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<img width="225" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Screenshots/readmeLogo.png"/>

App demo

Table of Contents

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 UIPersonalization
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Demos/Aural-Modularity.gif" width="450" /><img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Demos/Aural-Customization.gif" width="250" />
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 supportSound tuning and monitoring
<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Demos/Aural-AudioFormats.gif" width="150" /><img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Demos/Aural-Effects.gif" width="550" />
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).

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Diagrams/UnderTheHood.png" alt="How it works screenshot" width="850" />

Read more about it here.

Limitations

Key features

(Comprehensive feature list here)

Roadmap

The app (v3.x) is currently in maintenance mode - bugs will be fixed and small enhancements may be made.

Version 4.0

As of Jan 12, 2024, version 4.0 is being actively developed. I am aiming to release v4.0 by the summer of 2024 - June / July-ish.

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:

Other goals

Download

Latest release

See all releases

Compatibility

This table lists the range of compatible Aural Player versions for your hardware and macOS version. Unless you are using macOS 10.12 Sierra, 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 Sierra (no longer supported)3.16.0(N/A)
macOS 10.13 - 10.153.16.0 - latest(N/A)
macOS 11+3.16.0 - latest3.16.0 - latest

NOTES:

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. 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

How To's

Handy keyboard shortcuts

Building and running Aural Player (quick start guide)

Developer reference

Screenshots

Default window layout

Vertical full stack window layout screenshot

Expanded Art player view

Expanded Art player view demo

Hosting Audio Units (AU) plug-in "TDR Nova" Equalizer by Tokyo Dawn Labs

Audio Units demo GIF

Running in Menu Bar mode

Menu Bar Player screenshot

Running in Control Bar mode

Control Bar Player screenshot

Control Center integration (macOS Big Sur)

<img width="700" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master//Documentation/Screenshots/ControlCenter1.png" alt="Control Center integration 1 screenshot"/> <img width="700" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master//Documentation/Screenshots/ControlCenter2.png" alt="Control Center integration 2 screenshot"/>

Font schemes

Font schemes demo

Color schemes

Color schemes demo

Customizing the player view

Player view

Customizing the window corner radius (up to 25px)

Window corner radius demo

Enabling and disabling effects

Enabling and disabling effects demo

Segment loop playback

Segment loop playback demo

Detailed track info

Detailed track info

Changing the window layout

Changing the window layout demo

Visualizer

<img width="530" src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/master/Documentation/Demos/Visualizer.gif"/>

Known issues (and solutions)

Contact and conversation

(NEW!) Discussions: https://github.com/kartik-venugopal/aural-player/discussions

Email: kartikv2017@gmail.com

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

Contributor attributions

App user VisualisationExpo designed the new app icon (as of v3.22.0).

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.