Foobar2000 music player for Mac and IOS

By Voracious P. Brain, 21 October, 2025

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Just thought I'd offer a heads-up for anyone with a local music library looking for a free alternative to Apple Music or VLC on either IOS or Mac.
Foobar2000 has been my die-hard companion for about 20 years on Windows--a complete swiss army knife for audio that's 99.5% accessible, has a tree library I can navigate with one finger, and plays anything (including DSD). While I was trying to be a Mac user, I bought a mini PC primarily just to connect to my headphone rig. I don't know how Peter makes money off it, but it's one of those best things in life situations.
Happily, I recently discovered that he's fleshed it out to a tremendous degree on Mac and IOS as well, and all of them can share a library on a shared hard drive. The IOS version can also get music remotely if you have an FTP server set up. Unlike VLC, it plays gaplessly. Unlike Apple music on IOS, it doesn't stutter when playing an album in lossless mode; and, unlike Music on Mac, it doesn't make me scream curses at the computer. The Mac version also has exclusive mode, so it dynamically adjusts bit depth/rate.
When I upgraded to Taho under the naive assumption things couldn't get any worse, DSD playback stopped working and I had to switch that to PCM mode. That's my only complaint.
On IOS, to get my music library to index, I had to set up file sharing on the Mac (where the shared hard drive is). That's under system settings > General. Then I made sure I could get to the Mac file system from the IOS Files app. Finally, I pointed Foobar's media library to the shared music folder and it indexed in a few hours (5,000 albums). Peter did some work to fix accessibility issues on the IOS version, so he's aware. I did have to disable showing playback controls on the browse screen, but double-tapping plays, and then the standard control center controls work, as do the playback controls on the Tools screen.

Enjoy.

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Comments

By Khomus on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 00:38

Cool that it can do local stuff. I'm using it on Mac, but not iOS. Can you get music to the phone, somehow or other, and play that music with the iOS version?

By TheBlindGuy07 on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 03:17

My favourite audio player on windows has always been 6player from Quentin the guy who made le salon / playroom, not even the modern version he's released recently.
Minimul UI, easy to skip 5-30s-5min with keyboard, ultra fast.
I use VLC for very large files 8+hrs or formats like m4a and others. But VLC is ... better on mac than windows IMO.

By SeasonKing on Wednesday, October 22, 2025 - 08:34

The link to this 6player if you have it please?