Vox for Mac

Simple, lightweight and straightforward audio player

Vox (formerly known as ToolPlayer) is a simple media player that will play your music without all the fuss of importing into iTunes, database lookups, album art displays, playlist editors, etc.

Basic, lightweight and fast

Vox has been around in various guises for some time now but it's only recently that its been integrated into the Mac App store. With this comes a slicker interface and a few more useful features without bloating it. Initially there were problems with frequent crashes in Mountain Lion but the latest update has fixed that.\nIf you've grown tired of all the big bloated players, then Vox will probably appeal. It's very basic and fast but at the same time, it offers useful features such as indexing and sorting of playlists. To play a music file - and Vox supports a huge array of formats including FLAC, AAC, MP3, OGG and ALAC - simply browse to it using Vox and off you go.

The nice thing about the app is that, if you're trying to listen to a whole album, Vox will automatically detect that the song you are loading is the first track of the album and load the rest of them at the same time - far more intuitive than even VLC Player for playing music.

Other than that, there isn't a great deal more to Vox, apart from the graphic equalizer that allows you to refine your output slightly. This also allows you to add a few effects such as reverb, echo and distortion that you'll probably never use anyway.

There's now also Growl support for Vox and an added bonus is you can scrobble music to your Last.fm account if you've got one. The lack of a decent playlist editor may frustrate you but for what it's designed as - a lightweight media player, Vox is very good.