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iTunes 4.2 and QuickTime 6.5
usr122122121 writes "iTunes 4.2 and QuickTime 6.5 were released today, available by Apple's Site and Software Update (respectively)."
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any plans of a Linux version of iTunes? Since Mac OS X kernel is BSD, I guess porting to Linux wouldn't be that hard.
This is kinda like saying it would not be hard to port Internet Explorer to DOS. There are a number of problems with porting iTunes to Linux, mainly:
Granted, iTunes was successfully ported to an OS that has no real UNIX underpinnings in common with OS X (Windows), but the fact that QuickTime already existed in a mature state for that platform eased things a great deal I'm sure. It's not impossible, but there is little incentive for Apple to put the rather gargantuan effort required into porting iTunes Linux.
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
You've basically summed up why a lot of good commercial software doesn't exists for linux. Photoshop anyone? This isn't meant to be a troll, but he makes the point that companies want to release closed source software without jumping through hurdles. However, this is not an attack on Linux, but more so on the distros for not agreeing on standards. Make standards, then compete. This is why people hate internet explorer so much, it broke away from standards and tried to make the www a microsoft application.
But I'm not trying to be negative, things are improving...
The kernel (Mach, in Mac OS X's case) doesn't matter much to a media player. Obviously things like hardware support and i/o latency make a difference, but more or less any modern OS will support something that supports MP3 playing. It probably wasn't a matter of a quick recompile, but iTunes works fine on Windows, which has a completely different hardware and low-level software architecture.
What makes the difference here is having a media architecture. iTunes floats on QuickTime, which Apple trusts to work really well with various audio codecs (and their DRM schemes). Besides that, it's (")just(") some GUI, network, security, and disc-burning code. QuickTime is the central issue here; Apple would not make iTunes for mpg123/ALSA/whatever.
But if you're asking "Why haven't they ported QuickTime to Linux yet?", I agree. I suppose they might be thinking like this:
In other words, they have to port to Windows if they want it to survive at all. But they're the powerful ones in comparison to Linux, and they can just try to borg its users.
Disclaimers: (1) this is pure speculation, (2) I use Mac OS X considerably more than Linux these days, and (3) I'm feeding a troll.
Mmm, but iTunes is mainly used to buy music online, not to play music, QuickTime maybe used to preview music, but I think they can use Linux OSS or something similar, or just give the user the preview file to play using MPlayer or Xine, so I think QuickTime isn't that important in porting iTunes.
If you're only speaking in terms of what it does that can't already be done well by something else in Linux, then yes, iTunes mainly is just for buying stuff from the iTMS. However, the way that's worded, it sounds more like a comment on what people who use iTunes use it for. People who use it, in my experience, do not use it primarily to buy things. It's been the primary MP3 player/organizer on the Mac for most people for years now (probably since SoundJam was discontinued), kind of like how everyone uses WinAmp on Windows, but with a less profoundly odd interface (which is a whole different story...don't get me started on using ZXCVB for play/stop/ff/rw/etc. or how unintuitive that is).
If it were to be ported, I don't see Apple just porting the store and not the rest of the features iTunes has. From what I've seen, they seem to want to keep everything together in products like that, because the presentation and the total package are a vital part of their image.
The point of iTunes isn't to buy music, it's to have a completely integrated music experience where everything is handled in a simple, streamlined way with a consistent interface. The only single missing feature from other software is the iTMS, but passing files between different apps in Linux to accomplish the same thing isn't the "Apple way". In iTunes, you can seamlessly buy songs from the iTMS, have them automatically added to your master playlist and your music folder, create a new playlist of songs (even automatically based on criteria you specify, if you want), then burn it to a CD and have it all synced to your iPod, with maybe a dozen mouse clicks, all in the same familiar interface, pretty much straight out of the box.
So no, it probably wouldn't be that hard to just port the iTMS frontend itself and write something to handle the AAC files (with their minimal DRM...I'm sure there's plenty of stuff to play normal AAC files already), but that just isn't how Apple works. If you don't get the full experience of it, where's the incentive to go out and buy their products in the future? There won't be Linux iTunes unless they can use it to entice enough people to use OS X on Apple hardware to make the cost of porting the full app worth it.
Apple said they love open source. Not that they love linux. Apple is using materials from open source projects such as BSD and Konqueror, and they are contributing code back to those same projects. I don't see why this means they have an obligation to write some big complicated AAC library for UNIX when the UNIX OSes don't even seem to have a totally homogenous way to playback sound.
I'd concentrate on seeing what you can do to get Wine to accept iTunes if you want to use iTunes Music Store in Linux.
If you really want something native, MPlayer can play AAC already. All it needs to play iTMS purchases is to get past the DRM wrapper. The DRM wrapper on iTMS purchases is the technology sold by a company called "Fairplay". Perhaps you could try contacting Fairplay and asking if you could license their tech for playback in MPlayer? Or even better, you could perhaps just contact Apple directly and say you are interested in writing code to add iTMS playback support to MPlayer, and you would be willing to go under NDA and such... Wait, what's that you say? You don't have the time or linux programming knowledge to add FairPlay support to MPlayer? Well, apparently neither does Apple.
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