20/11/2025
🔥 The Making of QXPlayer — Part 1:
The Player I Always Missed (2017)
I want to start a series of posts about how I created QXPlayer — an audio player for macOS, and later for iOS.
These are not marketing stories, but the real history: problems, fixes, mistakes, and everything that pushed me forward during development.
By 2017, I had already spent more than ten years working on macOS.
In that time, I tried dozens of music players — lightweight, heavyweight, “audiophile”, trendy…
and every single one of them had the same strange issue that Apple still hasn’t solved.
Playing one file — easy.
But playing an entire folder as is, without creating playlists, without “importing into a library”, without losing the structure — that turned into a quest.
You copy an album onto a drive → you want to simply open the folder → press play → and listen.
But macOS players kept pushing their own rules: generating temporary playlists, reshuffling tracks, losing files…
And a week later you couldn’t even remember where you copied the music and what was playing there.
I often remembered the Winamp days,
where you opened a folder — and everything played exactly as it was on disk.
Simple. Predictable. No surprises.
And right around that time, I started learning Objective-C and diving into macOS development.
And for the first time in years, I had a thought:
“Why not build a player I would actually enjoy using every single day?”
But immediately two real problems appeared.
Problem #1 — I was a beginner in macOS UI
This was the very beginning: first steps in Objective-C, first windows, first buttons.
Skill level: “how do I make a button react at all?”
Problem #2 — I’m a very demanding listener
I don’t listen to music on a soundbar or a Bluetooth speaker.
I use A-class amplifiers, tube gear, reel-to-reel decks, vinyl, proper speakers.
And once you get used to warm, alive, analog sound —
the standard macOS AVPlayer feels like plastic.
I needed a player with low-level control,
clean output, precision, no system artifacts,
and most importantly — real gapless playback that doesn’t ruin albums with clicks.
And right then, luck knocked on the door.
I accidentally stumbled upon COG, an old open-source player,
where I could peek into how low-level audio output works on macOS.
It was the perfect bridge between two worlds:
my love for audio,
and my 10+ years of low-level C++ gamedev experience.
With that C++ background, massive new possibilities opened up.
I realized I could build not “just another player”,
but my own audio engine — with a foundation that would sound exactly the way I wanted.
I started experimenting, dissecting system APIs, building tests, writing C++ code, learning audio buffers…
and step by step, the first working low-level engine appeared — the one that later became the heart of QXPlayer.
And what happened next —
and why I almost quit because of the design…
👉 all that in the next part.
Full version - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/qxplayer/id1481703720?mt=12
Free version - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/qxplayer-lite/id1549676802?mt=12
