Basics

Playing Audio Files

When you launch the Music Player app, it will open a “Home window”. The first thing to notice in this window is the control in the upper right for choosing between Documents and Recent Audio Files.

You’ll learn about documents below. For now, choose Recent Audio Files and then click the Open Other... button at the bottom of window. This will bring up a panel to browse for audio files.

The app currently supports .m4a, .mp3, .wav, and .aiff (or .aif) files. Navigate to a folder on your drive containing one or more of these, select the files you want, and click the Open button. Each of the audio files you’ve chosen will be opened in its own window with a waveform and buttons for controlling playback. Experiment with playing these files.

As you open these files, they will be added to the list of recent files. These are links (shortcuts) to the files you’ve opened. Double click any file in the list to open it again. Notice the popup menu at the bottom of the window. You can choose between Most Recent First and Manually Ordered. The latter choice will allow you to rearrange the list to your liking. If you remove files from this list, only the links to them are removed. The original files remain unaltered. Note also the summary at the lower left which displays the number of files linked and the number of those currently open. To the right of this is a control for specifying maximum number of files to remember. As you open more files than the maximum, the links for files opened the longest ago will be removed from the list. This will keep the list from getting overly cluttered with files you no longer need to reopen. You decide how long the list should get. However, if you have lots of files open at once, the maximum will be automatically increased if necessary to accomodate them.

You can choose one or more audio files to open in several ways, all standard Macintosh techniques:

1. By clicking the Open Other... button in the audio files column as you did above.
2. By double-clicking a file listed in the recents list.
3. By dragging the file icon(s) to the list and then double-clicking them.
4. By using the Open.. command in the File menu.
5. By dragging the file icon(s) to the app icon, either on the desktop or in the dock.
6. By right clicking a file icon and then choosing Open With in the contextual menu. A submenu will list the apps capable of opening the file, including this one.

Please note that this app is intended for playing music from files, NOT directly from a CD. That would require more extensive buffering than this app provides in order to avoid dropouts (interruptions in the sound). And you would have to wait for the entire track to be read for waveform calculation before playing it. That would take far longer from a CD than a hard drive or SSD.

Taking It Further

You can also tell your Mac to make this app the application of choice for opening a particular type of music file.

Once you’ve done this, double-clicking the icon for a music file of that type will open the file in this app.

Here are the steps:

1. Find a file of the type you want, say .mp3 and select it.
2. Open an Info panel for the file — Command-I or Get Info.
3. In the Info panel, find the “Open with:” section and choose this app from the popup menu.
4. Click the Change All.. button to make this your choice for ALL files of this type — e.g. all .mp3 files.

Repeat these steps as you wish for .m4a, .wav, .aiff, etc.

Using Documents

A document and the playlists it contains provide the capability to organize many audio files into a collection that you can then play in ordered sequence. The document is stored on your drive and will contain copies of the audio files you import (not just links). This means that you can open the document again later and all of the music in the playlist will be there ready to play, regardless of what becomes of the original files. You store playlist documents on removable drives, move them from one computer to another, etc. They are totally self-contained and fully portable.

Start by choosing Documents in the control in the uppoer right corner of the window, and then click the New Document... button at the bottom. This will bring up a panel to choose a location in which to save the new document. Navigate to the desired location and click the Create Document button.

You can also create a new document by choosing New Document (Command-N) in the File menu.

Either way, the new document will be opened in a document window, which will be empty at this point. Notice the two columns. The left will be a list of playlists and the right will show the contents (a list of audio files) of one playlist at a time.

Here's an example of a document window with three playlists.

To experiment with your empty document, add a playlist by clicking the “+” button below the left column. Give the new playlist a name. Then select the new playlist by clicking it. The playlist is currently empty. Add audio files by clicking the “+” button below the right column and then browsing for the files, or by using drag and drop from the Finder to the list.

Rearrange the order of the files using drag and drop as needed. You can do this safely even if one of the files is playing.

You can import tracks from a CD into a playlist. Importing takes longer in this case, but once loaded successfully, the files will be played from the copies in the document and the CD can be ejected. Keep in mind however, that while the Mac presents CD tracks in the Finder as individual files, this is in some sense a fiction. The CD contains continuous audio, with markers to identify the start points for individual tracks. Music Player will contain separate files, and if the CD contained sound spanning track boundaries, it will be impossible to play this straight through.

Files in .m4a and .mp3 format are copied into the playlist unaltered. Files in .aiff and .wav format are transcoded to .m4a to save space. (.aiff format is what you sill see on a CD.)

The titles shown in the playlist default to the names of the files imported, minus the file extension. But you’re welcome to change them. Select a file and then click the Edit button at the bottom of the window. You can add a title to override the default, or leave it blank to use the original file name.

Another way to quickly add a playlist is to drag a folder to the left hand column (the list of playlists). This will add a playlist with the same name as the folder, filled with all of audio files from within that folder. This is non-recursive, meaning it only looks for audio files within the folder itself, not within any subfolders.

Once you’ve got the hang of this, try dragging several folders at once. The same process is repeated for each folder, creating multiple playlists in a single action.

Choose a file to play by double-clicking it in the list.

Playback is normally one track at a time. When a track has completed playing, it will pause at the end of the track.

Choose another track, or use the button to the right of the Play button to cycle through the tracks in sequence. The button will be titled Standby, Next, or Done depending on the current position in the list. More on that below.

There are times when it may be preferable to just automatically play everything. In that case, check the Continuous Play box. When this is checked and a track plays to the end, playback will fall through to the next track after a 2 second delay. In this mode the hints (described below) are deactivated.

Note that color has meaning in the playlist window. A green background in the duration column indicates that the file has been checked and is ready to play. Other colors indicate that the music is not ready and an explanatory message will appear in place of the duration. Yellow indicates various stages of importing a file. Red indicates a failure of some sort — a problem with the file which prevents playing it. In particular, “Unplayable” means that the file was copied successfully, but a problem within the file prevents the audio player from loading it. Usually this is because the data contents do not match what is expected based on the file extension — for example a file with m4a contents but an mp3 extension.

Using the App in Performances

The app is designed to support music playback for live performances such as competitions, shows, recitals, and so on. When using the app for events such as these, maintaining situational awareness and avoiding mistakes are primary concerns.

Unintended interruption of the music playback would be a serious problem, so the app has some protections built in to help prevent such accidents. If a track is playing, the app will block any attempt to switch to a different track in the window, or to delete the currently playing track. It will also block closing the window or quitting the app. To do any of these, pause the music first.

Notice that when a track has completed, the app will pause at the end. That communicates very directly that the track has finished. It’s up to you to decide when it’s time to cue the next track and when to begin playing it. This keeps you consciously engaged in the sequence without every having to wonder, “Did I play that track?”

If you’ve arranged the tracks in the proper order, it is possible to cycle through them all simply by alternating between Play and Next. This will save you from having to think about which track should be next and avoid the risk of accidentally repeating one or skipping ahead too far.

To help you even more, the app will draw a brightly colored outline around the button you are most likely to want to click next. (The color will reflect your choice of accent color in System Preferences.) Note that this is not a default button and is not activated by pressing the Return key. It is a “hint”, intended to guide your eye to where you probably want to go. However, you can always choose otherwise if you need to override the pre-planned order.

Also, the app does not support tapping the space bar to toggle Play/Pause as many other music apps do. This is by design — the space bar is far too easy to press accidentally, and doing so would interrupt playback. And notice that Play and Pause are two separate buttons. This is for similar reasons. If a single button were used to toggle between play and pause, then an accidental double-click could start playback and then pause it immediately. You’d expect the music to start and be left wondering why nothing was happening.

Once a track is playing, these are only things that can interrupt playback:

1. Clicking the Pause button.
2. Clicking the Cue to Start button.
3. Clicking in the waveform (which will cause the playback to jump to that point in the track).

So if you’re in a performance, avoid letting the mouse cursor hover over any of these areas on the screen to avoid accidents.

Note that these controls follow the same design and same usage conventions as my more sophisticated “Competition Live” app. The approach has been proven in extensive use at numerous figure skating competitions since 2014. You are getting the benefit of that long experience in a much simpler app.

Version 2.2.0 added another capability borrowed from the Competition Live app. The tracks in a playlist can now be “trimmed” by placing markers at the points where you want the playback to start and end. This is totally non-destructive, telling the app how you want the track played, but without altering the audio file in any way. Use this capability, for example, to remove any silence at the beginning or end of the track. Doing this is very helpful in a perfomance situation by eliminating any hesitation at the start of a track. If you trim out any lead-in, you can be assured that the music will start the instant you click the Play button. To this end, the app also pre-loads the audio buffers so there is no waiting for storage access to start playing.

Access trimming by right-clicking in the waveform. In the sheet that opens, drag the markers to the start and end points you want. This is easy to do in the enlarged waveform. Zoom in for greatest accuracy. And note the playback controls here so you can preview your changes.

Recommendations for Figure Skating Competitions

The Competition Live app has the capability to export music either as files in folders by event or as a complete Music Player Document (.mpdoc). Either can server as a backup, but the latter option has the advantage that a playlist is automatically generated for each event. It’s then easy to sort the events according to the schedule, and the music files by skating order within each event. The example below is from one such competition, the All Year Figure Skating Club’s 2021 Golden West Championships. The screenshot shows the Junior Ladies Short Program. I have not sorted these, so the events are in canonical order, not by schedule, and the skaters (whose names are blurred for privacy) are alphabetical, not in skating order. But this shows you what can be generated automatically with just a couple of clicks. Notice the summary display at the bottom left. This competition had 72 events, with a total of 436 music tracks. All easy to sort and play in this document.

But even if you’re not using Competition Live, Music Player would still be a highly practical way to play music for a competition. You’ll just have a bit more work to do manually. Start by creating a playlist for each event. Then, as you receive the audio files, drop each one into the proper event playlist. Once the schedule is known, order the events to match the schedule. The skating order is not usually posted until each day of competition, but once it is, arrange the music files in each playlist in skating order.

Some Notes

Just so you know, for a stereo file the waveform display shows the left channel above the axis, and the right channel below it. These are usually pretty similar, but there may be times when one channel is louder than the other. For a mono file, the waveform is displayed only above the axis, but the sound will play through both speakers.

Another useful tidbit: double-clicking in the title bar of an individual audio file window will stretch it to full width on your screen. In a document window this will stretch it to the full height instead.