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

Almost perfect ... just needs a crossfade

I was looking for a straight forward but great sounding audio player for MacOS that plays FLAC files, and Colibri is it! Lightweight, simple, and sounds fantastic - blows away all the normal competitors. Lots of great control, an EQ, gapless playback, and a low, one-time purchase price makes this an incredible value. Highly recommened!

My only gripe is that I listen to a lot of live concert recordings, and gapless playback is never truly gapless. There is still always a slight dropout between tracks, which is noticable and annoying when listening to a live performance with background crowd noise. This is easily fixed in my other players with a short crossfade -- usually a second or less does the job. Since Colibri is already preloading the next track, it seems like it should be simple to add this. It's kind of a glaring omission for a well-thought-out audio player like this. PLEASE, PLEASE add a short crossfade option so that the tracks on my live albums are truly gapless like the original CDs. Thanks!

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.