Whamb - Audio Player for Mac

• MP3 and OGG stream ripping feature. Tagging and auto track cuts are supported
• Ogg Vorbis streaming support (Icecast), with format auto detection system
• Better skinnable player window behaviour (click-through and floating window easy-switch)
• New tiny skin named Leaf
• Several skins now have a nice network's buffers gauge when streaming audio
• Lots of bugs fixed (stream's connection problems don't block Whamb, removed MP3's "rough click" which happened sometimes, better seeker, low bitrates MP3 and Ogg tracks now properly supported)
• You can now choose and fix the server port used by the Rendezvous sharing feature
• Started optimization for the PowerPC 970
• Freeware/Donationware

Whamb is very easy to use: it handles playlists as easy as files in the Finder, and can even keep folders synchronized with the Finder (that is, if you add or remove audio files in the Finder, Whamb's playlist will automagically be updated), that's a new and original feature.

We are very strict about audio output quality. As hardware become cheaper but more advanced, it would be a shame that a player can't reproduce Hi-Fi audio output. Whamb directly uses CoreAudio to play songs, one of the best features on Mac OS X. Note that this technology on Mac OS X is usually reserved for professional audio softwares.

Even if the apparence of a software is nice, we think that for a Digital Audio Player, that you might run 24/24, having the same window all the time can become quite boring, and that's bad (tm)! Whamb's player window is fully skinnable, and several skins are provided by default with the software. Other skins are available on this web site. Whamb uses "Quartz" (code name for CoreGraphics), a very nice new technology of Mac OS X, to render graphics, and very powerful low-level Carbon events to handle user interaction.

Despite these features, an audio player (that often runs in background) shouldn't take a lot of CPU time. Whamb's audio decoding is optimized for the PowerPC processor and uses a few Altivec optimizations on the PowerPC G4 (more will come). Well, the best to do is to check by yourself.

In the case you run Whamb on a "loaded" Mac (eg. it's doing lots of stuffs), with the help of the powerful mach threads provided by Darwin (the UNIX part of Mac OS X), the player can optionaly run in REAL TIME priority, then nothing will be able to trouble it (ie. cut the music).