v0.9.5 — clearer error for AAC-in-M4A via the Quick Action

Fixed

• Right-clicking a lossy AAC `.m4a` file (an iTunes/Music.app purchase, most commonly) — directly reachable via the "bpplay play" Quick Action — produced a codec-jargon error (`M4A: no ALAC audio track found`) instead of a plain explanation. Now says outright: this is AAC, not Apple Lossless, and bpplay does not decode lossy audio.

Why

Caught during a review of the Quick Action's real-world failure modes ahead of wider release: an M4A file being lossless isn't something a user can tell from the file icon, and the Quick Action's whole point is to be reachable without knowing anything about codecs.

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.

v0.9.4 — ALAC (Apple Lossless) playback in M4A

Added

• ALAC (Apple Lossless) playback, in the M4A container (.m4a) — the same bit-perfect, whole-track-in-RAM path as WAV/FLAC/AIFF. Handles 16 and 24-bit ALAC (what iTunes/Music.app actually produce), any channel count, -dir folder playback and mixed-format playlists.
• Vendors Apple's own open-sourced ALAC reference decoder (src/alac.h, Apache License 2.0) in the same single-header style as dr_flac.h.

Fixed

• The upstream ALAC endianness-detection macro only recognised __i386__/__x86_64__, silently treating Apple Silicon as big-endian — would have corrupted the magic cookie on an arm64 build. Fixed while vendoring, before it ever shipped.

Why

Requested directly by a user: iTunes/Music.app rips and purchases are commonly ALAC-in-M4A, and until now bpplay had no way to play them bit-perfect without a manual re-encode to FLAC.

Verified bit-exact against reference PCM (zero differing bytes) for both 16-bit/44.1kHz and 24-bit/96kHz test files. See CHANGELOG.md for full details.

v0.9.3 — Finder Quick Action (bpplay play.workflow)

Added

• bpplay play.workflow, bundled directly in the DMG — a self-contained Finder Quick Action. Select one or more music files, or a single album folder, anywhere in Finder, right-click, and choose "bpplay play". Same zero-configuration design as bpplay drop.app (bundles its own copy of the bpplay binary, plays on the system's default output device). One-time install: copy into ~/Library/Services/ (see the DMG readme, or manual chapter 9.2).

Why

Suggested by a user after trying bpplay drop.app in v0.9.1: a right-click "play with bpplay" option, the same UX pattern as macOS's built-in Quick Actions, for people who'd rather select files in place than drag them onto an icon.

See CHANGELOG.md for full details.

bpplay 0.9.2

bpplay 0.9.2 — macOS Core edition

Fixed

• bpplay drop.app's no-file-dropped dialog was in Hungarian regardless of the user's language (a leftover from development). Now in English, matching the project's primary language. (Reported by a v0.9.1 user — thank you!)

Full diff: v0.9.1...v0.9.2

SHA256 for the DMG is attached below and in bpplay-0.9.2-macos.dmg.sha256.

bpplay 0.9.1

bpplay 0.9.1 — macOS Core edition

Bundled, zero-configuration drag-and-drop launcher. First GitHub downloader feedback showed that the manual Automator-app setup (documented in the v0.9 manual's drag-and-drop chapter) was too high a bar — people never got to try drop-based playback.

Added

• bpplay drop.app, bundled directly in the DMG — a self-contained AppleScript droplet. Drop a file, several files, or an album folder onto its icon: a Terminal window opens and bit-perfect playback starts. It bundles its own copy of the bpplay binary and plays on the system's default output device — no setup needed.
• READ_ME_FIRST.txt (English) alongside the existing OLVASD_EL_ELOSZOR.txt (Hungarian) in the DMG.
• Reproducible build scripts: tools/build-drop-app.sh, tools/build-dmg.sh.

Changed

• HU/EN user manuals updated (installation chapter, drag-and-drop chapter) to document the bundled drop app; the manual Automator-app recipe (tools/bpplay-drop.sh) remains documented as the advanced path for a fixed output device.

Full diff: v0.9...v0.9.1

SHA256 for the DMG is attached below and in bpplay-0.9.1-macos.dmg.sha256.

bpplay 0.9 — macOS Core edition

First public release (release candidate) of bpplay — a bit-perfect music player for macOS. Bit-perfect playback through the CoreAudio HAL with hog mode and integer mode, whole-track-in-RAM model, WAV/FLAC/AIFF/DSF (DSD64–DSD256 via DoP) support. See CHANGELOG.md for the full list of changes.

Downloads

• bpplay-0.9-macos.dmg — universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), ready to run without compiling. See the included OLVASD_EL_ELOSZOR.txt (Hungarian) for first-run instructions, including the required Gatekeeper bypass step — this build is not notarised.
• Verify the download with the accompanying .sha256 file.
• Prefer to build from source? See the README.

Tested

Verified live against a Gustard USB DAC across FLAC (44.1kHz), high-resolution WAV (96kHz/176.4kHz/352.8kHz, including 32-bit float), and DSD256 via DoP — playback, pause/resume, and the q quit path all confirmed correct.