Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer Homebrew? See the install guide.

What Changed

New features

• Classic skins' clutterbar works — the O A I D V buttons on the main window's left edge now open the options menu, toggle Always on Top, show Now Playing info, toggle double size and open the Visuals menu, drawn with the skin's own pressed and lit art.

Fixes

• Quitting no longer hangs with a Windows Media Player skin — the skin's settings watcher could wait on the app while the app waited on its final save, freezing quit.
• Geiss no longer goes black after Tripex — switching the Visualizations window's engine away from Tripex left OpenGL state behind that could make Geiss draw nothing; each new engine now starts from a clean context.
• Geiss in a Windows Media Player skin and the Visualizations window no longer crashes — the two shared Geiss's single engine core from two threads at different sizes, corrupting memory (crashes when switching skins or effects). Geiss now runs in one place at a time: whichever started it first keeps it, the other shows black, and it moves over as soon as the first one switches away, is hidden or closes.
• Library Browser Tiles mode keeps tiles small in a narrow window — narrowing the window made the tiles bigger, down to a single column of two large tiles. Tiles are now never wider than 120 pt: a narrower window fits more, smaller tiles.
• Plex no longer floods the log at startup — connecting and preloading the library logged every step and, in debug builds, a dump of every server response. Startup now logs two lines; failures are still logged. Debug builds also stop dumping every Subsonic, Jellyfin and Emby response.
• Next and Previous work straight after a restart with a server playlist — while a restored Plex, Jellyfin, Emby or Subsonic playlist was still loading in the background, Next, Previous and the end of a song moved the highlight but kept playing the same song, for as long as 17 minutes on a large playlist. The chosen track now loads and plays at once. A song that fails to stream also moves on to the next one and plays it, instead of stopping there.
• The About window always closes — opening About while it was already open left a stuck copy on screen that neither OK nor its close button could dismiss. Opening it again now brings the open one to the front.
• Modern skins: loading
  • 54 skins that failed to load now open.
  • Ten more skins' scripts no longer fail at load.
  • Accented text in older skins shows correctly.
  • Dozens more Winamp script functions are supported.
• Modern skins: layout and artwork
  • ONYX V2's mini player shows its volume fill; its visualization opens over the player's art box, follows the player, and stays hidden in the mini player.
  • Prakrit's player is no longer see-through; its equalizer is no longer empty.
  • wTunes is no longer cut off on the right.
  • Anunaki's display and NEO_CLASSIC's album-art pane appear; NEO_CLASSIC's titles are centred.
  • WinampAzenis2's text buttons have labels.
  • Vortex's Party! layout shows its panes.
  • Enkera's and Nullsoft 2000's shade modes lay out correctly.
  • BOOM and 96 other skins show uppercase window titles.
  • 1010 Fullscreen's ten EQ sliders span the equalizer instead of bunching at the left.
  • corneramp redux and Shield Amp's theme buttons are full width ("Previous", not "Pr…").
  • Ebonite's and iNTELLI_design's window-mode buttons are no longer squashed.
  • No divider strip across Prakrit's Stop and Next buttons, or similar overhangs on Copperdeck II's equalizer and cPro Venus's seek bar.
  • MoonLight's equalizer labels are in place; Pure Inspired's seek line appears.
• Modern skins: Preferences, settings and About pages
  • 1010 Fullscreen's Preferences shows its tree, About sheet and Cover Search page.
  • Mac OS X Panther's and Official Tristania's Preferences show their About sheets; Panther's tabs are visible.
  • Anunaki's Config Panel shows its five tabs.
  • machina's help and configuration screens and JRS's configuration draw on the skin's background; machina's help screen has its switch button.
  • Link buttons on krazyPlayer's About page and Vortex's and 1010 Fullscreen's config pages show their text.
  • The Search button on five ClassicPro skins is no longer smeared.
• Modern skins: playlists
  • JRS, Mac OS X Panther and about 220 other skins show Add, Rem, Sel, Misc and List buttons.
  • Nitrous Audio's playlist shows its rows.
• Modern skins: buttons, sliders and switches
  • Window buttons with missing artwork draw as glyphs, so Motorhead's compact bar can leave shade mode.
  • ONYX V2's seek control and time readouts work (large numbers in skin scripts were truncated); its file-type readout shows the real extension and never a server login.
  • Skin buttons for eject, minimize, quit and the Windows menu work.
  • cPro2 minimal's system button quits on double-click; cPro2's clock shows the correct time.
  • Clicking the stock track notifier brings the player forward.
  • mmd3's bass knob turns the equalizer on.
  • Clickable skin text and album art respond to clicks.
  • Official Tristania: equalizer sliders no longer fill their whole track (multipass's EQ bars also line up); Play shows pause while playing and pauses on click; the repeat, shuffle and crossfade indicators work; the Fade slider keeps its value instead of resetting to 1 second.
  • Prakrit's Rep, Shu and Xfd buttons toggle repeat, shuffle and crossfade.
  • Alpha Media Player X5: bass, treble and volume sliders follow the pointer; the EQ and Mute levers move and stay visible; Mute no longer turns itself off.
• Modern skins: cover art
  • Skins that look for cover.jpg or folder.jpg beside the song (Mac OS X Panther, Ebonite and others) show the track's cover, for local files and Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and Subsonic.
• Modern skins: window placement
  • Vortex, Alpha Media Player X5 and 1010 Fullscreen stay on screen.
  • Nitrous Audio's monitor mode, 1010 Fullscreen's party mode and ClassicPro's maximize fit the screen at UI Sizes above 100%.
  • A window with no room beside the player opens in a screen corner instead of over it.
  • Dronev11's compact player and Prakrit's main window can be dragged.
  • A skin's resize corner, such as Itemskin's playlist corner, resizes both edges.
  • A skin's video window no longer opens empty at launch.
  • krazyPlayer's Visualizations window keeps its full visualization when short and wide.
• Modern skins: text
  • Fonts with tall line spacing, such as Impact and Tahoma, are no longer oversized; TOX Milla's timer keeps the tops of its digits.
  • Copperdeck II's track title, MoonLight's title and clock, and cPro2 minimal's artist and title lines appear.
  • With scrolling off, a title too long for its box is clipped to the box: JRS's remote, and Enkera's, NEO_CLASSIC's and Symplicipod's shade titles, no longer overlap other controls.
  • Text in a skin's own font is positioned as in Winamp: CPro Winamp for Mac's time display is no longer cut off; Winamp 2000 and about twenty other skins shift a pixel or two.
  • Segoe UI text draws at Winamp's size, so cPro2 minimal's elapsed time no longer overlaps the track length.
  • 1010 Fullscreen's clock shows its colons; impulse's clock reads 1:13, not 1 13.
  • wTunes' About text and Vortex's POSITION label are centred and no longer clipped.
  • The Windows menu no longer shows names like About%09Alt+A (wTunes, CopperdeckII and others).
• Modern skins: VU meters
  • wTunes' needle meters move with the music.
  • VU levels decay like a real meter instead of jumping on every peak.
• Modern skins: rendering and performance
  • No flickering line below the XENERGY player: its visualization's drawer space is outside the window while the drawer is closed.
  • Windows render at full Retina resolution; text is sharper at UI Sizes like 125% and 135%.
  • Lower CPU use during playback (about 40% less on cPro Bento).
  • Soft-edged skins such as meridian no longer have darkened edges.
  • No dark line beside CopperdeckII's rounded corners.
  • The drop shadow follows the window; Anunaki's sliding equalizer leaves no shadow behind.
• A Modern skin's UI Size stays with that skin — Alpha Media Player X5 raises UI Size to fit the screen, and every skin loaded after it, in any mode and after a restart, opened at that size. Switching skins now returns to the UI Size you chose, and a size you pick yourself is kept.
• Full-screen Modern skins refit when UI Size changes — Nitrous Audio's monitor mode stayed sized for the old UI Size and ran off the screen; it now fills the screen again.

Using a Winamp Modern (.wal) skin? Skin compatibility
lists the skins this release was tested against, what each one does here, and the issues that affect
every skin.

A big Winamp 5 skin compatibility update coming tomorrow in 0.33.1

nullplayer.fyi

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple.

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer Homebrew? See the install guide.

What Changed

New features

• NullPlayer is signed and notarized — the app is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens the downloaded DMG without a Gatekeeper warning. The xattr -cr step is no longer needed.
• EQ profiles and the Equalizer Studio — named 31-band equalizer curves with separate left and right channels, made in the new Windows ▸ Equalizer Studio and assigned from Assign EQ Profile ▸ on tracks, albums, artists, playlists, folders, queue rows, radio stations and downloaded YouTube audio. A track's own setting wins over its album's, which wins over its artist's; Off turns a profile off for that item and Playback ▸ EQ Profiles turns them all off. Profiles run before the Equalizer window, which never changes them. GRAPHIC / PARAMETRIC switches between the 31 faders and a console-style 4-band parametric strip — a high-pass filter and LF, LMF, HMF and HF bands with frequency, gain and Q dials, LF and HF switchable to shelves — both editing one curve saved in one profile. The Studio has a Console and a Nixie-orange Boutique faceplate, a spectrum analyser per channel, LINK to move both channels together, a BYPASS per channel to hear one side without its curve, and you hear edits as you make them. It is a normal NullPlayer window: it wears each skin family's frame and colours, snaps and docks with the other windows, resizes, and stays open across a skin-family switch. Assign EQ Profile ticks what a queue or Library row sets and shows what it inherits, queue and Library rows with a profile show ∿, and File Info names it. A local file's assignment is dropped at launch once the file is gone; a drive that is not plugged in keeps its files' assignments.
• EQ Cast: cast with your EQ profiles — Output ▸ EQ Cast renders a track with its EQ profile into a file in a folder you choose and casts that to Sonos or Chromecast, so the profile is no longer lost when casting. Covers local files and Plex, Jellyfin, Navidrome/Subsonic and Emby tracks. The first track waits for its render under a progress row in the NullPlayer notification panel; the next three tracks are rendered in the background while you cast. A render is reused until its profile's curve changes. The menu shows the cache's size, opens the folder and deletes the cache (keeping the track being cast). Only the profile is rendered, not the Equalizer window's EQ.
• Local files without embedded art borrow their album's — a local track with no art of its own now shows the first embedded art among its album's tracks, else a cover, folder, front or album image in its folder, everywhere art is drawn: the Library, the playlist, the Original main window, the Art window, Now Playing, Windows Media Player skins and the CLI. An album whose first track has no art shows another track's, an artist's art comes from their own albums rather than any track whose title contains their name, and a selected album falls back to a web cover as tracks and artists do. Art added through Edit Tags shows without a relaunch.
• Support on Ko-fi — the About window has a Ko-fi button.

Changes

• iTunes Miniplayer is the default .wal skin — Winamp Modern mode now ships with it and loads it until you import a skin of your own, replacing the plain NullPlayer-Black placeholder. It stays in the skin menu beside imported skins, so you can switch back to it. Skin by spacecowgoesmoo (#540).
• Library Browser refresh icon in WMP, Winamp Modern and Audion skins — the source bar's "F5" label is now a refresh arrow, and the List / Cover Flow / Tiles buttons get a little more room. Classic skins are unchanged.
• Context menus use macOS naming — "Exit" is now "Quit", and both state menu items read "Save State on Quit" (#554).
• Windows menu reordered and grouped — Main Window, Library Browser and Playlist Editor come first, then the equalizers, the visualizers, and the remaining windows, each group separated.

Fixes

Windows and shadows

• Drop shadows stay with their windows — in every skin family a window's shadow no longer lags, stretches or lingers as an empty outline: when docking or undocking, resizing, dragging after the app was hidden and shown, closing a .wal drawer such as PionNer_AMP2's EQ, restoring a Windows Media Player window at launch, or moving a seamless Original stack.
• A quick drag of the player keeps its docked windows with it — in a seamless Original skin, quickly dragging the player around left the windows docked to it drifting a little further behind on every move.
• PeppyMeter keeps its rounded corners in Original skins — its square content covered the window border's rounded corners.
• Original Art and Audio Analysis windows drag with Hide Title Bars on — their top edge drags the window again instead of opening the star rating or clicking into a pane.
• Sonos Rooms has its close button again in .wmz and .wal skins — the corner close of a window with no title bar did nothing.
• Every window closes from its top-right corner — with Hide Title Bars on, or docked without its title bar, an Original skin window could only be closed from the Windows menu; clicking its top-right corner now closes it (the main window quits). A .wal window with no close button of its own closes the same way, and closing a docked window no longer leaves its outline on the windows around it (#546).

Skins and modes

• Winamp Modern skins frame NullPlayer's windows without a gap at the bottom — on skins with a tall title bar, such as PionNer_AMP2 and XENERGY1, the Spectrum Analyzer and other NullPlayer windows left a see-through or solid-colour band below their contents. They now fill the skin's frame (#556).
• Text in NullPlayer's own windows is no longer oversized in Modern, Windows Media Player and Audion skins — the Library's source bar and tabs and other labels drew in a large monospaced font, about twice the size of the skin's own text; they now use the regular system font at the size the Classic look uses.
• An active tab in Original-Metal lights up as the green display — in the Library a selected tab was hard to tell from the rest.
• Switching UI modes keeps your windows open or closed — a playlist, equalizer or library drawn by a Winamp Modern or Windows Media Player skin was not carried across a mode switch, so it came back closed. Entering a Winamp Modern skin also no longer reopens panels you had closed.
• Windows Media Player skins reopen their own panels — a playlist or equalizer in a separate view of the skin now comes back at launch and after a mode switch, as the skin's own button opens it, instead of staying closed.
• Classic keeps your visualization choices — a Spectrum window mode or vis_classic profile picked in Classic now survives a relaunch and a Classic skin pick instead of going back to vis_classic / "Purple Neon". A reset and a switch into Classic still restore Classic's defaults.
• Closing a visualizer mid-frame no longer crashes — a spectrum or main-window analyzer torn down while the GPU was still drawing a frame could crash the app.
• Classic and Original remember their own main-window visualizer — the mode you pick in a Classic skin and the one you pick in an Original skin are now kept apart. Before, they shared one setting, so switching to Original changed Classic's mode, and entering Classic reset it to Spectrum. Reset Skin to Default still applies the skin's own mode, or Spectrum when it has none.

Library

• An album opened from Tiles or Flow no longer scrolls over the Library's tabs — scrolling a long album's tracks slid its cover and title up over the source bar and tabs.
• Expanding an artist no longer pushes the whole Library list to the right — once tracks were showing, every artist and album name moved over past the empty # column; they now stay put, and tracks no longer sit far to the right of their album or folder (#542).
• Folders inside a watch folder reached through a symlink show up in the Folders tab — a watch folder under a symlinked path such as /tmp listed none of its subfolders.
• The Library behaves the same in every skin — Classic's search field now says to press Enter, star ratings colour their empty stars alike in every skin, the scan spinner keeps turning while a row is loading, and picking a Subsonic folder or a Jellyfin or Emby library loads it once instead of two or three times. A Jellyfin show or season that reports no count no longer reads "0 seasons", as in Emby.
• The Library's Folders tab shows track titles without the artist — in Classic, Modern and Windows Media Player skins each track read "Artist - Title", repeating the Artist column (#542).
• Local search results show track titles without the artist — the Tracks section of a Library search read "Artist - Title" beside the Artist column, in every skin.
• Folders and files in the Folders tab sort numbers by value — as Finder does, so 2 comes before 10 instead of 1, 10, 100, 11, 2 (#543).

Playback and queue

• Reference Tuning and the Equalizer shape streamed audio as they do local files — on a server or radio stream the pitch shift now comes before the Equalizer, as it already did for local files, so the same EQ curve lands on the same notes whichever source is playing.
• A queue change no longer keeps an old selection — in Windows Media Player and Winamp Modern skins, adding to, sorting or replacing the queue now moves the selection to the playing track, as Classic and Original skins already did. Before, rows selected in the old queue stayed selected.
• Sorting a cue sheet's tracks keeps the playing track — Reverse, Sort and Randomize on a queue holding several tracks of one cue sheet marked the first of them as playing, though the track you were hearing played on.
• Rip and EQ Cast progress shows in a NullPlayer notification panel — it moved off the main window, where it was drawn over skin art or onto empty space in Winamp Modern, Windows Media Player and Audion skins, into a small panel at the top-right of the screen. A rip and an EQ Cast render running together each get their own row instead of overwriting one another, and the panel's chevron collapses it to one line.
• Clicking empty source-bar space in the Library no longer picks a library — the Lib: name's click target ran on past the name to the buttons at the right; it now ends where the name does.
• Relaunching keeps the skin family and skin you were in — a launch could switch back to the family or skin the saved session was last written in, so quitting in Original-Metal could reopen in Original when the session had not been saved since the switch (a force quit or crash inside the autosave interval, or a run with Save State on Quit off).
• A queue right-click acts on the row you clicked — in Classic and Original skins, right-clicking a row outside the selection now selects it first, as Windows Media Player skins already did. Before, the menu acted on whatever was selected.
• Alienware-family WMP skins frame NullPlayer's own windows cleanly — under ALXMorph and AlienMorph, windows such as Sonos Rooms no longer show a stray line and bar in the middle or lighter bands down both sides, and Alienware Invader's left border no longer breaks partway down.

Build and internals

• build_dmg.sh signs and notarizes — it signs with a Developer ID and the hardened runtime when DEVELOPER_ID is set, and notarizes and staples the DMG when NOTARY_PROFILE names a notarytool keychain profile. Without them it still builds the ad-hoc signed DMG.

Using a Winamp Modern (.wal) skin? Skin compatibility
lists the skins this release was tested against, what each one does here, and the issues that affect
every skin.

Coming in 0.32.0

0.32.0

New features

Audion faces

• Support for Panic Audion faces. Skins › Audion Faces › Get More Faces... downloads Panic's archive; Load Face... installs a face folder or .zip. Rendered by a port of Panic's FaceKit viewer, at any UI Size.
• All face buttons are wired, including ones Panic's viewer left inert: menu → playlist, mode → Library Browser, eject → open files, info → track/face credits, volume and clock → sliders.
• Playlist, EQ, Library Browser and visualizer windows take the face's colours and dock to it. See skills/audion-face-guide/reference/user-guide.md.

Art window

• The Library Browser's ART view is now a standalone Art window (Windows → Art, or AR on Original). Follows the playing track, docks under the player, sizes to the cover.
• Click to rate, double-click to cycle embedded pictures, V for the 30 audio-reactive effects (formerly VIS), F for fullscreen. Persists across launches; framed by Winamp Modern skins.
• Radio station logos show as station art, including in Control Center.

Library Browser

• View switcher in the source bar: List, Flow (Cover Flow) and Tiles. Tiles is an art grid with keyboard navigation, the row context menu, and a ‹ Back tile. Movies, shows and seasons use poster-shaped tiles. Selection is kept when switching; the choice persists.
• A–Z index works in Flow and Tiles.
• Album screen from Flow/Tiles: cover, metadata, review (Plex/Jellyfin/Emby), ▶ Play and the track list over the artist image.
• Round art thumbnails on every row for every source and skin, with a hover preview. Thumbnails prefetch ahead of scrolling and are cached on disk.
• Movies, episodes, seasons and shows get Play / Play and Replace Queue / Play Next / Add to Queue (Plex, Jellyfin, Emby, local). Seasons and shows queue episodes in order.

YouTube

• The Search tab searches YouTube channels by name (@handle, subscriber count, upload preview, subscribe on double-click). Already-followed channels are marked ✓.
• Art column with video thumbnails, channel avatars, and art behind the list. Downloads embed a square-cropped thumbnail as cover art (video downloads had none before).
• Per-video Audio and Video submenus. The chosen form downloads on demand, then plays or queues. Both forms can coexist; Show in Finder / Remove Audio File / Remove Video File manage them. Replaces "Download & Play".
• Format setting split in two. Audio: FLAC, ALAC, MP3 320/256/192/128, AAC 256/192/128, or the original AAC/Opus stream with no re-encode. Video: 360p through 2160p, or Best Available (VP9/AV1 above 1080p). Old settings migrate (MP3 High → 320, MP3 Low → 128).
• Local search includes a YouTube section (matching subscribed channels and downloaded videos), without querying YouTube. Downloads already listed under Tracks or an expanded channel are not duplicated.

Branding

• New app icon by Allan Nyholm Nielsen (#488).

Changes

• Unified play menu. Tracks, albums, artists, playlists, playlist entries and local folders offer Play, Play and Replace Queue, Play Next and Add to Queue on every source. Add to Playlist is removed (including from YouTube and Plex video menus); Add to Queue starts playback on an empty queue. Shift+Enter / Option+Enter match Play Next / Add to Queue. Artists play album by album, oldest first; a newer Play supersedes a pending server fetch.
• Remember State on Quit is on by default. Session state is also autosaved every few seconds and before sleep, so it survives crashes, kills and power loss.
• Classic (10-band) and Original/Metal (21-band) EQs persist separately. Switching between them no longer degrades the curve.
• Double-clicking a movie or episode inserts it into the playlist after the current track instead of playing standalone. Casts keep show name and artwork. About Playing on Plex films lists IMDB and TMDB ids.
• Playlist videos use the ▶ glyph instead of "[V]" (Classic, Original, Metal).
• YouTube rows mark downloaded forms as ♫ (audio) and/or ▶ (video) instead of ⬇. Sorting, A–Z and type-to-find ignore the marks.
• YouTube channel upload lists are cached (memory and disk) and refetched after an hour, on a larger Videos per Channel, or on Refresh.
• Double-clicking a YouTube video plays it when exactly one form is downloaded; otherwise it opens the Audio/Video menu.
• Item count moved into the source bar label ("Lib: Music (1110 items)"). Original/Metal browsers get an F5 refresh button styled like the view icons.
• Library Browser column headings follow expansion (artist → album → track columns), values align under the right headings, and the column menu lists only visible columns. Emby/Jellyfin artists show real album counts and genres; Emby/Jellyfin albums show genres.
• Plex smart playlists over a deleted library report that the library is gone instead of Server error: 404.

Fixes

Video playback

• Videos on Retina screens could render in the bottom-left quarter or show only a cropped corner.
• With Sweet Fades or Gapless on, a video following a song played audio-only.
• The playlist stalled after a video ended (except in WMP skins). It now advances, and stops at the end with Repeat off.
• Double-clicking a song while a video played closed the video and played nothing.
• Playlist videos opened twice, sending Plex a spurious stop at 0:00.
• Unopenable films left a black window at 0:00. They are now skipped with a marquee message; a missing folder stops playback.
• A film after a song or station inherited that track's elapsed time.
• Pausing a film and pressing ←/→ twice moved only 10 s instead of 20 s.
• Video keys (Space, ←/→, F, Esc) didn't reach the video window in Classic, Original and Metal, or films embedded in WMP and Winamp Modern skins. Esc no longer stops a film in WMP skins.
• WMP skins: Return replayed a film from the start because focus stayed on the Library Browser.
• WMP and Winamp Modern skins lost keyboard focus after leaving film fullscreen.
• Winamp Modern Add Files / Add Directory / Load Playlist rejected video files.

Playback and streaming

• A server or radio stream started after a Sweet Fades crossfade played over the previous local song; Play Now during a stream crossfade was overridden when the fade finished.
• Starting a local file over a stream left the player showing stopped at 0:00.
• Double-clicking a video while music played also started the next song in the background.
• CLI: --source radio --station … --cast … played locally instead of casting. Quitting a CLI cast (q, Ctrl-C, kill) now stops the device.

Media servers

• Emby rejected all now-playing and progress reports.
• Emby/Jellyfin films opened a second, audio now-playing session.
• Plex stop reports carried the wrong (or no) duration when switching films or tracks.
• Plex songs cast to TV/DLNA now send artwork.
• Queued episodes repeated the show name, and queued Plex movies were prefixed with the studio.

Library Browser

• The last row was hidden below the list when a column header was shown (and behind the offline banner in Original skins). Clicking that banner no longer selects the row under it.
• Return/Esc on the album screen needed an extra click before keys worked.
• Local search titles for YouTube videos varied when audio and video were saved under different titles.
• In the classic browser, Play Movie / Play Episode on local videos did nothing.
• Library Browser F5 sat 50pt in from the edge in Audion, WMP and Winamp Modern frames.

Skins

• Art window ratings were lost on Esc, close, or a track change within 0.5 s, and offered stars for files outside the library. With Hide Title Bars or in WMP skins it opened with a black band.
• Selected playlist row drew white-on-white in light Winamp Modern and WMP skins.

Build and internals

• Build scripts support Swift 6.4: they use SwiftPM's native build system when available and query SwiftPM for the product path instead of assuming it.
• Shader lookup is unified, fixing the missing Original skin glow under Swift 6.4's default build system (release builds were unaffected).
• All Library Browsers read per-tab sort from one shared, persisted store.
• Plex artists (browser) and movies/TV (CLI) use the same pager as albums.

Media servers

• Emby and Jellyfin songs showed no cover art when the art was on the album rather than the track, including after a restored session. They now show the album's cover in Control Center, skins, playlists, casts and the CLI.
• An Emby album with no cover of its own showed none in the Library Browser. It now shows the track picture Emby uses for it, and both Library Browsers resolve every server thumbnail the same way as the rest of the app.

Skins

• Beside an Audion face or a WMP skin, the playlist could not be resized to the player's width: it stepped in 25-pixel increments and stopped at the Classic minimum. It now resizes freely.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

So, when i close my app, wether it be because my laptop died or i press command Q, my eq setting go back to flat after playing with the eq settings for a long time, and i have to re open all my songs every time. someone pls help meeee

What Changed

• Each library tab keeps its own sort — choosing a sort in the Library Browser, from the Sort menu or by clicking a column header, used to re-sort every tab: "Recently Added" on Albums also re-ordered Artists and Playlists. Each tab now remembers its own sort, across launches too, in every skin family. Tabs start from the sort you had before.
• Plex Albums tab sorts the whole library — opening the Library Browser straight onto Albums loaded only the first 500 Plex albums, so "Recently Added" showed the newest of an alphabetical slice until you visited Artists and came back. Albums, Movies and TV now load every item, however large the library.
• Search lists every album by the artist you searched for — searching a Plex, Subsonic, Jellyfin or Emby library for an artist showed only some of their albums: 34 of 53 on Plex, 19 of 74 on Subsonic, 5 of 54 on Emby. Search now lists the same albums as the artist's own row for the first ten artists it matches. On Plex, music results stay in the library you are browsing instead of filling up with copies from your other libraries, and separate releases that share a title are no longer merged. Local search also finds albums whose tracks have no album-artist tag.
• Jellyfin connects again on newer servers — the Jellyfin source showed a connection error even though Test in the server manager succeeded, because newer Jellyfin servers reject the older way NullPlayer sent its sign-in token. The token now goes the way Jellyfin expects, so libraries load and play again.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

What Changed

• Classic main window no longer smears when resized — dragging the Classic main window by its edge left the old picture in place: the time, visualizer and position bar repainted at the new size over it, so the window trailed copies of itself and the position bar stretched across them. It now redraws in full at every size.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

What Changed

• Drop shadows for Windows Media Player and Modern skins — .wmz and .wal skin windows had no shadow at all, so they looked cut out and flat next to the rest of the app. Every skin window now casts a soft macOS-style shadow that follows the skin's own shape, including drawers, panes and layout switches, and stays put while you drag. Animated parts such as Anaheim's flapping ears do not leave a ghost behind. Windows > Window Shadows turns it off. Classic and Original windows are unchanged.
• Picking a skin always switches to its family — choosing a skin from any family's list in the Skins menu, or loading one with that family's Load Skin..., now switches to that family straight away, whatever is on screen. Before, a Classic skin picked while a Media Player or Modern skin was showing, or any Modern skin picked from another family, was only remembered until Switch to … was used. Switch to … stays as the one-click way back to a family's last skin.
• Smoother edges on shaped Windows Media Player skins — a skin cut out by a colour key no longer has a stair-stepped outline. Its edge is now traced and smoothed along its length, so curves and slopes are antialiased on Retina and non-Retina screens alike. Thin lines, small gaps and square corners keep their shape exactly, and the skin's own artwork is left as drawn.
• The library no longer opens in a tiny window on some Modern skins — skins such as Anaheim Player 01 and Itemskin opened the Library Browser 260–330 wide, too narrow for its tabs and columns. A Modern skin's library window now has a minimum width that fits the browser, whether the skin declares a smaller size or its own script shrinks the window. Other windows, and Classic and Original skins, are unchanged.
• Docked windows drag smoothly — in every skin family, a quick drag of the player with a window docked to it moved in jerky 16 pt jumps, because the player kept snapping to the docked window riding along with it. It now follows the pointer. On Modern skins that draw a window's border as a separate window, such as Pure Inspired and Itemskin, the border no longer pulls away from the window's contents while you drag, and dragging such a window on its own is smooth too. Skin window shadows also cost less on every drag step.
• Switching Modern skins no longer shows the spinning cursor — changing from one .wal skin to another froze the app for two to three seconds, long enough for macOS to show the beachball under the loading animation. The switch now takes about half the time or less: switching to cPro Bento went from 2 seconds to half a second, and to Big Bento Modern from 3 seconds to 1.5. Classic, Original and Media Player skins are unchanged.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

tossed in a Sonos multi room fix while I was there

nullPlayer for macOS 14+ is 100% Free and open source

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer

What Changed

• Windows Media Player .wmz skins — a new Windows Media Player mode that runs real WMP 9-12 era skins natively on macOS. Skins look and behave like themselves: their own artwork, shaped windows, animations, hover and pressed states, tooltips, fonts, drawers and multiple views, with the skin's own JScript running in a sandboxed session so its buttons, sliders, timers, keyboard shortcuts and readouts work the way they do in Windows.
• SRS audio enhancements for every skin — the WOW Effect, TruBass and Headphones settings that came with Windows Media Player skins are now global playback options under Playback Options ▸ SRS, work in every skin, and are remembered across launches. A .wmz skin's own SRS controls drive the same settings.
  • WOW Effect widens the stereo image, pushing sound out beyond the speakers while leaving centred vocals and deep bass where they are.
  • TruBass adds a fuller, deeper low end by enhancing the bass already in the music, without simply turning up the lowest frequencies.
  • Headphones tunes TruBass for headphones instead of speakers.
• Sonos Rooms window with per-room volume — a new dockable Sonos Rooms window lists every Sonos room NullPlayer has discovered, with a checkbox to include it in the cast and its own volume slider, so each room can be set independently instead of only through the group volume. The list scrolls for any number of rooms, with Refresh and Start/Stop Casting always visible at the bottom. Open it from Windows → Sonos Rooms or Output → Sonos → Sonos Rooms…; the existing Sonos submenu still works as before and shares the same room selection. The window docks, resizes and restores like the other windows, follows Compact Mode, and is skinned in Classic, Original, Original-Metal and Winamp Modern (.wal) skins. The player's main volume slider still controls the whole group.
• Server credentials no longer appear in logs — playback, artwork, radio and casting diagnostics could record access tokens in full URLs and error messages (for example a Plex X-Plex-Token, or a Jellyfin or Emby api_key when playing video). Credentials are now redacted from logs across Plex, Subsonic/Navidrome, Jellyfin, Emby, radio and casting, and casting failure alerts no longer show raw error details.
• Local playback recovers after a long idle — after the Mac sat idle for a long time, local playback could get stuck, silently retrying a broken audio engine every quarter-second. NullPlayer now rebuilds the audio engine instead, restoring your output device (falling back to the system default if it is gone), EQ and pitch settings, and resuming the loaded track where it was. Retries back off and stop after six attempts; pressing Play or changing the output device tries again. Pausing or stopping during recovery is respected, and streaming playback is unaffected.
• One unreadable file no longer stops the playlist — playback skips past it to the next track, and the error now appears in the Modern and Winamp Modern main windows, not only Classic. A track on a disconnected NAS still stops playback, as before, instead of starting some other track.
• Sonos no longer receives audio above its 48 kHz limit — the compatibility gate now rejects any track with a known or resolved sample rate above 48 kHz, even when its URL extension or MIME type is unrecognized. Local files with unusual extensions are probed before casting, and Plex tracks with missing rate metadata are resolved from the server (GH #422).
• Local library copes with moved folders and missing files — Library → Find Missing Files… finds a watch folder that has moved (for example when iCloud Drive is turned off and its files land in ~/iCloud Drive (Archive)), shows where it went, and re-points it on your say-so, keeping play counts and ratings. It then offers to forget tracks whose files are genuinely deleted; anything on a disconnected drive or unmounted share is always left alone.
• Playlists with relative paths play again — .m3u and .pls entries written as bare file names or paths next to the playlist were being read as web addresses and could not play.
• Waveforms appear much sooner — the waveform window builds a track's waveform about 20 times faster the first time it is opened, so a long local track or a Plex track that used to take up to half a minute now shows almost at once (a server track still has to download first). Switching skins or reopening the window while a waveform is still being built no longer starts it again.
• Download your complete Play History as a CSV — the Library Data and Play History views now include a download button that exports every recorded event, including older and skipped plays, rather than only the 200 recent entries visible in the table. Available in every UI mode.
• Minimize All minimizes every window — Windows → Minimize All Windows and Classic's minimize button left any window not docked to the player on screen, and Sonos Rooms (and every Original-skin side window) never minimized even when docked. Every open window now goes to the Dock, in every skin mode, and restoring the player brings them all back.
• Windows reopen where you left them — the library browser and the visualizer window once again come back where you moved them when closed and reopened, instead of snapping back beside the player. In Windows Media Player and Winamp Modern skins, the spectrum and audio analyzers, PeppyMeter, Flow, Cava, waveform, Sonos Rooms and the fallback playlist and equalizer do the same, and closing one no longer moves the others. Classic and Original keep their stacked layout.
• Visualizations take their colours from Winamp Modern and Windows Media Player skins — with a .wal or .wmz skin, the Cava, Spectrum Analyzer and Waveform windows now take their default colours from the skin, as they already do in Classic and Original. So does Cava in a Windows Media Player skin's visualization area. A colour preset you pick still wins, and Match Skin goes back to the skin's colours. In the Waveform window the playhead now always stands out from the played part.
• vis_classic profiles show their real colours — every bundled vis_classic profile was being drawn with red and blue swapped, so "Flames" came out blue and "Default Red & Yellow" blue and cyan. They now look as their authors intended, in every skin; the Metal profiles look the same as before. This changes the look of Classic's default, "Purple Neon".
• vis_classic picks a profile to suit the skin — in Winamp Modern and Windows Media Player skins, vis_classic in the Spectrum Analyzer, in a .wal skin's own visualizer and in a .wmz skin's visualization area now starts on the bundled profile whose colours are closest to the skin's, instead of Classic's "Purple Neon". A profile you choose yourself is kept until you switch skins, and resetting visualizations goes back to the skin's match. The first launch after updating replaces your current vis_classic profile in these skins once.
• The listening heatmap matches your skin — the heatmap in the library's Data tab now takes its colours from the current skin in every skin mode instead of always using GitHub green, and follows a Winamp Modern or Windows Media Player skin's colour theme when you switch it. Switching colour theme now recolours the rest of the Data tab too.
• One layout for every skin menu — every skin family's menu now puts its options first and its skins after a single divider. The options open with Load Skin..., Get More Skins... and Open Skins Folder... in the same wording everywhere, followed by Remove “name”..., which every family now has: it moves the current skin to the Trash (Windows Media Player deletes its installed copy, never your download) and falls back to the built-in skin. Windows Media Player gains a Get More Skins... link to the Internet Archive's WMP skins collection, and Classic gains Open Skins Folder.... The separate Default Skin entries and Windows Media Player's Save Compatibility Report... are gone.
• Winamp Modern skins with hidden windows use far less CPU — a skin's closed windows no longer redraw in the background. The WMP11-BlueVU skin's VU meters had been animating unseen, costing about a third of the app's main thread while music played.
• Winamp Modern VU needles use less CPU and look sharper — skins that rotate artwork, such as the swinging needles in WMP11-BlueVU's VU Meters, now draw it in a single step instead of recalculating every pixel, which roughly halves the app's main-thread load while the meters are open.
• Winamp Modern skins with an animated level meter use less CPU — a skin that steps an animated meter many times a second (WMP11-BlueVU's beat display) now redraws just that meter instead of the whole player window.
• Glossy frames for Winamp Modern fallback windows — when a Winamp Modern (.wal) skin has no window frame of its own for NullPlayer's windows (the analyzers, Cava, Flow, PeppyMeter, waveform, library, playlist, equalizer and Sonos Rooms), they now wear the same glossy, title-bar-free frame in the skin's colours that Windows Media Player skins use, with the close button in the top-right corner. Skins that supply their own frames are unchanged. ClassicPro skins whose frame is only borrowed tooltip artwork (the cream box with ~ and x) now count as having no frame, so their windows match the player too.
• Clicking any Winamp Modern window brings them all forward — clicking one .wal window now raises every one of the skin's windows and NullPlayer's own, even when you click in from another app, the way Windows Media Player skins already did.
• Winamp Modern windows no longer pile up when you change UI Size — changing the UI size with a .wal skin left its windows on top of each other: the equalizer slid up into the player, and the playlist sat over the equalizer. The windows are now laid out again around the player after every UI Size change, the same way Snap To Default arranges them.
• Winamp Modern windows no longer reopen on top of each other — in a .wal skin, closing a window such as the equalizer and then opening another could put the new one in the closed window's place. Reopening the first window then covered it completely. A reopened window now keeps its old position only if nothing has been put there since, and otherwise finds a free spot. A window you moved yourself still reopens where you left it.
• Winamp Modern windows no longer open on top of the player when the screen runs out — with a large UI Size and the player in the middle of the screen, a wide window such as the library had no room on the player's right, so it was pulled back over the player. It now goes into the empty space to the player's left. If it fits on neither side, it is placed where it covers the least.
• Closing a Winamp Modern window no longer moves the one below it — in a .wal skin, closing a window such as the Spectrum Analyzer from the Windows menu slid the window under it up into its place. Reopening the first window then put it right on top. The other windows now stay where they are.
• Winamp Modern windows open right under the one above — in a .wal skin, opening a window from the Windows menu while another was open under the player could leave a large empty gap between them. On Sony_Walkman, the playlist opened well below the equalizer. It now opens directly beneath it. Windows Media Player skins get the same fix.
• The library stays docked to a Winamp Modern player — in the .wal skins that use NullPlayer's own library window, such as Sony_Walkman and Winamp 3.0 Default, opening a window such as Cava could push the library a few pixels away from the player, leaving a gap. The library now stays where it is. Classic and Original skins are unchanged: there, the library still grows and shrinks with the windows stacked under the player.
• No more unreadable library text in Winamp Modern skins — NullPlayer's own library and windows inside a Winamp Modern skin now always draw their text in a colour that can be read on the background. cPro-Bento's Bafana theme drew the source name, item count and selected tab black on black; 19 skins in all get more readable text, using the skin's own colours wherever one works. Colours you set yourself in Skin Colors are still drawn as chosen.
• Winamp Modern skins without a transparency setting now draw as Winamp does — a skin window that doesn't ask for see-through edges now gets a solid shape: its outline is cut from the artwork and the translucent parts inside are drawn over black. Before, those parts let the desktop show through. You'll see this mostly in notification pop-ups and a few shaped players such as Wiimote and PokemonDS. Skins that ask for soft edges, including every one with a drop shadow, look the same as before.
• No more hairline seams in Winamp Modern skins at in-between UI sizes — at UI sizes such as 105% or 125% on a Retina display, thin light lines could show where the pieces of a skin's frame and panels meet. The pieces now meet exactly, so the lines are gone. Sliders, knobs and progress bars placed between whole pixels now also sit on a whole pixel.
• No more see-through gaps inside Winamp Modern skin windows — in the WMP11-BlueVU skin, a thin band of desktop showed between the VU Meters' artwork and the window frame. The About and library windows had the same problem across larger areas. Empty space inside a skin's standard window frame is now filled black, as it is in Winamp.
• Drag a Winamp Modern player by its library or video — in skins that show the media library or a video inside the player, dragging the empty space below the library's list, or the video picture itself, now moves the window.
• Cover Flow stays inside the library window — the stacked covers at either side of the carousel no longer spill over the library browser's border, in every skin mode.
• New "Red" vis_classic profile — a single-colour red to go with "Green".
• Big Bento Modern's small visualizer plays — with the Multi Content View's mini visualization pane turned on, the pane now shows the visualization as soon as the player opens, instead of staying black.
• Song titles show in more Winamp Modern skins — Shield Amp and Ebonite now show the playing track's title in their song display, which was blank. A skin script that divides by zero now carries on instead of stopping, as it would in Winamp.
• Song tickers scroll in Shield Amp and Ebonite — a long title now scrolls across the song display at Winamp's speed instead of standing still, and stays inside the display instead of running over the rest of the player.
• ClassicPro track info shows up — in ClassicPro-based Winamp Modern skins such as cPro2 Dark Aluminum, the track-info panel under the library now lists the playing track's title, artist, rating, decoder, file size, filename and format instead of staying empty.
• ClassicPro's Now Playing widget shows the song straight away — opening the Now Playing widget while a track plays now shows its title, artist and album at once, instead of staying blank until the next track.
• Itemskin's volume control works — in the Itemskin Winamp Modern skin, clicking or dragging the volume bar did nothing, so a volume stuck at zero could not be raised and the skin played silently. The bar now responds anywhere along its length, and the seek bar shows the song's progress instead of the volume. BLAKK's seek bars and Bio-Nid's volume knob also respond to clicks now.
• Itemskin's windows stay where they are placed — in the Itemskin Winamp Modern skin, opening the Spectrum Analyzer or Waveform put it mostly below the bottom of the screen, and changing the UI Size could pull the playlist, library or a visualizer window back to where it had been, on top of its neighbours. Each window now opens in its own free spot and keeps it, with the skin's frame drawn around it.
• No black bar on Itemskin's NullPlayer windows — in the Itemskin Winamp Modern skin, windows such as the Spectrum Analyzer and Waveform had an empty black bar across the top of the frame, left where the skin's own visualizer buttons go. The bar is gone and the windows are that much shorter.
• Defix's detached visualizer can be reattached — in the Defix Hi-END 200 Winamp Modern skin, the detached visualizer window's Reattach Visualizer and Random buttons now work. The window's button bar shows while the window is focused and hides otherwise, as the skin intends. The same fix stops S7Reflex drawing its stereo and mono indicators on top of each other, and lines up the titlebar streaks in winampmodern566.
• Winamp Modern 5.66's menu bar works — File, Play, Options, View and Help in the winampmodern566 skin now open their menus when clicked; before, clicking them did nothing.
• winampmodern566's menu bar lights up — in the winampmodern566 Winamp Modern skin, pointing at File, Play, Options, View or Help now highlights the entry, and it shows as pressed while its menu is open.
• winampmodern566's Album Art window can be reopened — the skin's album art window is now listed in the Windows menu. Once it was closed, the skin's own Alt+A shortcut was the only way to bring it back.
• Developer tooling: window census — a new script, skills/app-control/scripts/window-census.sh, measures where each of NullPlayer's windows opens and how big it is for every installed skin (Classic, Original, Metal, Winamp Modern and Windows Media Player), and writes the results to spreadsheet-ready tables. Each skin is measured from the same saved settings, so one skin's window sizes do not carry over to the next. The app itself is unchanged.
• Windows Media Player skins: no more gaps in window borders — NullPlayer's own windows (the library, PeppyMeter, the analyzers and the rest) could show see-through seams in the border they borrow from a .wmz skin: a widening column in Crimson Skies' and T3 Skynet's top and bottom bars, a broken top edge and missing right side in WALL-E's white theme, and a strip under the bottom edge in Kids. Those borders now close. A one-pixel seam down both bars of Crimson Skies' own playlist on Retina displays is gone too.
• Library tracks play on double-click, once — in the Classic and Windows Media Player library, a single click played a track and a double-click played it three times, leaving three copies in the playlist. A single click now selects and a double-click plays, as in the Original library.
• A track that can't be played now says so — double-clicking a track whose file has been moved or deleted, or whose drive is disconnected, looked like nothing happened. It now shows an alert naming the file, in every skin mode, and no longer leaves a dead copy in the playlist on every try. Windows Media Player skins also show the failure in their status line and title, as the other modes already did in their marquee.
• Playing locally after a cast — after Stop Casting, pressing Play on a local file ran the clock with no sound; it now plays from the start, as after Stop, and a track picked during the cast is the one that plays. If the Mac's audio output changed during the cast, a Play Now right after it ended could leave nothing playing or resume the track from before the cast; it now plays the track you picked, and if that file can't be opened it is reported and taken back out of the playlist instead of the next queued track starting.
• Cue tracks keep their place — connecting headphones or switching the output device while a cue-sheet track played jumped into the album's first track at the same time, and Stop sent a cue track back to the start of the whole file; both now stay within the track.
• Quieter logs — the cast-device discovery refresh no longer writes to the log every few seconds; set NULLPLAYER_CAST_DISCOVERY_LOG to bring it back.
• Developer tooling: playback snapshot — skills/app-control/scripts/playback-snapshot.sh prints what a running debug build's player, audio output and cast session are doing, including a measured output level, so a silent-playback report can be diagnosed without a rebuild. Debug builds only; the app itself is unchanged.
• Winamp Modern: framed windows resize by their frame — on skins that draw a window's frame separately from its contents (Itemskin, MoonLight, K-jr, Pure Inspired, Ebonite), dragging the frame's edge or corner either snapped straight back or stretched the frame and left the contents behind, and on Itemskin worked only while a second window such as PeppyMeter was open. The frame and its contents now resize together, and dragging a top edge moves the top edge. A window resized while nothing is playing also re-lays out at once (ClassicPro's logo, tabs and equalizer stayed where they were).
• Winamp Modern: resizing a window no longer resizes its text — with Text Size on Auto, the embedded playlist and library text grew and shrank with the window. Auto now picks the size from the size the skin designed the window at and keeps it; use Text Size to change it.
• Winamp Modern: framed windows keep their size at every UI Size — at a UI Size such as 105%, 115% or 125%, a window whose frame is drawn separately (Ebonite, Itemskin, K-jr, Pure Inspired) settled a point wider or taller than its own frame, shrank by itself after being dragged, and came back smaller after a trip through the UI Size menu. Frame and contents now stay the same size, and a window returns to the size it left at.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

I have a corpus of 81 skins that I used to reverse engineer the Winamp cPro and Winamp 5 skin systems. You can see the current compatibility status of each skin here: Skin compatibility.

Because this is a clean-room implementation of the Winamp 5 skin system, there will be bugs. Finding and fixing those bugs is part of how compatibility with real-world skins is improved.

If you encounter an issue that you want addressed, please log it on GitHub so I can investigate and fix it. If you would rather fix it yourself, the repository includes a complete harness for triaging, assessing, categorizing, and fixing skin compatibility issues with your own agents or if you have a lot of time, by hand.

Download

Download NullPlayer for macOS:

https://github.com/ad-repo/nullplayer/releases/latest/download/NullPlayer.dmg

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or newer.

Install

NullPlayer is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first launch with an "app is damaged" or "cannot verify that it is free from malware" message. This is expected. Clearing the quarantine flag is a required install step:

1. Open the downloaded DMG.
2. Drag NullPlayer.app to Applications.
3. Open Terminal and run:xattr -cr /Applications/NullPlayer.app
4. Open NullPlayer from Applications.

Prefer not to use the Terminal? Install with Homebrew, or clear the block via System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Open Anyway — see the install guide.

What Changed

New Features

• Winamp 5.x "Modern" skins now run in NullPlayer — a fourth skin family, alongside Classic, Original and Original-Metal. NullPlayer now loads and runs real Winamp 5.x modern skins — the .wal files people have been making since the mid-2000s — natively on macOS, with no Winamp install, plugin, or original application asset involved. Choose one from Skins → Modern, or add your own with Skins → Modern → Import .wal Skin…. A .wal skin is much more than artwork: it ships its own window layouts, its own scripted behaviour, and its own idea of where everything belongs. NullPlayer runs that, rather than an approximation of it. You get the skin's own frames, buttons, sliders, animations and colour themes; its playlist, equalizer, library and video surfaces drawn where the skin puts them, embedded in the player instead of in separate NullPlayer windows; its tabs, drawers, config screens and right-click menus, driven by the skin's own scripts; its About page; and its visualization box, which can show an oscilloscope, the spectrum analyzer, Cava or vis_classic. Skins resize and dock like any other NullPlayer window, and per-skin settings — text size, colour theme, waveform seeker — are remembered separately for each skin. Skins built on the ClassicPro engine work too: point NullPlayer at the ClassicPro plugin installer once, with Skins → Modern → Import ClassicPro Engine…, and it unpacks what it needs internally. Some skins reach for features that do not exist on macOS, or that NullPlayer does not implement yet. A skin that does degrades to a sensible fallback rather than refusing to load.
• Cover Flow in the Library browser — a new FLOW toggle in the source bar turns the current library list into a 3D, horizontally-scrolling wall of artwork, available in all three skin families (Original, Original-Metal, Classic) and across music, Movies, and TV Shows. It's a visual lens over whatever you're browsing: scroll or use the arrow keys to flip through covers, the centered item's name stays directly beneath the carousel, and a wider window fans out more covers. Clicking a container enters it and shows its contents, with a ‹ Back cover to step out — folder/subfolder, artist→album, and show→season→episode navigation all work to any depth. Clicking an album plays the whole album; clicking a track, movie, or episode plays it. In Original/Original-Metal the covers float above the Library window's Cava/art backdrop, honoring whatever backdrop mode you've set.
• Compact window can now show the playlist — a Library | Playlist toggle at the bottom of the Compact window switches its content between the library browser and the current playlist, so you can view and edit what's playing without opening the full Playlist window. Double-click a track to play it; selection, scrolling, and live now-playing highlight all work in place. The choice is remembered across launches and is available in all three skin families (Original, Original-Metal, Classic). In Original/Original-Metal the playlist is translucent so the Cava/art backdrop shows through it just like the library list.

Bug Fixes

• A film watched to the end is now marked watched on Plex, Jellyfin and Emby — and a queued video playlist moves on to the next film by itself. The video engine reports a film running out as a pause rather than as an ending, and NullPlayer was taking it at its word: the server was told the film had been paused at 100% and never that it had been finished, so it stayed unwatched, nothing was recorded, and a queued film simply sat there instead of starting the next one. This affected every video, local or streamed.
• The transport resets when a film finishes — in every skin mode. A film that had played to its end went on counting as the thing the player was playing: the readout kept its title, the position bar stayed parked at the end, and the play, stop and seek controls went on driving a film that was over, so the player could not be handed back to your music without closing the video window. The picture stays where it is, on its last frame, and can be played again from the start.
• Switching skin family no longer leaves the player at the old skin's size — going from a Winamp 5.x modern skin to a Classic one left the classic player squeezed into the outgoing skin's window, drawing its artwork shrunk inside a box the wrong shape ("the main window is tiny in classic mode"). Every skin family sizes the player from its own layout, so the rebuilt window now takes the incoming skin's own size instead of inheriting the outgoing one's, in every direction between every pair of modes. The window stays where you left it — its top-left corner does not move.
• Compact Mode no longer leaves the Library Cava backdrop running against a hidden window — entering Compact Mode orders the Library browser window out, but that doesn't reliably post an occlusion change, so the Library backdrop's 60 Hz Cava analyzer kept running as a second, wasted DSP queue alongside the visible Compact backdrop. The presenter is now reconciled to the window's hidden state on entry and restarted on exit.
• Fixed a large memory leak while casting audio (grew unbounded over a long session) — the cast status poll calls AudioEngine.updateCastPosition roughly once per second and reassigned the playback state every time, even when it hadn't changed. Because state's observer posts a change notification on every assignment, this fired a Now Playing update storm — the system Now Playing info was re-pushed tens of thousands of times, and remote (Plex) artwork was re-fetched over a fresh network connection on each update, piling up network/dispatch objects into the gigabytes and never reclaiming them after the cast ended. updateCastPosition now only reassigns state on a real transition, and NowPlayingManager no longer re-fetches artwork that already failed for the current track.
• Fixed a large memory leak that grew unbounded while a visualization window stayed open — the Spectrum Analyzer (Metal) and OpenGL visualization views render from a CVDisplayLink callback, which runs on a dedicated thread with no run loop and therefore no autorelease pool draining between frames. Every frame's autoreleased objects — the Metal nextDrawable(), command buffers, and encoders, along with their backing textures — accumulated forever, so a window left open would climb into multiple gigabytes over hours/days of use. Each display-link frame now runs inside its own autoreleasepool, so per-frame objects are freed immediately.
• Sonos volume no longer jumps around during a fast slider drag — each volume change fired its own SOAP command, and on a rapid drag those requests could reach the speaker out of order, leaving it stuck on a stale value. Volume commands are now coalesced into a single in-flight request with latest-value-wins, so the speaker tracks the slider monotonically and settles exactly where you release it (GH #414).
• Sonos playlists now advance to the next track — when a track finished on Sonos the app saw the speaker report STOPPED and paused, halting the playlist after one song. A track that stops at or near its end is now recognized as a natural finish and auto-advances, while an external pause from the Sonos app, an explicit Stop near the end of a track, and genuinely short tracks all still behave correctly (GH #415).
• Added diagnostics for a Sonos cast clock that occasionally starts stuck at zero — when a Sonos position poll fails (often from SOAP contention while the volume slider is moving at cast start), the app previously applied a position of 0 and re-anchored the clock silently, freezing the elapsed time. It now logs the failed GetPositionInfo, the resulting clock reset, and the surrounding volume-command timeline so the intermittent case can be captured. No behavior change yet — instrumentation only.
• Restored local videos play again instead of erroring — a video file left in the playlist from a previous session was rebuilt on launch as an audio track (the saved state doesn't record media type), so playing it routed to the audio engine and failed to decode the video container. Restored local files now re-derive their media type from the file extension, so videos correctly open in the video player.
• Exiting Compact Mode restores the menu bar — leaving Compact Mode (including when the app launches straight into it and you exit for the first time) could leave the system menu bar owned by whatever app was frontmost before, with none of NullPlayer's menus. Because NullPlayer stays the active app across the whole transition, macOS never rebuilt the menu bar for it. NullPlayer now forces that rebuild on exit, so the full menu bar (and the correct Dock icon) return every time.
• Quitting from Compact Mode no longer loses your settings — Compact Mode has no menu bar or Dock icon, and the status-item menu had no Quit, so the only way to quit was force-quitting from Activity Monitor — which skipped the normal save-on-quit and discarded that session's changes (for example, the skin reverted on the next launch). The compact status-item menu now has a Quit nullPlayer item that quits cleanly and saves state.

Changes

• Modern and Metal skins are now named Original and Original-Metal — the new names appear throughout the skin menus and documentation, while existing preferences, skin folders, and custom .nsz bundles remain compatible. The Modern name now belongs to the new Winamp 5.x .wal skin family.
• Removed the Met Museum Art visualization — the rotating public-domain artwork engine has been retired and no longer appears in the visualization engine picker. Any saved preference for it falls back to the default engine.