Colibri 4+

Plays HD audio files from external drive(s)

Audio: For just playing HD audio (flac, wav, etc.) it's great and doesn't require some nonsense subscription fee each month/year. The EQ is nice for fine tuning the sound for various albums/genres. ~no way to preset an album for a specific EQ preference currently though. Luckily, the EQ icon makes sense and is easy to find. Don't seem to be able to back up/save to disk EQ settings and they sometimes dissapear forcing me to re-adjust them for a specific album. ~small price to pay for a simple app that just plays HD audio on OSX.

GUI: Unfortunantly, the gui follows Apple and their quest to make the icons so simple that they are meaningless and indicate nothing about their function. The loop/replay settings are hidden behind a contextual menu indicated by what looks like a reminder list icon... There are - icons that would appear to be volume rockers but are not. They are add track/album and clear-all playlist buttons... Similar overly simplified icons are used for the next/previous track (which just restart the current track and don't seek or skip), play and stop (looks like the old home icon from iPhone) icons. Don't appear to have a seek icon/ability. I don't blame the developer for following Apple's desent into GUI madness but it makes interacting with the app a little annoying. There are some hotkeys to make up for the GUI issues but (command L) for loop and others are missing.

Developer Response ,

Hi!

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll look into these and see what I can do about them going forward.

Cheers,
Gabor

Exceptional app, but missing one feature

I'm a developer myself, so I understand the toils for a "labor of love." While I'm programming, there's nothing better for me to listen to various tracker formats while I'm programming (yes, file extensions with the *.mod, *.s3m, *.it, and others).

Having been a Windows user for years, XMPlay was my go-to program of choice. With BASS, it's always played music as accurate as possible; just the way nature intended.

I recently started the switch to macOS for a different workflow and found myself immediately installing Colibri to fill the music niche. Great theming, a stellar-sounding modular player, and intuitive controls make this app a must-have for any tracker music enjoyer.

However I have to deduct a star because there is one feature (very important to me) that XMPlay has that Colibri lacks: looping for *.xm, *.it, and *.s3m files. While Colibri does include looping for *.mod files (which works *very* well on songs like Elysium), others like Future Space Bass and Revenge of the Cats seem to abruptly end, when they loop correctly on XMPlay.

I don't know for sure if this is a format limitation with the BASS implementation on Mac OS, or if it's a feature actually missing in Colibri, but I would LOVE if this feature were to be added.

Regardless, thank you for the stellar app! While I can see myself using this for years to come, it would be *amazing* if looping for other tracker formats were implemented.

So Far, So Good!

I'm a recent convert from Foobar2000, as I just got a new Mac, and I was suprised to see so many lossless players have adopted a subscription-based model for their applications. I don't mind paying for an app but I would like to feel that I own the program I have purchased and I would prefer for it to not be a large percentage of what I paid for my Mac Mini.

All that being said, I am running Colibri on a new Mac Mini M1, in January 2021, on Big Sur no less, and the app works very well. The GUI is very basic, but responsive, and so far the app interfaces very nicely with my Benchmark DAC 3. In the future it would be nice to have the album art be slightly more prominent, and to lock the volume control at 100% when using an external DAC/pre-amp with volume control (maybe allow the user to toggle, maybe it's already there?). For what appears to be a one-person operation this is a fantastic app and well worth one's consideration.

Developer Response ,

Hi s_alvanip,

Thanks so much for the kind words, they really do mean a lot and keep me pushing forward. Yes, I'm doing this alone in (all of) my free time as a labor of love and am glad to hear you enjoy using Colibri! I can personally guarantee that Colibri will never adopt the subscription format, it will remain a one-time purchase that you own, with free lifetime updates and no in-app purchases.

The current version only uses signal bypass when playing DSD files in DoP/DoPA data sending modes. I'm finishing up a pretty big update which will allow signal bypass on a per-device basis and for 'regular' PCM output as well, along with separate volume controls for device volume and Colibri mixer output, respectively.

Let me know if anything else comes up and please look forward to the update!

Cheers,
Gabor