Aural Player

Update (Sep 19, 2020)

Version 3.0 is in active development and may come out later this year or early next year. New features and enhancements include:

• A new visualizer (e.g Spectrogram, etc.).
• Real-time playback (without transcoding) of non-native formats (eg. Vorbis, Opus, APE, etc).
• Support for more non-native formats (eg. True Audio, TAK, RealAudio, etc).
• A newly designed play queue and library with better organization and searching.
• A new file system browser.
• A new "Unified" interface, in addition to the existing modular interface.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Documentation
• Download
  • Installation
  • Granting access on macOS Catalina
  • Compatibility
  • Enabling media keys support
• Summary of features
• Known issues
• Screenshots
• Third party code attributions
• Contributor attributions

Overview

Aural Player is an audio player for macOS. Inspired by the classic Winamp player for Windows, it is designed to be to-the-point, easy to use, and customizable, with some sound tuning capabilities for audio enthusiasts.

Goals:

• To have a simple drag-drop-play player for the music collection on your local hard drive(s), that requires no configuration out of the box, although plenty of customization/configuration is possible.
• To make sound tuning an integral part of the listening experience and to have it within quick and easy reach at all times.
• To have a decent macOS alternative for Winamp.

Documentation

All the documentation can be found on the wiki.

How To's

NOTE - The documentation is incomplete and is a work in progress.

Download

Download the DMG image (containing the app bundle) from the latest release here.

See all releases

NOTE - The ffmpeg source code (and build script / instructions) for each release can be found in the Source code archive (zip / tar) for the release, under aural-player-x.y.z/Resources/ffmpeg (when extracted).

Installation

1. Mount the AuralPlayer-x.y.z.dmg image file
2. From within the mounted image, copy Aural.app to your local drive (e.g. Applications folder)
3. Run the copy from your local drive. You will likely see a security warning and the app will not open because the app's developer is not recognized by macOS.
4. Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General > Open anyway, to allow Aural.app to open.

NOTE - Please don't run the app directly from within the image. It is a compressed image, and may result in the app behaving slowly and/or unpredictably. So, copy it outside and run the copy.

Granting access on macOS 10.15 Catalina

Aural Player uses the Documents user folder to store persisted application state, logs, and transcoder output files. In other words, Aural Player needs access to the Documents directory to function.

Due to increased security on macOS Catalina, you will need to grant Aural.app access to your Documents folder. Please perform this step once by going to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Files and Folders, and adding Aural.app with permission to access your Documents folder.

NOTE - Future versions of Aural Player may make the app storage location configurable, to circumvent this security restriction, but for now, this step is necessary for the app to function on macOS Catalina.

Compatibility

User: macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later versions

Developer: Swift 5 and XCode 11.

Enabling media keys support (optional)

1. Quit Aural Player if it is running.
2. Go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy, and select Accessibility from the list of features.
3. Click on the lock icon in the bottom left corner, if it is shown as locked. Enter your macOS password to authenticate.
4. Click the + button and select Aural.app in the file browser that opens, to add Aural Player to the list of apps allowed to control your computer (See image above).

NOTE

• Media keys support is available from version 1.3.0 onwards.
• You will have to repeat this simple process whenever you upgrade to a new version of the app, because the macOS Accessibility permissions are tied to a single instance of the app.

Summary of features

(Comprehensive feature list here)

• Supports all Core Audio formats (inc. FLAC) and several non-native formats: (inc. Vorbis, Opus, APE, WMA, DSD & more)
• Supports M3U / M3U8 playlists
• Playback: Bookmarking, segment looping, 2 custom seek intervals, delayed playback, last position memory, timed gaps, autoplay
• Chapters support: Chapters list window, playback functions including loop, current chapter indication, search by title
• Effects: Graphic equalizer, pitch shift, time stretch, reverb, delay, filter
• Built-in and custom effects presets, per-track effects settings memory
• Recording of clips with effects captured
• Playlist: Grouping, searching, sorting, type selection
• Information: ID3, iTunes, WMA, Vorbis Comment, ApeV2, and other metadata (when available). Cover art, lyrics, file system and audio data. Option to export.
• Track lists: Favorites list, recently added and recently played lists.
• UI: Color schemes (built-in and custom), window layout presets (built-in and custom), window snapping, collapsible UI components, adjustable text size.
• Usability: Configurable media keys support, swipe/scroll gesture recognition

Known issues

Bad audio quality when using Bluetooth headphones

If you notice poor audio quality when using Bluetooth headphones, try the following:

Fix# 1 - Set your system's input device to the built-in device

When you connect Bluetooth headphones to your Mac, if your headphones have a microphone, the OS will typically switch to using your Bluetooth microphone as its input device. Simply go to System Preferences > Sound > Input, and change the input device back to your Mac's built-in input device.

This should fix the problem. If not, try Fix# 2.

Fix# 2 - Change your system's Bluetooth audio codec settings

Follow the steps clearly detailed here.

Screenshots

(All screenshots here)

"Vertical full stack" window layout

Changing the color scheme

Customizing the player view

Segment loop playback

Enabling and disabling effects

Detailed track info

Changing the window layout

Searching the playlist

Chapters support

Third party code attributions

• FFmpeg (used to transcode from unsupported to supported audio formats)
• MediaKeyTap (used to respond to media keys)
• RangeSlider (used in the Filter effects unit to specify frequency ranges)

Contributor attributions

Fellow GitHub member dun198 made significant contributions towards this project - performance optimizations, UX improvements, etc.