to start out, let me make it clear that i am in no way affilitated with this software or its development, nor have i had the time to do any extensive testing of the player as of yet... i just came across it this morning via VersionTracker and thought it might be of interest to the other OS X users who have been looking for a means to playback the other lossless formats that thus far haven't been supported on Macs.

to make it short, this player can play FLACs, SHNs, APEs, ALACs/ALEs, AIFFs, and WAVs, as well as AAC, MP3, streaming internet audio, and internet radio... that alone makes it interesting. however, it is apparently also capable of rudimentary CD ripping, lossless encoding, and music databasing. the author also hopes to add support for Airport Express streaming and iPod file management.

in my opinion, this could be a serious alternative to iTunes for OS X users trying to manage music collections composed of more than one lossless format... also, since it is in active development (at least for now), it could eventually become very feature rich (for example, the first practical introduction of secure CD ripping in OS X, transcoding, additional compressed format support, skinning, visualizations, etc.).

however, this guy, apparently a currently unemployed programmer, needs some encouragement to keep this going... he is under the impression that there isn't really an interest for this kind of product in the OS X community, so if you are interested, then definitely check it out and drop this guy a note.

like i said, i have nothing to do with the project... i just think it has great potential and am certainly going to give it a shot.

http://homepage.mac.com/steve_bryan/Personal12.html

I agree it's a good start but at the moment it's behind MacAmp Lite in performance, though the bundling in of apeplay is very welcome. There's a greater gap  between FLAC tracks on playback than MAL and the whole thing feels very embryonic



  xACT already features ripping with cdda2wav in the recent betas.



  Absolutely, in tandem with xACT it could be just what the OS X community need.

Hi,

I'm the guy working on what I have clumsily named PureMusic Audio Player. I wanted to pop in here to let any early downloaders know that I seem to have found (ie not thoroughly tested yet) a zerolink error that I committed while compiling some of the unix executable sub tasks for the project. This led to problems with playing formats like MP3, AAC, streaming audio, etc unless you were fortunate enough to be using my Mac. I wish they had zerolink turned off by default so this sort of thing could only happen if someone were intentionally trying to use their "performance enhancement feature". But enough whining by me. The correctly linked sub tasks have been provided with the otherwise unchanged application available at the download site:

http://homepage.mac.com/steve_bryan/FileSharing11.html

I have begun addressing some of the issues people have pointed out by did not want to introduce any changes in the posted version aside from correct linking.

I hope some people will be able to use and enjoy the program and I hope there are more than about 5,000 potential users (estimate from Versiontracker and other lossless codec projects). But in any case it has been great fun doing a worthwhile programming project again.

-Steve Bryan
sdbryan@gmail.com

Keep up the great work, Steve. Thanks for at least opening up that little corner of audio land to the MacOSX community.

I've just got this & it works fine.

It's a crying shame mac users don't have either:-

1. A decent media player of all formats - something along the lines of Foobar on windows
2. Quicktime plugins for Flac, Monkeys Audio, for native iTunes support.

Personally I prefer option 1 being implemented fully, looks like we have taken our first few steps down that road.

Thanks for publishing this & hopefully theres money in it for you to continue active development.

a FLAC QT component is progressing: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=17290

but you're right, itunes owns and making third-party formats operate with it is as hard as can be.

Josh

Steve,
Is there any chance you're looking at creating a secure ripping portion of the app? From what I remember, cdda2wav's error correction isn't nearly as good as EAC. Secure ripping is one of the few (only, perhaps) things I have to use a PC for.

Yes, that is precisely the sort of feature I plan to pursue. When I started to discuss this project with friends that was one of the suggestions presented. I investigated and learned that EAC was simply (a loaded term) using the error correction code in the Red Book standard that most others were ignoring. My background is in math and physics so implementing protocols is a programming activity that I quite enjoy.

It is necessary to prioritize so my first goal was to produce an app that would allow people to play their files. I discovered to my dismay last night that ripping to AIFF is currently broken. That was a simple threaded solution that was working long ago and left in order to concentrate on playback. I'll be returning to it and probably fixing it before tackling error correction code challenge.

I'm also using QuickTime and Sound Manager calls for audio playback. At least in the case of FLAC and probably others I plan to substitute CoreAudio to take advantage of higher fidelity possibilities.

This all started out as a simple project to put a better GUI around apeplay which took less than a week. Enhancing usefulness and expanding options has led to a lot of interesting challenges and then, of course, there are the bugs. Among the available tasks I have to decide in which order to apply my efforts. Part of the reason that I released now rather than later was to get feedback about what changes would be most useful.

Thanks for taking a look at PureMusic Audio Player.

-Steve Bryan
sdbryan@gmail.com