The default app on macOS for listening to music or opening audio files is Apple Music. If you have a subscription to this platform, you may want to keep it as your app of choice, but if you are one of the majority who use Spotify or another service, then there are several reasons to ignore Apple Music on your Apple computer.
I generally like the Apple ecosystem and its proprietary apps (I wouldn’t have bought a Mac otherwise), but Apple Music is one app I never use. I don’t subscribe to it, and I was always annoyed by what happened every time I needed to open an audio file on my PC, whether it was a song or another type of sound file.
Apple Music takes a long time to open. Once it has opened, I have sometimes experienced strange things, such as another audio file playing after the one I opened by mistake, or it playing an older version of the file instead of the new one.
I make music with Logic Pro in my free time, and I export new versions of the same audio. At some point I noticed that the program played an old version instead of the new one, but I found that this problem did not occur with VLC.
I think VLC player is mostly used as a video player, but it also plays most audio formats without any problems. I started using it as my default program, and it’s only been improvements since then.
VLC vs Apple Music
For starters, VLC opens instantly, it’s very fast. Secondly, its interface is minimalistic and clear, and it doesn’t bother you with other suggestions, it doesn’t show you all the audio files saved in other folders, and it doesn’t bother you with pop-up messages asking you to subscribe to a streaming service.
And in some ways, Apple Music seems to want to function as a hub for managing all the music or audio services on your computer. Just as the Photos app shows you all the photos on your computer as well as those saved in iCloud, Apple Music creates (often wrongly) albums with what it thinks are related audio files, but they are not.
Also, Apple Music has tabs for the iTunes Store and for radio or podcasts, and I’m not interested in those services. I just want to play audio and that’s it. VLC does that, faster and better.
Also, if you want to add songs or audio to the queue to play them one after the other, you just have to drag files to VLC and a playlist will be created.
VLC as default audio app
If I have convinced you, you too might want to try using VLC as the default application to open .mp3, .wav or .aiff on your Mac. Remember that you only have to:
- Download the app (remember it’s free)
- Click + control key on any audio file on your computer
- Click on Get information
- Select VLC (default) in the Open With tab
- Click on the Change All… button just below. This indicates that we want to use this application to open all files of the same type.
Of course, we will have to repeat the process with the different types of formats (.mp3, .wav, .aiff, .flac, etc.). We can do it as we go along.
I prefer it this way, although if you use Apple Music instead of Spotify, or are subscribed to any podcasts from the platform, then it’s a different story.
