I get asked by a lot of my switcher friends what alternatives to iTunes exist for the Mac. While I personally don’t mind iTunes at all, I understand that some people are thrown off by Apple’s handling of software on Windows in general. So, I have decided to take a look at some of the other music players available for the Mac so that I could come up with a decent answer the next time around. I am looking at basic music playback and Internet radio support, not iPod management or video capabilities necessarily.

The applications under the microscope are Whamb, VLC, ToolPlayer and Cog. The review is quite focused, so for a full feature list, look at the software’s site (linked in every case) or download any of these applications — after all, they are free — and give them a spin. Then come back and tell me about your experience.

Whamb first caught my eye with its stream-ripping capability and the sharing of playlists over Bonjour. Not that I encourage you to rip streams, since that is probably infringing on something. Unfortunately, Whamb did not actually play streams. Although the application window indicates that something is happening, no sound comes out.

Another feature is skinning, though the default set was not that great. This might be important for some people, though I am not one of them.

The biggest problem for me was that files are added via a normal Finder browse window. If you do make playlists and always use them, that’s fine. Otherwise it becomes quite tedious to manage your music. As far as playlists are concerned, the m3u file I had used in my tests was not opened in Whamb, and I suspect the terminology might be a problem: Whamb cannot save playlists from itself, so it might be using the name loosely.

ToolPlayer is, basically, a HUD window with sound effects. It is the kind of player that you throw some music at and let it do its thing in the background. It does not even show a playlist, only the current song name and at what track you are. The UI is very simple, though in the usage scenario that I am understanding for it — throw music, let it play — it is more than adequate. I am surprised that the application even has a dock icon, since it seems that it would fit naturally in the OS X menubar and only there, completely out of your way. I am a bit skeptic about the use of the effects, since I generally do not play my music distorted through phasers and reverbs. Playlist import worked, but there is no Internet radio support.

VLC I assume is an application that more users are familiar with. I would go as far as to say it is one of the best video players available, able to handle pretty much everything thrown at it. Well, anything video thrown at it. I did not have such a pleasant experience listening to music in VLC as you might expect.

VLC is the only viable choice when it comes to listening to AAC+ streams. iTunes does not play them and neither does QuickTime, even with the excellent Perian plugin pack installed. So I have been recommending VLC for those that queried me about AAC+ streams. However, that is as far as I am going to go, from now on. VLC for music was the most painful thing to use, especially because of some UI peculiarities that I have encountered. When you load a playlist in VLC, it will not immediately render the file names or the track lengths, which makes it frustrating to use. Worse still, if you drop a folder in the playlist view, you need to first double-click it before VLC will show the files, but that stops the music playback.

I would guess that there may be an option to fix these issues, but VLC has a lot of options to go through. And, since I am the one most likely to answer questions, insofar as my friends are concerned, I would not want to recommend something like that. Video is what VLC is meant for, it does it well in the default mode, and we will leave it at that.

Cog was the first thing I tested and quickly became the standard that I held all others applications to. If I were to write some kind of replacement for iTunes, Cog is what it would most likely resemble. It has system-wide hotkey support, to play and pause music; it does Last.fm and Growl as well. You tell it the location of your music and it will show it all neatly in the drawer, the way that it resides on the filesystem — a big thing among the people that I know to be looking for iTunes replacements. If you drag a folder from the drawer it will add all its contents to the current playlist, as you would expect (and unlike VLC). Unfortunately, I was not able to open streams, although the option exists in the menu; hopefully newer versions will fix/implement/better the option, but for the (AAC+) stream that I have used in testing, it did nothing.

Bottom Line: I will start recommending Cog to those looking for iTunes alternatives and I will definitely keep an eye out on its future development. It looks like the most promising application from those that I have tested, although ToolPlayer’s UI does help it gain followers, I am sure.