I just recorded the output from iTunes and Cog playing the same file into Logic, zoomed right in and sample aligned them. They nulled perfectly upon reversing the polarity of one of the tracks. Hence proving they are bit for bit exactly the same.
Jimmy, all the girls and guys out there who expect the opposite are the victims of some well known (socio)psychological effects (“I've paid for this app, so it
must be better than a free one”, “I have studied music for five years / have good ears, so I
must hear the differences”, etc). It reminds me the '90s, when some freaks showed me how to “belt” a CD with small colored paper dots to improve sound quality. Of course those dots had no effect at all, they just wanted to believe there was (probably because they've had already “belted” a few hundreds of records).
Apart from these funny but usual reactions (ref.: Elliot Aronson), the decoding process of an mp3/flac/alac etc. file relies on some basic (C, C++, ObjC) libraries, that are used by the players, so programmatically they give the same effect in sound quality, period. How you can fine tune it with equalizers and other spells – is the other side, but the basic quality is the same. All in all: I personally totally agree with you.
What the player itself concerns, and if there's a better one than the default iTunes on the Mac: I have to report you sadly – after switching to a Mac 6 months ago and looking for a better music player alternative – that I could not find any, that fulfilled my needs or did not have any severe bugs outside of my interval of tolerance. Here are my reasons – as a music enthusiast who has his collection mostly in FLAC on his NAS (so that way his wife can listen to the same songs), and belongs to the few ones who still buy CDs (well... and sometimes downloads too).
1) I have tried
Clementine – it worked well, played almost every formats, but it crashed every second time it was run. It became more and more annoying after a while, so I began to look for alternatives.
2) I have tried
Songbird – it worked well, until I wanted to update the tags in the audio files, but the app still remembered the old ones (caching problem?) still after restarting the app, the computer, having a bath, or sleeping, waking up next day and taking a walk on the streets. After trying to alter those damned old tags, I tended to suspect those tags would survive World War III too.
3) I have tried
Cog, that doesn't support playlists, which is a fatal problem in my case. It was not a good omen too that the player's page shows February 15, 2008 as the freshest news – I wish it would still February 15, 2008 when the people on Earth were in a much better mood, we didn't have this economical crisis yet, and our prime minister wasn't called that f...ng Viktor Orbán (people of the World, please forgive us, I personally didn't vote for him).
4) I have tried
Winamp for Mac which is joke.
5) I have tried
Enqueue which would have been the best player among these ones above: “Enqueue Is the First Music Player That Could Actually Replace iTunes on the Mac” as the Lifehacker advertises it, and it's almost true, or better to say, it can be almost true sometime, but not now. It didn't accept drag'n'drop, and I couldn't manage to control it with user defined global shortcuts, plus it didn't show any notifications (thru' Growl, or in any other way). But I'll take a look at it in a year, and revisit it again.
6) I have tried
Decibel (yes, I have downloaded it from a torrent site to test it, it's not free). It doesn't support playlists, but handles a wide range of lossless formats, which is good, but in general the player offers very few features.
7) Last, I have tried some really
exotic apps, that were fun, but wouldn't provide a usable alternative to iTunes. They are small, usually play one playlist, and although they do this job well, but this is not what I need on a Saturday morning after a cup of coffee and choosing which music set would fit my needs for today's design works.
All in all: I took a deep breath, started to be friends with iTunes and decided to convert the FLAC files of my music collection to m4a (ALAC). This step forces me to revisit and correct the tags in them, so it may have good aspects – apart from the fact that this process would take a few weeks (considering ~300GB and the retagging procedure). Yes, I have put down the weapons, and started to “look at the bright side of life”: my Apple Remote will work with it, I'll have a searchable library of songs, can have a preview of a song with the spacebar in Finder, and hopefully some music related utilities will co-work with iTunes as well.
