In general, I like Mac OS. It’s stable, renders fonts at 5K far, far better than Windows and generally gets out of my way.

But there is no good music player on the platform. Not the first one. It’s the glaring gap of the entire OS.

iTunes is an abomination of application overreach, poor coding and features an inscrutable and hostile user interface. And somehow all the alternatives are even worse.

I don’t want some damn media manager snarfing up my whole music library. I don’t want it re-encoded, dropped into folders, made into playlists automatically, fucking album art downloaded or my data uploaded to the goddamn cloud.

I just. Want. To. Play. Music.

Is that so hard?

Right now I use Clementine but that hasn’t had a new release in over two years and it has various bugs (such as sometimes not advancing to the next track).

Why is a simple music player so difficult? I’d even pay for it if a decent one existed but the paid ones also look disastrous.

As with smartphones, I’m not the target market I know because I don’t want to “social” my music into the “cloud” — I just want to listen to the goddamn songs.

But apparently that’s asking the impossible.