Table of Contents
- Overview
- Key features
- Download
- Building the app
- Documentation
- Screenshots
- Known issues (and solutions)
- Contact and conversation
- How to contribute
- Third party code attributions
- Contributor attributions
- License
Overview
Aural Player is an audio player for macOS. Inspired by the classic Winamp player for Windows, it is designed to be easy to use and customizable, with support for a wide variety of popular audio formats and powerful sound tuning capabilities.
| Flexible UI | Personalization |
|---|---|
 |
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| With Winamp-like modularity and multiple app presentation modes, you can lay out the app to suit your workspace, reduce it to a tiny widget, or tuck it away in the macOS menu bar. | Personalize Aural Player with exactly the colors and fonts that define your creative tastes. |
| Extensive audio formats support | Sound tuning and monitoring |
|---|---|
 |
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| By harnessing the power of FFmpeg, Aural Player supports a wide variety of popular audio formats, in addition to all macOS Core Audio formats. | With several built-in effects and support for Audio Unit (AU) plug-ins, sound tuning and monitoring possibilities are endless. |
How it works (under the hood)
Aural Player uses AVFoundation's AVAudioEngine framework (and some low-level Core Audio) for playback, effects, and visualization, and uses FFmpeg libraries to decode formats not native to macOS.
The UI is built on top of AppKit with views defined in XIBs (no SwiftUI).
The code is written entirely in Swift (approximately 100,000 lines of code).
Read more about it here.
Limitations
- Currently, Aural does not play online streams. However, this feature has been requested and I am strongly considering implementing it for version 4.x.
- Aural does not play protected content (for example, Apple's M4P or Audible's AAX). There are no plans to implement this.
Key features
(Comprehensive feature list here)
- Supports all Core Audio formats and several non-native formats: FLAC, Vorbis, Monkey's Audio (APE), Opus, & many more
- Supports M3U / M3U8 playlists
- Playback: Bookmarking, segment looping, custom seek intervals, per-track last position memory, chapters support, autoplay, resume last played track.
- Effects: Built-in effects (incl. equalizer), Audio Unit (AU) plug-in support, built-in / custom presets, per-track settings memory.
- Playlist: Grouping by artist/album/genre, searching, sorting, type selection.
- Track information: ID3, iTunes, WMA, Vorbis Comment, ApeV2, etc. Cover art (with MusicBrainz lookups), lyrics, file system and audio data. Option to export.
- Track lists: Favorites list, recently added and recently played lists.
- Visualizer: 3 different visualizations that dance to the music, with customizable colors.
- UI: Modular interface, fully customizable fonts and colors (with gradients), built-in / custom window layouts, configurable window snapping / docking / spacing / corner radius, menu bar mode, control bar (widget) mode.
- Usability: Configurable media keys support, swipe/scroll gesture recognition, remote control from Control Center, headphones, and media control devices / apps.
Roadmap
Version 4.0
As of May 21, 2022, version 4.0 is in active development, and may bring several improvements.
Interested in seeing what's going on with the development of v4.0 ? Check out the v4.0 branch!
In addition to v4.0, the following features may be implemented in the future:
- Replay gain.
- Crossfading between tracks.
- Gapless playback.
Other goals
- More extensive unit testing.
- More comprehensive documentation.
- Better source code commenting.
Download
Compatibility
This table lists the minimum required Aural Player version for your hardware and macOS version. It is always recommended to use the latest app version, regardless of your hardware / macOS version.
| Intel (x86_64) | Apple silicon (arm64) | |
|---|---|---|
| macOS 10.12 - 10.15 | 1.0.0 | (N/A) |
| macOS 11.x (Big Sur) | 2.3.0 | 3.0.0 |
| macOS 12.x (Monterey) | 2.3.0 | 3.0.0 |
NOTES:
-
Version 3.0.0 and all subsequent releases are universal binaries, i.e. capable of running on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.
-
Due to limited time, I can only officially support macOS Big Sur and Monterey going forward. The app should still work on older systems (going back to Sierra), but I can no longer make guarantees or troubleshoot issues on older systems.
Installation
- Mount the AuralPlayer-x.y.z.dmg image file.
- From within the mounted image, copy Aural.app to your local drive (e.g. Applications folder).
- 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.
- 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. Copy it outside and run the copy.
Media keys support
Your Mac media keys should work with Aural right out of the box (assuming you granted Aural Accessibility permissions on first app launch), but if for some reason the media keys don't work, follow the steps listed here.
Building the app
All you need is Xcode 12.2+ and the source code (a working knowledge of Swift would help !). It is recommended to use the source code from the latest release (as opposed to the master branch) as code between releases can be buggy / unstable.
Read the quick start guide for more details.
Documentation
All the documentation can be found on the wiki.
Some pages to get you started
Building and running Aural Player (quick start guide)
Screenshots
Default window layout
Expanded Art player view
Hosting Audio Units (AU) plug-in "TDR Nova" Equalizer by Tokyo Dawn Labs
Running in Menu Bar mode
Running in Control Bar mode
Control Center integration (macOS Big Sur)
Font schemes
Color schemes
Customizing the player view
Customizing the window corner radius (up to 25px)
Enabling and disabling effects
Segment loop playback
Detailed track info
Changing the window layout
Visualizer
Known issues (and solutions)
Contact and conversation
Email: [email protected]
GitHub Issues https://github.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/issues.
The app is what it is today largely thanks to the numerous bug reports and valuable feedback of users over the years. I urge you to file issues for any bugs you encounter or for features / behavior you would like to see implemented. I am generally pretty good at responding to issues, and at the very least, I will read, contemplate, and respond.
How to contribute
Interested in contributing to this awesome project ?!
I would love to localize Aural Player so that it is more comfortable to use for users who prefer other languages. I could definitely use help translating Aural Player's text into languages such as German, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc (and any others that you can help with).
Please email me if you're interested in helping with this !
NOTE - I am not looking for help with app development at the moment, but if this changes, I will post an update.
Third party code attributions
- FFmpeg (used to decode audio formats not natively supported on macOS)
- MediaKeyTap (used to respond to media keys)
- RangeSlider (used in the Filter effects unit to specify frequency ranges)
Contributor attributions
App user yougotwill made numerous suggestions for improvements and features, provided a lot of valuable feedback, and designed the Poolside.fm theme.
Fellow GitHub member dun198 made significant contributions towards this project - performance optimizations, UX improvements, etc.
I am also hugely grateful to all the app users who have filed bug reports and feature requests, and provided valuable feedback.
License
Aural Player (in both forms - source code and binary) is available for use under the MIT license.