Music Players for OSX

[killfire72]

Hi,

I recently bought a Mac for school and want a music player that handles tagging the way that MB does (Multiple Artists especially). Most players that I've tried either only recognize one of the artists, only recognize the ID3V1 tag, or translate the multiple artists into a long string (If my displayed artists was "A; B; C" in MB, Swinsian for example would show it as "A B C"). I tried Quod Libet but it did not recognize the album artist tag that MB and MP3Tag wrote, which turned everything into a mess. Does anyone know of a suitable player? Even better, if that player has Android sync capability?

[Steven]

clementine is very popular and might do what you want. The alternativeto.net site might give you others to try
http://alternativeto.net/software/clementine/

[pickx]

1) Swinsian is the most complete solution right now, which isn't saying much. It's one of the few music players that is actively being developed. It's decent.
2) Enqueue is a pretty competent player, but the developer has evaporated over 3 years ago.
3) Sonora is another abandonware option, with a very tiny feature set, but it kinda works as a playlist player. Also try the 1.0 version available from a link on their github.
4) Multiplatform ports Clementine, Tomahawk and Quod Libet are also options. Clementine has seemingly been abandoned. Tomahawk is actively developed, but has started obnoxiously shoving streaming music integration at the user. Quod Libet has nice sorting (not nice enough for the OP though) and nothing else.
5) Vox is a native option that strives a bit too hard for that minimal feeling (so forget about sorting) but ironically the UI has grown cramped and inexplicable while the feature set has bloated. Also now advertises the developer's crappy streaming music service.
6) Cog is yet another abandonware and is very barebones and frankly useless.

For the past 3 years or so OS X has been having rough times as far as 3rd-party software is concerned. This has been especially noticeable with audio players (but frankly OS X music players have always sucked). I hope the developers come back soon, or Steven saves us all with a MusicBee port   no but seriously, Steven - please do... we're pretty desperate here.

[klh]

I was a long time MB user, and when I switched over to Mac I tried all the major options (Swinsian, Clemintine, etc) and ended up with iTunes. Unfortunately it's very weak with tagging, I especially miss not having a tag for record label, I've had to do what most iTunes users do and use the "Grouping" field for anything not supported. You might try a comma separated list of artists in Grouping and then use smart playlists to organize the artists, but it's a hack.

I would say the #1 thing I miss most now that I don't have MB is auto-tagging. I have used kid3 but it's not user friendly and it's not integrated, so not as convenient as MB's built in tagging. But to be honest, iTunes is not as bad as I remembered and I've been pretty satisfied. I can't see any reason to use Swinsian over iTunes, especially given the cost. If MB was ported to Mac, Swinsian would be bust. I'd pay $20 for MB on the Mac.