Cog 2016

I love how minimalistic this can be made to look. Nice job! Is there any way to hide the level meter by default? It reappears for me every time I relaunch the app. Also, the Info Inspector can't be de-/activated using a shortcut?

 

Wow, thanks – that's pretty awesome!

 

Dear vivo, thanks for all your effort. Cog is my favorite player too.

Please consider a bug in my system (El Capitan 10.11.2). When the playback of the last track in the playlist is done, the player is not usable any more since playback freezes and after choosing to listen another track in the playlist or a new one, nothing happens. In this point you have to restart the app in order to operate it properly.

This is a bug in the last versions (2016) you produced. Cog 10111-4 doesn't have this issue.

 

Hi vivo,

Thanks again for your constant work and dedication. Just did some testing on our favourite little music player (v24). I really want to help you improve the app and, as a UI designer, here are my thoughts:

The dark UI is a really nice approach with no eye strain for me and has only one major bug and few little ones:

* most important one: the playlist doesn't save the tabs for me; I've set only to have Status/Artist/Title/Length and upon closing and opening the app, all the tabs are active again; besides saving the active/inactive state and length/position values for the tabs, it would be nice to also have bitdepth and samplerate options here if easily possible

* closing and opening the folders tab maximizes the info, two clicks on the info button are needed to minimize it again; would you put an option to disable it entirely, please?

* total duration overlaps for 100+ hours

* the separating line between the folders and playlist should have a solid color, like the 1 pixel line above the tab titles, code #1e1e1e

* minor inconvenience: when having set in System Preferences/General another Highlight Color besides Blue the playlist text gets harder to read; a solution would be to have #1e1e1e font color for selection and playing status icon

* the PRE/POST text is also a bit hard to read; maybe keep only the level meters, and ditch the button and grey background; the button could become a menu entry

* suggestion for status bar: keep only the total time (right aligned), level meters (left aligned) and move the rest to the title bar; title example: "Goju - [2010-07-20] Migrations Radio Show | 1:09:01 | 16 bit | 44.1 kHz"

* suggestion for current time: a time elapsed example would be "0:13:50 | 1:09:01" and a time remaining one "-0:55:11 | 1:09:01"; total duration could be optional but the rounded rectangle stroke around the time should not be displayed as it adds clutter to this minimalistic design

* the white scroll bar kind of breaks the dark UI design, are there other color options for it ?

* the current time is the only UI element that I found using another font; you should keep just one font in the app and work only with different sizes with bold/regular


I'll stop here for now. It was supposed to be a shorter post but I got carried away .
These are just my thoughts and suggestions, everyone, please feel free to comment upon them.

Check the two attached pics, the second one is a fake with some playlist fixes.

As always, thanks a lot for your work and I hope this helps.

 

By the way...I think this would make a nice, sensibly grouped default toolbar set:



Unfortunately, when you customize the toolbar, the rectangle outlines for space/flexible space items stick around until the app is relaunched as you can see here:



And the only way to make the toolbar reappear after it's been hidden (it seems) is to select "Customize Toolbar..." from the menu bar, i.e. there is no "Hide/Show Toolbar" menu item

Another bug report: You can't drag items from the Spotlight panel to the main window unless they are selected/highlighted as well. If you're dragging something different from what is highlighted, the highlighted items, not the dragged items are added.


edit: And the artwork displayed in the File Inspector should be prevented from taking part in the vibrant (NSVisualEffectView) appearance of its superviews. iTunes used to have the same bug in its Artist View sidebar.

 

Awesome! Though now the behaviour of the level meter has regressed to again have its visibility setting reset every time the app launches. Or was that a deliberate decision on your part?

The level meter display also doesn't always keep up with the position of the window when I resize it, often even settling completely outside its bounds.

 

Hi vivo, i'm posting to inform you that the latest bonus update solved my problem of not showing the time in the toolbar, thanks a lot.

 

Last version? But the year just started !

Just kidding, man. You were on an updates roll lately and for this we thank you a lot. Please take as much time off as you want.

The player looks better and better, is feature packed and stable while keeping it minimal. CPU consumption is low. On my mid-2011 iMac with i5 @ 2.7 ghz, Activity Monitor reports that Cog is at around 4.3% with 48khz selected in Audio MIDI Setup and around 7% with 192 khz selected. That's at least 2 times less than a late 2015 version of Cog. This was tested with 24bit/96khz flacs.

I'd like to give you more feedback and help with artwork if needed. But for now, please rest your brain .

You have done a really good job! Thanks again!

 

Thanks for that last update, glad to see you're still on it .

First thing I noticed is the new size, 27.3 MB vs. 20.2 MB in version 2016 - 53.
Besides the new stroke around the icons, there some changes in the time display format, the white elements are back including the scroll bar, which is also thicker. Imho, the older version was visually better but I like how the folder icons and status icon are visible again and also the folders background is dark again => better. The buttons are worse than in the older version. Now they look like the time display which is not an action button (like Play) but an info with a toggle. About the time display, the "r|t" and "e|r" texts in the middle are not quite user friendly, please go with " elapsed | total " toggled to " - remaining | total ".

Because the Level Meter icons were the only ones with color and not in line with the design, I took the liberty of creating new ones, find them attached (they do not look great because... autoscaling). Also, in the package, there are icons in png and pdf format, with different resolutions and all of them in black. For the player's interface they're autoscaled and tinted to white which is not recommended. The icons should be displayed in their native resolution and color. You can tint them to black for the "Customize Toolbar..." section.
I will remake the whole set in png format with the needed resolution and same visual theme (background included). Just make some specs like resolution for the main icons, folder icons etc. and if they should be white (recommended) or black or both.