Software Reviews Of The Moment

This time I’m going to be looking at XMPlay for Windows, plus Cog & MacAmp Lite X for Mac OS X.

XMPlay

28th Of July, 2018

This is an awesome little audio player, with some useful features and a good range of file support right off the bat. As the name suggests, it was designed to play XM files, but as time went on, it started to support more. Accuracy of modules is supposed to be very good, and it was recommended by Maniacs Of Noise, who created some of the tunes I have.

Here you can see the types of files supported straight up, without any additional plug-ins.
Module play-back will display what channels are playing what notes. This usually scrolls very quickly.

Files can be dragged into the playlist on the right side. Extra formats supported by plug-ins, such as FLAC, Monkey’s Audio and Dreamcast ADX files will also play for me. The 1st 2 also have their tag editors available, since they’re actually designed for WinAmp. That’s right! This program can use such plug-ins too! With better MOD accuracy, this makes it a worthy opponent, and it’s still being worked on, as far as I know, where-as WinAmp has gone by the board.
Unfortunately XMPlay is only for Windows, or at least the version I have is. It would have been a really good program for Mac OS X.

XMPlay also supports various skins, but I like the default best.
There’s a simple equaliser and other adjustment controls too.

The program will run as far back as Windows ’95, so even older computers using it can benefit. Windows Media Audio requires the support usually supplied by Windows Media Player. I have the very few WMA files I have associated with XMPlay. These are mostly from my Cowon S9’s recordings.
You can also quickly select a wave file output, instead of your sound card, so you can convert modules for instance, for playing on your PMP or whatever.
Without the Snatch skin & play-lists, but WITH the plug-ins I have, the program directory only comes to 820 KB. Pretty compact by today’s standards. iTunes for Windows 10 is apparently a ridiculously huge size of 476.7 MB. What the hell needs all that space? Of course with all the irrelevant cr*p that Apple have tried to get it to do that it shouldn’t, it’s probably no surprise. No thanks Apple; shove it up your @$$. WinAmp 2.8 is bigger than XMPlay, but not in the same league as iTunes. (It’s less than 100 × smaller, actually.)
All in all, a REALLY recommended player for Windows that you must have. The format support and extendability, plus the compact size on screen, features and pleasant design are all there.


Cog

One of the few music players for Mac OS X that has some resemblence of similarity to XMPlay’s format support, is Cog. This is a universal binary, so it will work equally well on PowerPC or Intel CPUs. Newer versions of the program require Mac OS X Tiger, but there is a version for Panther too. Monkey’s Audio and FLAC are supported thank goodness, as well as Ogg Vorbis, MP3, Musepack, Shorten, WAVPack, AAC, Apple Lossless, Wave / AIFF, various video game formats (nsf, gbs, gym, spc, vgm, hes, & more!), and Modules like IT, S3M, XM & MOD. (Information from their web site there.) M3U and PLS type playlists are also usable as well as cue sheets. So, more stuff really, than XMPlay, and certainly more than iTunes.
Seeing as Mac OS X presents CD tracks as AIFF files, you can also drag these in.

Here I am playing a range of audio files. The Monkey’s Audio file does have built in information, but unfortunately the program didn’t recognise it. Dreamcast ADX files are NOT known about, since I tried it anyhow.
Options are pretty basic.


Oddly, the playlist seems to ignore files with capitalised extensions, so you may need to “rename” them. There aren’t any fancy visualisations, no balance control or equaliser either. You can choose other output devices though, including Sound Flower, which is a virtual device for capturing audio. Mmm, so no ability to record stuff to AIFF or WAV files neither. You would need to choose Sound Flower (if you have it) and then run another program to record from it.
The size is 11.1 MB, with the Intel machine code stripped out on my Power Mac, so quite a bit bigger than both WinAmp and XMPlay on Windows.
I would definitely recommend this program, since it’s about the only one I know of that supports so many different audio files, but compared with XMPlay and WinAmp for Windows, it is rather lacking, and was updated about 10 years ago. Still, it is free, and it gets the basic job of playing music done.


MacAmp Lite X

In terms of looks, this program is nothing like WinAmp, so don’t get any ideas of it being similar. Coming in at 17.4 MB, this is bigger than Cog, but then it does have some extra features. It is PowerPC only, meaning it will run slower on Intel CPUs, and may suffer from other programs hogging the CPU. On my Power Mac G5, it runs with fairly low CPU use, as you would expect.

The main window is microscopic, but you can change the “skins” on it.
The play-list.

File support is pretty good & does include FLAC, but not Monkey’s Audio, even though that’s 18 years old now. There is a plug-in directory, but it doesn’t seem to offer any compatibilty with the “bundles” that come with Cog. They must be different. Either that, or the program doesn’t look for any more than what it was written to know. Again, you can play CD tracks by dragging the AIFF files that the OS presents them as, into the playlist.

This oscilloscope is about the fanciest visualisation you get.
There are also these VU meters, plus a Menu Bar display. You can run them all @ once. Float = Always on top.

In the plug-ins section, you will find the likes of a 10 band equaliser, but it seems a bit out of the way to get to. You can also encode to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files, plus there’s an AIFF writer function & various other filters. You will also need to use the plug-ins section for balance control too. With more features than Cog, you may feel this to be worth checking out. I’d only use it on real PowerPC hardware personally, rather than through Rosetta.