I had an issue. iTunes is a fine program, with loads of great features, and it’s essential for the iTunes store and syncing my iPhone. Trouble is, in my house, we’ve got a central media server which reports 1037 albums – pulled from the CD collections of four music lovers. The combination of network access and a huge number of songs means that iTunes does get a little sluggish. I’ve tried alternatives – Songbird, Picoplay, Cog – but to be honest I want something that’s fast as lightning and I’m not really interested in the library features of iTunes.

I’ve written a very rough and ready Objective-C media player. It sits as an OSX menu icon, near the spotlight and airport icons, and allows you to pick a directory of audio files to play. That’s pretty much it. You can choose “pause”, “skip” and “quit” to control the player, but there’s no notifications, libraries, fancy features or airs and graces.

I want to thank Matteo Bertozzi for teaching me how to create the system bar items, and P.J. Onori for the icon from the Iconic set which I used. I’m using this player daily, so it works for me, but we’re putting it in our labs and it’s on github, so please fork the audioplayer repo if you have any features you want to add.

Updated 19/3/2010: The audioplayer has been renamed Euphony, so I’ve updated the links accordingly.