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Really grateful for this reanimation! I finally updated to a MacBook Pro a few weeks ago, and one of my worries was that I'd have to find a new audio player.  It's great that such a terrific program has been rescued from being totally moribund.  (That's something that happens far too often -- it's been over a decade but I still remember SoundApp, and how the developer of that great little audio player abandoned it without any explanation.)

I actually think this is a great idea, though since Cog hasn't seen any real development in months now (and no release in over two years), I don't know how much hope there is to see it implemented.  If I had any programming skills, I'd try, but...

I have to agree with Remain.  It's distinctively depressing to periodically go to the site for a well-loved app, and see no updates for years at a time.  (I remember doing that a decade ago with SoundApp, Cog's spiritual ancestor of sorts.)  The way the Cog site looks right now, it's easy to come away with the impression of yet another dead/abandoned project.

Even a small sign of life makes a big difference, and given how much has been done on 0.08, having a beta release would help to "keep the faith".  It might even bring in developers who can help keep things going, fix bugs, etc. until you have more time.

Actually, Drayon, I use audio-manipulation techniques all the time in my listening.  For example, I sometimes get recordings that are going at the wrong speed -- concert recordings, or my dad's old vinyl transfers before he adjusted the speed on his turntable -- and it's nice to be able to adjust that in real time, on the fly, without having to do a proper speed correction.  Another thing I like to do is sum tracks to out-of-phase mono, aka "karaoke mode", to see what hidden layers can be revealed in recordings I otherwise know well.  And I EQ stuff all the time, given that I listen to many recordings whose fidelity leaves a lot to be desired.  (All these functions are also useful for transcription purposes, too.)

Since I have a lot of stuff in FLAC, doing any of that in Logic or iTunes is out, not to mention the fact that the former takes aeons to boot and the latter is horrendous these days.  I've been using MacAmp Lite, which has all the functionality I mentioned above, but that's an old and mildly unstable program and I don't know if it even works with Leopard.  Audacity is buggy, and more importantly it's not playlist-based -- it has to import everything, which is annoying if you just want to quickly try a few things out.

I'd far rather use Cog for these tasks, if it were possible to do so without adding bloat -- and I get the impression that the amount of code needed to get Cog to interface with Audio Units would be relatively small, because you're not implementing that functionality yourself, just working with an already-existing API.

FWIW, this is coming from a recording engineer and classical musician/composer, and someone who thinks that "end users" are entirely free to "mutilate someone else's music" (!) however they want -- including mine!  I'm kind of bemused by your reverence for the recording/mixing/mastering process, as if end-user interference were a blasphemous idea.

Having seen the inner workings of that process, I assure you that these things aren't handed down on golden tablets from on high, and there have been some terrible decisions made in those booths, more than once.  (Too bad there isn't an "un-limiter/compressor" plug-in.)

No, it can be a lot of fun to do potentially-atrocious things to a recording, and occasionally I've come up with something transformative and beautiful, just by messing around with a half-dozen tracks in all kinds of ways.

Having said all that, I agree that there are higher priorities for Cog right now -- in particular, getting 0.08 out the door.  But I wouldn't pooh-pooh the idea of Audio Units;  assuming it doesn't slow Cog down, it only makes it a more valuable tool, specifically because it allows the end-user to use it in unanticipatable and surprising ways.

I'm still hoping that some intrepid third party will backport some of the new features. (Whatever happened to Andre R., anyway?)

Really, the only things that are sorely needed are "Undo" and a working shuffle system (though 0.08 doesn't yet have that either, right?).  Without them, especially the latter, 0.07 feels sort of broken.

(I keep meaning to try to come to grips with the code so that I might work on this stuff myself, but it's a little overwhelming, given that I've never done any serious programming.)

Anything you can do would certainly be appreciated!

Yikes, I don't think so -- these are commercially sold discs by indie bands, and I'd rather not ruin them, visually speaking.

I hope this bug gets fixed soon, and that the fix gets backported to 0.07, as it's kind of a dealbreaker for many users.  After all, being able to load your playlist up with a thousand songs and get true shuffle play is one of the main reasons we use audio players to begin with, right?