What Your Mac Won't Tell You About Your Music Files

Select a song in Finder, press the space bar, and Quick Look starts playing it. It's handy, but that's about all it does. It won't tell you what format the file is, how good its quality is or how loud it is, and plenty of music files won't even play.

TL;DR: In our test on macOS Sonoma, the Mac's built-in playback, which Quick Look and QuickTime use, handled only 5 of 10 common audio formats. Ogg, Opus, WMA and WavPack files didn't play at all. For the files it does understand, Finder's Get Info shows the bitrate and sample rate, but not the codec, whether the file is lossless, or its loudness. A free menu bar app like Trackray shows all of that in one panel and plays the formats macOS can't.

If you'd like to see everything about a track with one shortcut: Trackray →

What Quick Look Shows You

For a music file, Quick Look gives you a simple player and, if the file has one, the cover art. You can listen, pause and close it, and nothing more.

There's no line saying "MP3, 320 kbps" or "FLAC, 24-bit". So you can't tell at a glance whether a file is a small, compressed copy or a full-quality one, which is often the very thing you wanted to check.

Many Music Files Won't Play at All

We made short test files in ten common formats and tried to open them on a Mac running macOS Sonoma. Half of them played. The other half couldn't be opened by the Mac's built-in playback, the same system Quick Look and QuickTime rely on.

Two formats popular with music collectors, APE and DSD, aren't supported either. And FLAC, which plays fine in Quick Look, still can't be added to the Music app. If you want your FLAC files there, you'll need to convert them to Apple Lossless first, as our guide to converting FLAC to Apple Lossless explains.

Where to Find a File's Bitrate

The Mac does know a little more than Quick Look shows. Select a song in Finder, press ⌘ + I, and open More Info. For the formats it can play, you'll see the length, the sample rate and the bitrate.

Get Info still leaves out a lot. It doesn't name the codec or say whether the file is lossless. For an MP3, it won't tell you how the file was encoded. And for an Opus, WMA or WavPack file, the section stays empty, because macOS can't read those files at all. The bitrate alone can also mislead: as we explain in why 320kbps from YouTube isn't better, a big number doesn't always mean good sound.

Why Some Songs Are Louder Than Others

If one song in a playlist is quiet and the next one makes you reach for the volume, the files aren't broken. Songs are simply made at different loudness levels. Streaming services even this out on their side: Spotify, for example, adjusts every track to the same level, called -14 LUFS.

Your own music files don't get that treatment unless you ask for it. The Music app can even out the volume with Sound Check, which you'll find under Music > Settings > Playback. But neither Finder nor Quick Look will show you how loud a file actually is.

How It Can Look Instead

This is why we made Trackray, a free app for Mac. Select a track in Finder and press ⇧ + ⌘ + Space. A panel opens next to Finder and starts playing the track, much like Quick Look, but with everything Quick Look leaves out:

• the format, bitrate, sample rate and bit depth, and whether the file is lossless
• for MP3 files, whether the bitrate is constant or variable, and how the file was encoded
• the loudness in LUFS, the peak level and any ReplayGain values
• all the tags, the lyrics stored in the file, and the cover art

It also plays more than 200 audio formats, including Ogg, Opus, WMA, WavPack, APE and DSD. Select several files and you can step through them with the arrow keys. The rest of the time it waits quietly in the menu bar.

The Bottom Line

Quick Look is fine for a quick listen to a common file. If you want to know what you're actually listening to, or you have music in formats your Mac doesn't understand, you need a tool that looks inside the file. Get Info covers the basics, and Trackray covers the rest with one shortcut.