I've had a long aversion to iTunes, as well. I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for nearly 10 years now, but I've also been using Audirvana on the Mac recen

I've had a long aversion to iTunes, as well. I've been a happy Spotify subscriber for nearly 10 years now, but I've also been using Audirvana on the Mac recently to play FLAC files. It's a very lightweight player in comparison to iTunes, but still based around the album thumbnails you mention. Not stuffed with features, but a lot of attention is given to codec and playback options to get the best audio quality possible from your gear. Handles your material regardless of sample rate (44.1 to 192) and bit depth. If you've got a collection of CDs, I'd recommend XLD [1] to rip them to FLAC. I still use Spotify, mostly for discovery, but also have sessions with Audirvana where I listen to classic albums from beginning to end. Through some A/B testing, I noticed a modest improvement in depth and clarity over 320kbps MP3. The tradeoff is storage of course, and the growing album collection can start to take a chunk of your HD. [1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/xld/