Tool 01 · critical listening
Onyx音频播放器
A desktop audio player for critical listening.
It plays your files bit-transparently, shows you what they actually measure, and lets you flip between two versions of the same material — instantly, at the same playhead, time-aligned if they do not start together, and blind if you want the answer to be honest.
It is aimed at the moment where you have mix_v3.wav and mix_v4.wav, or the 24/96 master and the 320 kbps encode, and you need to know whether you can hear the difference at all.
What it does
- Two decks, one playhead
Tab moves which deck is audible, with a short equal-gain crossfade. The position is shared rather than copied, so there is no seek involved and no gap to lose your place in.
- Blind testing, 2AFC and ABX
The honest answer is the one you give when you cannot see which deck is playing.
- Level matching that only ever attenuates
Opt-in, and it never turns anything up — so a comparison cannot be won by being louder.
- Bit transparency, and it means it
Onyx asks the device to change sample rate to match the file. The Web Audio API cannot do that, which is why the audio path is hand-written Rust with nothing between it and CoreAudio or WASAPI.
- Plays very nearly everything
WAV/BWF, FLAC, MP3, AAC, ALAC, Vorbis, Opus, AIFF, CAF, MKA/MKV, WebM, the audio track of MOV and MP4, .mid rendered through a bundled General MIDI bank, and zip archives. Formats are detected by content, not by extension, so a renamed file cannot lie its way into the wrong decoder.
- Metering you can actually trust
Standards-compliant to the coefficient, drawn on canvas at 60 Hz. Meters that lag are meters you stop trusting.
Get it
Builds are attached to each release: a universal .dmg for macOS 11 and later, covering both Apple silicon and Intel, and an x64 installer for Windows 10 and 11.
The builds are unsigned, so both systems will complain the first time. On macOS: right-click → Open → Open. On Windows: More info → Run anyway. There is no auto-updater and Onyx phones nowhere.