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I am considering migrating to Mac OS X. But I like music too much, so I must find an audio player that will be comparable to foobar2000.

Some features that I will miss when using another audio player include:
(some of them are implemented via plugins, a.k.a. components)
(I tried to list them in order of importance)

  • True gapless playback (absolutely required, but I guess almost any modern audio player implements it?)
  • Ability to play without any drop-outs when using USB DAC (foobar2000 may be beaten here, because sometimes it happens, after all my attempts to optimize its output settings, so I guess this is easy one too)
  • Full ReplayGain support (both scanning and compensating for loudness changes when playing)
  • Pluggable DSPs and ability to chain them and save chains to presets (including ability to run some high-quality parametric equalizer with bell and shelf filters (built-in, or external via a VST adapter), high-quality resampler is also must-have)
  • Converter that can apply DSP chains and ReplayGain compensation during conversion (I use it all the time when converting music for my portable player) and save conversion settings to presets
  • Support of (Unicode!) CUE sheets and almost any (lossless) audio format, including MLP (DVDA), DSD (SACD)
  • Scriptable/automatic tagging
  • SDK for developing plugins (including DSPs) — I will use it if I will miss something tiny
  • OS X supported (foobar2000 does not), bonus points if GNU/Linux is supported too.

I'm aware that I can just continue to use foobar2000 under Wine. In fact, I tried this and it works! (Under both Mac OS X and GNU/Linux). But it looks very ugly (especially fonts) and alien.

Are there any comparable alternatives?

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    You want it for OSX or Linux or any OS? – Braiam Mar 24 '14 at 23:02
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    @Braiam ideally for both, but I'm looking for OSX first. – Display Name Mar 24 '14 at 23:03
  • I use AIMP3 player currently in my Windows. It is nice audio player. You can customize it very much. It has most of the features you specified. But I don't know whether it has a version for other OS. – TomJ Mar 25 '14 at 3:02
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    Maybe this link could help. It's a reddit page with some suggestions for a foobar alternative for mac: reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/19q710/… – mk117 Mar 26 '14 at 12:58
  • I will try some players mentioned there soon... – Display Name Mar 27 '14 at 20:57
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Other than the OS X requirement, deadbeef sounds like a good option - it's basically an attempt to build a foobar clone for linux. It dosen't run on OS X but it does have a plugin system, last.fm support, customisable columns and cue support. It has some DSP supports and plugins, but nowhere near as mature as foobar2000, and you'll likely need to test it to see if it meets your needs .It supports TAK as of version 0.6.0 as well.

Its not a foobar killer, but if I was using linux to play music, its what I'd use

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  • Yes, I would use it on GNU/Linux too, no doubts. :P But for OS X it's still an open question. Maybe porting deadbeef to OS X is possible? I guess, only UI part will need to be rewritten... – Display Name Mar 25 '14 at 9:26
  • Maybe, but at this point there's probably better OS X alternatives - I'm just not aware of them – Journeyman Geek Mar 25 '14 at 9:51
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    looks like someone is already doing this spontaneouscoders.com/projects/deadbeef-macosx – Display Name Mar 25 '14 at 9:53

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