What Cog does

Everywhere

• Gapless playback
• Scrobbling with Last.fm and ListenBrainz
• Shuffle, both albums and tracks
• Repeat single track, album, or whole playlist
• Playback from HTTP(S) sources, both livestreams and static files
  • Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
  • Live metadata from Shoutcast, Icecast, Ogg Vorbis comments, and timed ID3v2 packets
• CUE Sheet support, including embedded CUE Sheets in several formats
• Album artwork per track — embedded and external, cached per unique image. JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, HEIC, or AVIF.
• Track info: tags, format, ReplayGain values, and play counts, as the Mac's Info Inspector shows them
• Synced lyrics from the file's own tags, or looked up on LRCLIB when the file has none
• ReplayGain by album or track, with clipping prevention, falling back to Sound Check
• Graphic equalizer with presets
• Spectrum visualization and a stereo VU meter
• Waveform seek bar
• Spatial audio: surround tracks are spatialized on headphones and speakers with Apple's renderer and your personalized HRTF, with head tracking on AirPods
• Speed control: plain varispeed like a record player, or tempo and pitch shifting with either the Rubber Band or the Signalsmith Stretch libraries

On the Mac

• Automatic updates in the direct download edition
• Global hotkeys, notifications, and AppleScript support
• A file tree browser with search, Spotlight search, and a mini player
• Dockable panes: the spectrum, the VU meter, the lyrics, and both inspectors dock around the playlist or float in their own windows
• Stereo upmixed to surround with FreeSurround
• Exclusive mode, which takes the output device for Cog and runs it at each track's sample rate
• Signal Inspector, showing every stage from the decoder to the device with live peak and RMS meters
• Remote Control (opt-in, macOS 13 or later): once you turn it on, the bundled cog-mcp tool lets MCP clients such as AI assistants control playback and the playlist

On iPhone and iPad

• Plays files and folders from the Files app where they are, without importing copies
  • Files shared from other apps go into Cog's own Music folder, which Files and Finder show
• Now Playing themed from the album art, with a mini player in Liquid Glass
• The playlist beside Now Playing on any device with room for both
  • Split along the fold on an unfolded iPhone Duo (iOS 27.1 or later), with the controls in a Liquid Glass bar on the flat half when it stands like a laptop
• Fast forward and rewind by holding Next and Previous, and lock screen controls
• Search the playlist by title, artist, or album
• MIDI with your own SoundFonts, or Sound Canvas emulation from an SC-55 ROM set you import
• An iPad layout with menus and keyboard shortcuts

Plays almost anything

Older versions

These releases and their notes cover the Mac app only. Cog for iPhone and iPad updates through the App Store.

Very old builds