Ionica 4+

What a great find this has been. I have no interest in Soundcloud but have a large local library which is a mix of mp3s ripped from CDs and .m4a purchased via iTunes. I hate the usual take over everything approach that many media apps take and this is perfect for me in that I can drag in files and play. It doesnt currently display the metadata from .m4a files unfortunately but hopefully that will come. Keep up the good work!

Ive been a Mac user for the last 7 years, and have been looking for a simple intuitive WinAmp-like music player ever since. This fits the bill perfectly for me.
If you're the kind of person who dislikes the way Itunes took over your life, and store your music in organised folders then this works in a very similar way that Winamp used to on windows based systems.
I have a few hundred Gb of MP3 files organised this way, and don't want to import them all into Itunes just to play them. Now I just browse to the folder I want to play, highlight the tracks I want, right click and open in Ionica. (If you change the default music play to Ionica, just click open). The playlist window populates and it starts playing. The rest is just really intuitive and works. I especially like the gesture control for skipping and volume adjustment from the touchpad on my Mackbook.
Took me less than 5 mins of testing to realise this was well worth the fair purchase price for me, and I bought the app.

If i'm being mega picky, it would be nice to right click on a folder and select play contents in Ionica, but i'm guessing thats more a limitation of OSX rather than the app itself, so not really a criticism of the developers work. If it's something you can add to a future update though, that would be the icing on the cake.

Keep up the good work!

it pretty much copies what was once a fantastic file player on Windows, namely Winamp.

for basic functionality, it plays fine, the equaliser works OK, and the player is streamlined, reliable, and easy to use (surprisingly many apps fail this basic test).

It works less well in a few places:

1. Minor annoyance: It's not possible to drag a folder to the app icon and same if you add it to the Finder toolbar.

2. More problematic: the UI presents a way to rate a song, which immediately overwrites its ID3 tag without asking if that's OK. Some files with older (non-Unicode) tags are overwritten, and lose data in the process. I'd go as far as to suggest an option to disable all ID3 features - most of the time we use more powerful specialised tools to tag files.

3. the album art displays too small. This extends to the general UI spacing in the player which feels a little unbalanced and disproportioned - busy in places, and leaving room in others.

4. It aggressively creates new presets in the Equaliser every time the user moves away from a Manual 1 (2, 3..) preset. I'm pretty sure anyone who is able to adjust EQ to their taste could then explicitly save a preset.

Finally, as it's so obviously aimed at power users, who keep their own music collection, it would be great if it allowed selecting a particular device to play out of.

You could do way worse than getting this. Wonderful utility.