Simple Made Better

As I don’t really have any iDevices, iTunes has been too much of a resource hog for just pounding out some tunes. While looking into alternatives, I ran across Vox, and thought it was just what I was looking for: light as a feather, a slick interface, and some hardcore music features. Some irritating little flaws, though, like issues with playlists, gapless playback, and that I couldn’t download album covers, eventually had me set it aside and switch back to iTunes.

Vox 2.0, though, is about as rad as it gets.

The interface has been superbly refined, compact yet informative, and almost all its features can be accessed from the mini-player, of which there are many. There’s a sublime customizable EQ with many presets, the ability to play on a different sound source than the system source (useful if you’re watching a movie on the second monitor but want to use headphones), a floating miniplayer that can go across Spaces, a cool new feature on the mini-player that shows the album art, a preview of the album art in the Dock icon, the ability to show play/next track/previous track in the menubar… I could go on.

This new version also irons out a lot of the weird flaws of the old version, including gapless playback, better playlist management, and I can download album art off the internet. You can also download a program on the web called the “Vox Preference Pane” that lets you use your keyboard or headphone’s media controls to control it, you can even open it by pressing the Play button!

There’s still a few weird flaws, though. Since the program aggregates music from several sources, it doesn’t have deep access to its metadata, so I can’t edit track info, and I still need iTunes for that. It also seems to sort all the songs by album, which can make it a bit difficult to play all your music on shuffle. It also lacks iTunes’ clever Genius features, but for what a memory-sucker iTunes is, a few clever features are to be expected.

Still, its flaws aren’t enough to knock it down a whole star rating, so if you just want a music player, and not the whole media hub/app store/content aggregator iTunes offers, you can’t do much better than Vox!

Uberman5000 about VOX: MP3 & FLAC Music Player, v2.0