in between the iTunes’ and the Vox’s, meaning that it is somewhat expressive but at the same time has its clarity in it which could be a winner for some people’s taste.

SongBird

And of course I even forgot about this too. The pretty bird player that is built on top of Gecko (The interface engine used to power Firefox) to be cross platform. It is interesting to create a music player out of a browser’s framework but the problem I feel is that Gecko is not that fast at drawing components and it feels a little sluggish at times. The audio quality is somewhat an average one. It is extendable via plugins and interface isn’t bad.

Update – 2011 February 19th

Decibel

I found another new one and it’s from the sbooth.org which distributes a number of useful audio related app and interestingly this app was not even mentioned at their site (at least as far as I looked around) but was mentioned in one of the paper magazine I’ve read recently.

Their site already has ‘Play’ which is another player which I reviewed above but this seems to be targeted for high quality playback. But unfortunately it is kind of buggy here and there and the quality wasn’t that great either. It has memory playback and can exclusively access the device but once I pulled out ‘Vox’, it lost in it’s audio quality. Hopefully future version can do better.

iTunes with afplay memory playback

I’m not sure how I didn’t figure out about it but afplay also had a memory playback version bundled in the zip and it can increase the quality even further, though it will take a slight moment to load up lossless files, especially higher sample rate ones. But I definitely feel that memory playback does boost the quality enough to notice it.