Play MP3s on Your Mac Without iTunes and Without Any Additional Mac MP3 Players!  
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. - 2 Comments, Last updated 08/26/2010

Some people may already know this, but there are plenty of people who don’t. Forget your fancy Mac MP3 players!

Did you know that you can play an MP3 on the fly on your Mac without using or loading any separate Mac MP3 players, and without even loading or using iTunes?

And it’s as easy as locating the file you want to listen to in your finder window! It’s which view you choose in your finder window which makes the difference.

When you are using Finder, you have the choice of three views: as Icons, as List, and as Columns. Here is how the buttons look to choose those views:

Now, the one that you see highlighted in blue - the right-most one - allows you to view your files in columns which get increasingly narrow in their scope. The left-most column is the “big picture” - think of it as a satellite photo of the earth. The middle columns get increasingly granular (folders, folder contents, directory contents, file names, etc.). Think of those columns as showing you countries on the earth, then cities, then streets. The right-most column is information about a file you have selected. Think of it as showing you the contents of a house.

When the file you have selected is an MP3 or other audio file, that right-most column gives you a whole lot of information about the file, along with an inline player, like this!:

Just click on the audio controls to play, pause, rewind or fast-forward your song (and you can control the volume from there too!).

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