A free bit-perfect music player for Mac
Short answer: turn on HiFi output in Audify and your Mac stops touching the audio. Audify takes exclusive control of the output device, switches that device to the file’s own sample rate, and hands the samples over untouched — no resampling, no system mixer in the path. It costs nothing, there is no account, and the app is notarized by Apple.
Why trust this page? It is written by the team that builds Audify, and it describes what the shipping code actually does — including, at the bottom, the things it deliberately does not do. Version 1.0.10, August 2026.
What “bit-perfect” actually means
Every Mac runs a system mixer. It exists so a notification chime can play over a song, and it works by converting everything — every app, every file — to one shared sample rate. If that rate is set to 48 kHz and your album is a 96 kHz master, macOS quietly resamples it before it ever reaches your headphones. Nothing warns you. The music simply is not the file any more.
Bit-perfect playback means the samples in the file arrive at the converter unchanged. To get there a player has to do two things: take the output device for itself so the mixer is out of the path, and set that device to the file’s own rate so nothing has to be converted. On macOS this is normally a feature you pay for — the well-known audiophile players that offer it are commercial software. In Audify it is a switch in Settings.
Swipe the table sideways →
| Normal macOS playback | Audify HiFi output | |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns the output device | Shared by every running app | Audify alone, exclusively |
| Sample rate | One fixed system rate — files are converted to match it | The device is switched to the file’s rate, per track |
| Resampling in the path | Whenever file rate ≠ system rate | None, for rates the device supports |
| Other apps’ audio | Mixed in — chimes, browser video, everything | Silenced by macOS while playing |
| Price | — | Free · no account · no subscription |
How to switch it on
Open Settings, find HiFi output — exclusive device access, and turn it on. Play something. That is the whole procedure — there is no driver to install and no device to configure first.
You will know it is working when other sounds on your Mac go quiet: notifications and browser audio stop reaching the speakers while Audify holds the device. That silence is the feature. Turn HiFi output back off and the system mixer returns immediately.
What else is in the audio path
Bit-perfect output is the strict end of the scale — everything below is off by default and each one is a deliberate change to the signal. They are here because most listening is not purist listening.
- AutoEQ import. Paste in a parametric EQ file from autoeq.app and Audify reads its preamp and filter bands directly, correcting your specific headphone model towards neutral — no typing numbers into a graphic EQ.
- Headphone crossfeed. Bleeds a little of each channel into the other, the way speakers in a room do, which takes the pressure off hard-panned stereo mixes.
- ReplayGain, track or album. Reads loudness tags already in your files and levels playback without re-encoding anything. Album mode keeps a record’s internal dynamics intact.
- Gapless, crossfade, or Auto. Auto reads the end of each track and decides: fades that trail into silence get a crossfade, hard cuts stay gapless. Live albums and DJ mixes keep their seams.
- A 10-band equalizer, skip silence, and a sleep timer that fades out rather than cutting off mid-bar.
127 formats, including the ones nothing else reads
Audify bundles the libVLC engine — the same decoder VLC is built on — so its format coverage is VLC’s coverage: 91 audio and 36 video formats, with nothing to install separately.
Past the usual FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF, Opus and OGG, that includes the formats collectors actually get stuck on: DSD (.dsf, .dff), APE, WavPack, TAK, OptimFROG, Shorten, Musepack, TrueHD, MLP, RF64 — and the tracker modules a lot of people still have in a folder somewhere: .mod, .s3m, .xm, .it.
Where this falls short
Being straight about the limits is more useful than a spec sheet.
- DSD is decoded to PCM, not passed through natively as DSD-over-PCM. Your .dsf and .dff files play; purists who need a native DSD path to their DAC will not get it here yet.
- Exclusive output is macOS-only. It is written against CoreAudio directly. The Windows build does not have this path — see Audify on Windows for what it does have.
- No network streaming or NAS-library features in the sense the paid players mean it — no Roon-style server, no UPnP renderer. Audify plays files that are on your Mac.
- Rates the device cannot do are still converted. “No resampling” holds for sample rates your output hardware actually supports; anything beyond that falls back rather than failing.