A Well-Designed and Versatile Music Player for Your Everyday Life

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Support for numerous audio sources
  • (4 more, see all...)

The Internet is filled with a plethora of music players and playlist managers that can help you handle your music library and listen to music or radio. However, only a few of them are as stylish, flexible and smooth-running as Vox.

Vox is a lightweight and user-oriented music player that features a minimalistic design, AirPlay support, a customizable equalizer, an inbuilt online radio player and seamless Last.fm integration. Additionally, Vox comes with an album artwork downloader, crossfade and gapless playback capabilities.

Vox can be easily and quickly installed via the Mac App Store with just a couple of mouse clicks. However, if you want to control the player using the Apple media keys, headphone control buttons or the Apple remote, then you should consider downloading and installing Vox’s Preferences pane. The installation process is quite fast and straightforward for both the application and the pref pane.

The clean and intuitive interface allows you to effortlessly add music and import playlists from your iTunes library or hard disk, create and save your own playlists, search for songs or radio stations, adjust the volume along with the equalizer preset and use the AirPlay function.

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Moreover, thanks to the built-in search engine you can instantly find the desired song, artist, album or even radio station. What is more, you can switch between multiple playlists, add, import or remove files, shuffle and repeat the entire playlist or just a single track.

The compact interface can be expanded or compressed to display or hide the playlist, equalizer and the AirPlay menu. Hence, you can hide all unnecessary menus and display only information about the currently played song along with the album cover art in the background. Beside the title of the track and the name of the artist, Vox will also display the file format, audio frequency and quality.

Speaking of file formats, Vox features support for a wide variety of audio formats, including HD formats and playlist files. Thus, you can enjoy your MP3, FLAC, OGG, MP4, SAP, VMG and M4A files or your CUE, M3U, PLS or XSPF playlists. You can find the complete list of supported formats on Vox’s support page.

Furthermore, you can configure Vox to automatically pause the player when the headphone jack is unplugged, display the artwork in the Dock icon, hide or show the menu bar controls and use a colored status bar icon. Another useful feature is provided by Vox’s ability to pause the music when you receive a Skype call.

By accessing the status bar menu, you can pause or play the music, jump to the next or previous track and view the upcoming songs in your playlist. You can also use your Apple remote, media keys or headphone buttons to control the player and adjust the sound volume. In other words, you’ll always have control over the music you are listening to without even opening Vox’s main window.

If you enjoy streaming your audio content to your Apple TV or other AirPlay compatible devices from around your house, then you’ll be thrilled to know that Vox can help you choose the desired output device and even convert stereo input to multiple channels to fill up all your speakers. Unfortunately, Vox does not provide the necessary documentation about how this performance is achieved.

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Headphone users can enable the BS2B (Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP) effect in order to blend the left and right channels of a stereo audio file. Thanks to this audio processing technique, you can enjoy a more natural sound from your headphones. You can choose between three different presets and set the priority before or after the EQ and Effects.

When it comes to the built-in equalizer, Vox offers a comprehensive list of presets that range from Classic, Dance, Electronic, Flat and Headphones to Hip Hop, Jazz, Lounge, Rock and Vocal. Unfortunately, you can add only one custom EQ preset, a fact that can drastically limit the possibilities of transforming the way your music is played through your audio system.

More demanding users can access the Preferences window and adjust the balance value, volume limit and buffers size and even configure Vox to fully load music into the computer’s RAM memory. This function proves its utility when listening to large audio files such as audio books or lossless files by allowing you to quickly skip to anywhere within the file in an instant, without having to wait for your Mac to load it from the hard drive.

The best thing about Vox is that you can enjoy your iTunes library directly from within the application. Thus, you will be able to view, access and browse through all your playlists, albums along with the artwork, quicker and easier than ever.

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Vox’s user-friendly interface enables you to focus on your music and work with multiple audio sources that include custom playlists, iTunes library or online radio stations. On top of that, you can constantly update your listening statistics on Last.fm by logging in with your account and enabling the scrobbling feature.

On the bad side, you cannot update your listening history with songs you listen to on radio stations, even if they offered the track info via the Radio Data System broadcast communication protocol. We are not sure if this inconvenience is caused by a Last.fm limitation or Vox’s inability to send the data. On the bright side, Vox promises to offer support for Grooveshark, SoundCloud, AUPEO!, Beatport and other popular sources in future versions.

While using Vox to play various types of audio content in a vast assortment of formats, the resource consumption can be easily kept low by not loading entire tracks into your RAM (you can do this by toggling the “Load music files fully into memory” within the General / Labs Preferences tab).

Regardless of the RAM load, the CPU usage was constant between 3 and 10%. On the other hand, the RAM usage is heavily influenced by your settings and the files you listen to.

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In other words, if you configure Vox to fully load music into the memory and you decide to listen to a 1.3 GB file, then the RAM usage will raise accordingly. Changing to smaller tracks will immediately decrease the RAM usage to lower values.

The above provided values were recorded using an iMac with Intel Core 2 Duo and 6 GB of RAM. Consequently, you can witness different values according to your system configuration, app settings and the size of the played files.


The Good

On the whole, Vox is a light yet powerful iTunes alternative that you can rely on to listen your favorite artists or radio stations without sacrificing too much desktop estate. Moreover, you can take advantage of the scrobbling capabilities to effortlessly update your Last.fm profile with all the songs you’re listening using Vox.

Its long list of features combined with the customizable equalizer, AirPlay support and compatibility with a large variety of audio and playlist formats, make Vox one of the best audio players available out there for the Mac platform.

The Bad

We hope that future updates will fix the scrobbling songs from radio to Last.fm issue, while the addition of a visualizer could make the app much more desirable by eye candy loving Mac users. Also, we would like to see different color schemes and themes for its minimalist and user intuitive interface.

The Truth

In conclusion, Vox is a well-designed and very flexible OS X audio player that enables you to play a wide selection of audio formats, create personalized playlists, listen to popular radio stations and stream your music to AirPlay compatible devices.

user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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