Gapless. Properly gapless.
Nanosecond-anchored scheduling on the same audio node. Live albums and DJ mixes flow without that little hiccup other players sneak past you.
Bòcan
A music player for people who still keep their CDs.
Remember when you owned your music? When the player was a program on your computer, not a portal to a marketplace? When skipping a track took zero seconds, not three? Yeah. That.
Bòcan is a native macOS music player built for the kind of person who alphabetises their FLACs, has opinions about replay gain, and quietly judges anyone whose library is "in the cloud". It's free. It's fast. It plays almost everything. And it never, ever, tells anyone what you're listening to - unless you want it to.
What it does
Plays the awkward stuff.
FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AAC, OGG, Opus, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, DSD, WMA, AC-3, DTS, and more. Bit-perfect output to whatever DAC you've got plugged in. See the <a href="/formats/">full formats list</a>.
Smart playlists with teeth.
Real predicates, not hand-wavy ones. "Played fewer than three times since 2019, rated four stars or higher, not in any other smart list." Done.
Tags it knows; tags you don't.
AcoustID fingerprinting hands you MusicBrainz IDs for that 64 kbps Limp Bizkit b-side from 2003 your friend insists is yours. Pick the exact release you own, then write Picard-compatible IDs, ISRC and totals back to the file.
Mini-player that doesn't lie.
Stays on top, sized like a Winamp window, with a real spectrum analyser. No fake Apple-Music-style "oscilloscope". Reads the actual signal.
Visualisers that watch the signal.
Six GPU visualisers on Metal: spectrum bars, oscilloscope, a breathing Halo ring, a Cascade spectrogram, a Starfield warp field, and a Nebula gas cloud that churns with the bass and ripples on every beat. Moving them onto the GPU frees the CPU for the audio and keeps them smooth at Retina resolution, so Nebula's churn is a live shader, not a looping texture. Dockable or full-screen, six colour palettes, locked to the audio you're actually hearing. Hover to switch mode or palette right on the visualiser.
Lyrics, scrolling, synced.
LRC files, embedded lyrics, or fetched from Last.fm. Karaoke-style line highlight. Toggle a translucent lyrics pane next to the queue.
Cross-fade the mood.
Per-genre fade durations. Equal-power curves. The dance set blends, the classical doesn't. You set the rules once.
Scrobbles only when you say so.
Last.fm and ListenBrainz, opt-in, batched, signed. No background telemetry, no "anonymous usage stats". Bòcan never phones home.
Plays your other library too.
Subsonic, Navidrome, Airsonic. Up to nine servers, federated search across all of them, per-server status dots, offline banners with one-tap retry, and <kbd>⌘⇧1</kbd>–<kbd>⌘⇧9</kbd> to jump straight to a server. Streams through the same gapless engine as your local files.
Podcasts that keep up.
Subscribe by URL or search Podcast Index and Apple. Grab one episode, a whole batch for the flight, or let new ones auto-download per show. Full Podcasting 2.0 where the feed bothers: show notes that render cleanly (no raw HTML) right from the player bar, jump-to chapters, readable transcripts, host and guest credits with faces, and a shelf of shows the publisher recommends. Variable speed, skip-back and skip-forward, and it remembers exactly where you stopped.
The Homer of music players.
Every cool feature from iTunes 9, Winamp 5, Foobar2000, and Cog. Without the bloat, without the spyware, without the cloud.
A log console you can actually read.
Open <strong>Help → Log Console</strong> (<kbd>⇧⌘L</kbd>) to tail every debug, info, warning, and error line since launch. Filter by level or category, search free-text, pause, copy, and export to a <code>.log</code> file. No terminal required.
Feels like it belongs on a Mac.
A tiny trackpad tick when you love a track, set a rating, land a seek, or release the volume slider. The Mini Player cross-fades with the main window instead of blinking. Honours Reduce Motion and your trackpad's haptic settings.
Browse the way you think.
Sort Albums, Artists, Genres, Composers, and Podcasts by name or by the count that matters: songs, albums, year, unplayed episodes. Your choice sticks across launches. And every list remembers its place, so scroll halfway down, open an album or a show, hit back, and you land exactly where you left off instead of back at the top.
What it doesn't do
- Phone home. Ever.
- Ask you to sign in.
- Recommend playlists generated by people who don't know your name.
- Hide local files behind "Apple Music".
- Pretend the EQ does anything when it's set to "flat".
- Cost money.
Get it.
brew tap bocan/bocan
brew install bocan