Cenobox music software: testers wanted :-)

[Cenobytez]

He guys,

I want to introduce myself and a pet project of mine, called Cenobox music software. It started all out a couple of years ago when I got tired of using iTunes/Apple Music after almost 20 years. It got too bloated and lost functionality I liked and while I was thinking about that, I noticed I would like to add some functionality as well. I started working on a music player that was built on the Apple Music library, but that turned to nothing very quickly because of how closed up Apple has it's database, so why not write an entire new program...

Cenobox plays Flac, mp3, AAC and if you guys can throw some other music formats at me I can test those too. You can choose where to store your music library and you can synchronize/share your library with other computers and clone your collection for safety purposes. While playing your music, mixing everything together if you like, it shows a screensaver based on your own collection of pictures or a selection of pictures you can download from my site, while also showing a jukebox titlestrip with info about the file that plays (title, artist, year, rating, mood and cover art). Volume normalization is also built in, non-destructive of course and managing your library is also a nice part of Cenobox.

Check out my website at https://cenobyte.blog/cenobox-software/ and please let me know what you think.

This "advertisement" is meant for feedback purposes and to let you music guys know of this software you might like.

About me:
My name is Mario van Ginneken, I'm from the Netherlands and I am NOT a professional programmer and software is not my daily job: it's a lifelong hobby and so is music. After working on and off for about a year on this software my wife encouraged me to do something with it, since it developed from a clumsy music player to a full blown music system with management, Flac support, screensaver and synchronization functionality to make life as easy as possible for the digital music collector like myself.

 

[Cenobytez]

Short impression. Music is bad quality because of the capturing software, in real it's as good as your sound files are. And Youtube cut off a few tracks in some regions also

 

[bzgnyc2]

Hi Cenobytez, appreciate creating and sharing this. You've already mentioned a lot of features that I wanted from iTunes so excited to see where this goes.

First question, if I switch to this from iTunes/Apple Music, can I use it to sync a library to an iPhone, etc?

Second question, do you forsee registering as an Apple developer and/or releasing the source code?

First suggestion: create a .dmg for download. When I go to the link to the binary on DropBox, there's no obvious place to download the whole app. It defaults to letting me download the app like it is a regular folder.

Cenobox plays Flac, mp3, AAC and if you guys can throw some other music formats at me I can test those too.

I assume AAC includes Apple Lossless but if not I would add that. I would also add AIFF. Vorbis and Opus, the audio codecs used in VP8/VP9 --as used by Youtube, etc -- wouldn't hurt either.

while also showing a jukebox titlestrip with info about the file that plays (title, artist, year, rating, mood and cover art).

This is great! I've always wanted something like that from iTunes. Look forward to testing.

Volume normalization is also built in, non-destructive of course and managing your library is also a nice part of Cenobox.

I would also offer the option to output 100% unprocessed (i.e. what goes to the DAC is exactly what was in the AIFF, etc).

 

[Cenobytez]

Thanks for your feedback!

Syncing to an iPhone would be a big wish come true for me and would be a huge step but as you know, Apple does not share info on this. In the first stages of developing my software, I wanted to run my app from the Apple Music library to keep functionality like syncing, but updating (even accessing) the Apple Database is absolutely impossible and it would make my software dependent on future development of Apple Music. It would also cripple functionality, so I had to abandon that plan. I now have a different strategy: I have imported all my music into Cenobox, moved my music collection somewhere else (Cenobox let's you do that) and emptied my Apple Music library. If I want music in my iPhone, I use the "Cassette tape" function, which makes an external copy of the music files in a Selection List, and read those files back into Apple Music to sync them to my iPhone. It's not perfect at all, but the best I could do with Apple's closed software. When managing your library in Cenobox, the ID3 tags of the music files are also updated, so stuff like genre and year is also updated. Now I need to come up with a plan to import the rating of the files back into Apple Music.

Second question, do you forsee registering as an Apple developer and/or releasing the source code?

Not at the moment. Creating this software was only for myself at first, not meant as a commercial product. When I read about all the hoops one needs to jump through to get your software into the App store, it made it too difficult and expensive for me to do that. Besides that I doubt an app competing with Apple's own iTunes/Apple Music would be accepted?

First suggestion: create a .dmg for download. When I go to the link to the binary on DropBox, there's no obvious place to download the whole app. It defaults to letting me download the app like it is a regular folder.

That might be something for the future. Creating a wrapper means I need to invest in software that can do that. At this point my software is still in the "let's see if somebody actually cares" stages and besides the huge amount of time I invested in it, I don't want to invest money in it since I haven't created it to make money.

A tip: when you go to the binary in Dropbox, there is an icon in the top of the screen (arrow pointing down on a line) that is the "Download" button. Clicking this will download the ZIP file with both versions of the app in it.

I assume AAC includes Apple Lossless but if not I would add that. I would also add AIFF. Vorbis and Opus, the audio codecs used in VP8/VP9 --as used by Youtube, etc -- wouldn't hurt either.

AAC is Advanced Audio Coding and it's a compressed format like mp3, but using the extensions m4a and m4p. Apple uses it in iTunes/Apple Music, when you buy songs. I would love to test other formats as well, but it seems difficult to find files from these more obscure formats. I did test some formats using Audacity to convert a flac file, so I now know that supported are: mp3, m4a, m4p, wav, flac and aiff.

I would also offer the option to output 100% unprocessed (i.e. what goes to the DAC is exactly what was in the AIFF, etc)

The files you enter in Cenobox stay unprocessed, the normalization is realized using a volume setting per track, like iTunes does. I could easily add a setting so that every track you add to Cenobox will play at 100% volume.

 

[bzgnyc2]

Thanks for your feedback!

Syncing to an iPhone would be a big wish come true for me and would be a huge step but as you know, Apple does not share info on this. In the first stages of developing my software, I wanted to run my app from the Apple Music library to keep functionality like syncing,

Yes appreciate one can test your software without migrating one's library over.

but updating (even accessing) the Apple Database is absolutely impossible and it would make my software dependent on

Oh look at that Apple abandoned the XML database mirror for the iTunes database. Wasn't paying attention. While direct 3rd party updating is no longer possible, presumably this API should let you read the database?

iTunes Library | Apple Developer Documentation

Retrieve the properties of the media in the user’s iTunes library.

developer.apple.com

Not at the moment. Creating this software was only for myself at first, not meant as a commercial product. When I read about all the hoops one needs to jump through to get your software into the App store, it made it too difficult and expensive for me to do that. Besides that I doubt an app competing with Apple's own iTunes/Apple Music would be accepted?

Not sure about the last one (hard to say with Apple these days), but I wasn't asking about an App Store version. Just registered developer code signing so one doesn't have to do the gatekeeper bypass/open this app from an unidentified developer step. I believe the requirements for that are much lower.

That might be something for the future. Creating a wrapper means I need to invest in software that can do that. At this point my software is still in the "let's see if somebody actually cares" stages and besides the huge amount of time I invested in it, I don't want to invest money in it since I haven't created it to make money.

I think you can just use Disk Utility to create a new image and then add files to it? Or from the command-line with hdiutil.

If you wanted to get fancy: https://stackoverflow.com/questions...ing-dmg-for-mac-os-x-using-command-line-tools

AAC is Advanced Audio Coding and it's a compressed format like mp3, but using the extensions m4a and m4p. Apple uses it in iTunes/Apple Music, when you buy songs.

Yes most of my library is in the AAC as purchased from IMS or imported from CD. In this case I was referring to Apple Lossless which uses the same MPEG-4 container and typically the .m4a extension:

Apple Lossless Audio Codec - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I would love to test other formats as well, but it seems difficult to find files from these more obscure formats. I did test some formats using Audacity to convert a flac file, so I now know that supported are: mp3, m4a, m4p, wav, flac and aiff.

If you are using a library then all these and more are likely supported. As far as creating files for testing, iTunes (and Apple Music) can create AAC (of course), Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, and MP3. I think ffmpeg can also transcode to other formats but if not I am sure VLC can do so.

The files you enter in Cenobox stay unprocessed, the normalization is realized using a volume setting per track, like iTunes does. I could easily add a setting so that every track you add to Cenobox will play at 100% volume.

Yes what I am saying is to include an option not to changes the bits at all -- not even for in-app volume control. Let the audio play at whatever relative volume was encoded in the file and then let the system volume control take care of the rest ((or in the case of digital output to an external device, for example an AV receiver connected via HDMI, let that device handle it).

In addition to preserving the digital bits as-is (for the OCD among us), this avoids multiple layers of volume controls. Also this can also be important when playing back special audio formats that may need decoding by an external device (I think some of the Dolby digital fall into that category).

I'm not saying to get rid of the auto volume level control. It's a nice feature and probably a reasonable default for most. Just not sure will be appreciated by all.