Subtitles Playback for Audio files

[adamlogan]

I often create subtitles for audio files because I'm hard of hearing and it's energy draining to listen to audio without subtitles. Currently I can only playback audio files with subtitles in subtitle creation tools, which is a horrible media playback experience.

I would really appreciate being able to playback subtitles for audio files, and even being able to turn off video for video files and just displaying subtitles w/ the video audio.

I wish to avoid having to create dummy video and deal with demuxing/ muxing to playback subtitles to audio files with my favorite media player.

For what it's worth Mac OS is my primary OS, I'm on a silicon mac with an M1 CPU. I use Windows 11 in Parallels on occasion as well. I am not aware of another media player that has the feature I am requesting, as far as I know subtitle editors such as Subtitle Edit (Windows only) that can handle video are capable of this but the media playback is not convenient at all compared to VLC.