Key Of Grey

November 4th, 2009 – Ever since I moved to the OSX platform, I’ve used iTunes. Sure, I dabbled with Songbird for a quick minute, but at the time it wasn’t mature enough to complete with iTunes. I’ve stuck with iTunes over the years because I like the way I’m able to organize and tag music. Sure, other software does it similarly but the competitors haven’t been leap-years ahead enough to make me switch.

I also, and feel free to call me crazy, like the way iTunes looks (although not in Windows). Now it’s not the best looking app out there, but its UI matches the rest of OSX. That cohesiveness serves no other purpose than aesthetics, but I still like things to match.

One thing I certainly don’t appreciate in iTunes is its significant bloat. Not only features-wise (for example it’s irritating that even though I can disable the iTunes store, I can’t get rid of it on the sidebar), but especially in memory usage. I also still find myself organizing the folder structure (left over from my days as a PC user) because I hate that iTunes makes a new folder for each artist on a compilation CD; I want all the files from one compilation to reside in the same folder.

Because of these issues, I’ve been looking for a lightweight alternative. While there are many options on the Windows platform, there just aren’t that many that aren’t memory hogs in OSX. Of all the ones I’ve tried so far, only Cog has come close. Unlike iTunes, Cog is able to play 1337 file formats like OGG and FLAC, alongside AAC and MP3’s. Music nerds rejoice! As well, it features Growl support, searching and hotkeys.

In my memory tests, it remained rock solid at 26 megs of RAM usage, while iTunes would start at double that, and go up from there. In all fairness though, iTunes 9 fixed a lot of the memory leaks I was seeing in iTunes 8, but double and even up to quadruple the memory usage of Cog is unacceptable when all I want to do is listen to some music. Cog also loads and plays tracks noticeably quicker than iTunes.

Of course, Cog is not without its problems. It has a weird glitch that sometimes causes song database corruption for users of OSX Leopard. After some time trying to figure out the problem myself, the Cog forum came to the rescue. If you have the same problem, you can change the update options to “unstable” and have Cog check for updates. The latest “unstable patch” will rebuild the database, and prevent future corruption. Of course, your music files will be safe through all this.

Also, although Cog is designed to be stream-lined, there were a couple features I missed. For one, the ability to use an increasingly specific pick list to view songs (a la iTunes categories) would be useful, as would being able to edit the ID3 tags. If both those features were implemented in future Cog updates, I would ditch iTunes entirely. As is, Cog is a great alternative to iTunes, and it’s my go to player for loose files that I don’t want to import into iTunes. Plus it’s free!

Cog