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iTunes For Linux, Thanks To CodeWeavers
pizen writes "The folks over at CNet have the scoop that a new version of CrossOver Office (3.1) now supports Apple's iTunes. The preview version of the software is being tested and is currently only available to current CodeWeavers customers. They expect a final version to be available later this year." Reader snowtigger contributes a link to this screenshot. White demonstrated iTunes on a Linux machine at OSCON as well; a rendering glitch marred that demo, but he was still able to demonstrate playing back a song which he'd purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Linux.
I think iTunes on MacOS X is a Carbon application, ie based on an updated version of the old Macintosh APIs. If it's anything like Quicktime for Windows, the Windows version of iTunes probably makes use of what's effectively a Carbon layer for Windows.
Just because there might be BSD stuff underneath everything on MacOS X doesn't mean everything directly uses the BSD APIs...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Wooohoo.
transmission_err
I've never needed more management than that - why would anyone? Seriously, I'm asking. :)
just use it for a couple of days...see if you don't love it
try out the tag editing also
You know, I've never found artists not getting a very big cut as a good excuse to not pay them at all...
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Crudely Drawn Games
Is that because of the music store or because of iTunes management capabilities? Because I never got that last one - I've got a lot of music, mostly my albums on my computer - they reside on their own partition, one folder per album.
Personally, I use Winamp 5, which I think has a much better interface than iTunes, but its the same concept with its media library. I used to have all my music in folders and run them from there. But then I started using Winamp 5 and really liked the media library once I started using it. Being able to search your entire library for a song or artist and have the entire search result be your playlist is just one possibility. Bookmarks, rating songs, recently played songs, most played songs, being able to scroll through your entire library are other nice features. When you have a music collection that has become disorganized and fragmented like mine has, it helps a lot, too.
Though iTunes is lacking in comparison to Winamp 5, it is slowly catching up. But screw iTunes, I want to see Winamp 5 running on Linux!
#!/
OSX still uses a BSD interface which is alot similar
/dev/whatever/ so I don't see any problem
iTunes doesn't, so you're wrong here. It uses Carbon, a completely different and very large API ported to Mach from MacOS. I doubt highly it touches the BSD server much.
and OSX's fancy graphics are still X11 based
Wrong. Quartz is essentially a display PDF renderer, written from scratch and having nothing to do with X11.
and music devices and disks are still
Wrong. 0 for 3. Thanks for playing "Slashdot pundit who doesn't know what he's talking about".
Uh, no. I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The point is that MacOS isn't FreeBSD with an Apple window manager slapped on top, as Slashbot dimwits all seem to believe.
Well.. maybe not.. but how hard can it be for Apple to do a carbon copy for Linux, like they've done for Windows.
Probably just about as hard to make, although a lot harder to support. But for 1% of the desktop market instead of 97%, "no harder to make" isn't necessarily a winner.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
There are times when you want to listen to music, without giving it much attention. This means you don't want to navigate a filesystem every three minutes to select the next tune, which would amount to interrupt what you are doing. Playlists don't work well with me, because this means selecting stuff in advance. You can do the analogy to how you listen to music in your car, playlists are like burning your own compilation on a CD, selecting files is like inserting a new tape after each tune. The first one implies work and to be organised (I'm not), the second would not be very safe. Of course, you listen to whole albums sequentially, but this is often not what I feel like.
I used to have a Sun station with XMMS, but not listening a lot to music because of this. With iTunes, I usually browse either by genre or artist or even use the search facility and play the set of songs that come out. The party mode is also, I think, quite a good idea, although I have to figure out how to prevent certain tunes from ending up in there.
i've bought 140 songs from itms. probably a good 40 or 50 of them were from the pepsi promotion. but with my klipsch pro media speakers they don't sound bad either. my monsoon stereo in my car seems to like them too because it sounds like any other cd. ya.. i agree 128kbps is kinda low and i wish they'd raise it to 160kbps or 192kbps but oh well. this gives me a way to buy single songs from those cd's that have 1 or 2 good songs on them and not spend $10-15 to get those 1 or 2 good songs. even if they quality isn't cd quality i still saved myself a crap load of money by buying them this way. if you looked through my itms smart folder you'd notice that it's all 1 or 2 songs by an artist and not full cd's. I still buy the full cd's from a store like best buy or cdnow.com. but when it comes to a couple songs on a cd that sucks other than those couple songs.. i'll take the DRMed low quality than paying $10-15 for them.
Kyle
http://www.unlogikal.net/
This was my killer app for linux too.
I didn't spend days rating and organizing my songs for nothing. Until some free (as in speech) app comes along that can import *all* my iTunes ratings and organization I wont be switching from my Mac or Windows PCs.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
And this is why the gulf between Linux and Mac OS is so wide. "It's so easy, just do this and this and this. Oh, you mean you want it to just work?"
Whether it's because iTunes tagged the files unconventionally, or because the XMMS is broken /inferior, the simplicity of iTunes didn't translate to the original poster's Linux environment.
iTunes has plenty of room for improvement, but it's a solid app., both on Windows and OS X.
I don't blame the OP for missing it.
I personally have no interest in paying apple $1/song for a proprietary format; reencoding in ogg is not an option. Really, $1 per song is very, very expensive - considering a cd is about the same and you get a nice semi-permanent media, far higher quality audio, with artwork lyrics, etc.
.50/song.
Only if you like and will listen to every single song on that hypothetical CD. If you'd rather pick and choose every track to make sure there's no dead weight that you'll always skip over, then $1 is a perfectly good price point.
Come to think of it, $1 per song is a complete rip off. If they were ogg encoded, I might give it some consideration at
With how pervasive MP3 is these days, it's going to take a hell of a lot of catching up before anyone will give a damn that a relatively miniscule group of people won't listen to music that isn't ogg encoded.
If $1 a song is too expensive, it should come down, unless online operators start colluding. Still, it is cheap, in Europe we pay a lot more.
Remember also Apple are only making a small profit at the moment. At $.50 they would lose money. If you have no interest, don't buy. I don't. Just accept you aren't part of their target market. I'm puzzled why people need to keep saying they wouldn't buy something, just don't buy it.
You use it because it's the best music management app out there.
People generally want to use the best if they can, right? Now you (and other Linux-folk) can.
The real question is... Why wouldn't you use it? It's free, it's powerful, it's easy, it's simple!
GPL Deconstructed
Sorry I wasn't entirely clear. I mean, if you take, say the Mahler 2 San Fran/MTT CD and encode it with lame as a mp3 or encode as an ogg (to the highest levels), it comes out sounding like ass unfortunately. Lots of airy distortion, and noise. And if you have a choir in there, you can really hear the noise even worse. Lame is good for pop songs, etc. but it just doesn't work as well as the Franhaufer (sp?) encoder with classical music unfortunately.
Why?
:)
It's more mature.
It's more convenient.
It's *still* free
It gives you more capabilities with downloaded music:
Burn on 7 CDs before needing to alter your track order
Stream to 5 computers
Did I mention burning to CD was free?
You are right, Linux programmers *should* try to write a better iTunes. They haven't yet. Taking a look at Juk features... you do realize that 90% of the features they tout on their website was first implemented by iTunes? Inline search, tree view mode (though implemented as column browse mode), tag editor, vfolders, online tag lookup, as well as the file renamer
So the real question is... What does Juk do that's better than iTunes that would suggest anyone use Juk?
GPL Deconstructed
How so? CodeWeavers didn't do anything to iTunes itself. They just tweaked their software so it could support iTunes.
If Apple can sue because some talented hackers managed to get iTunes to run under Linux, then MS can sue because they've gotten Office to work.
One day you'll realise the lawsuit isn't the answer to every problem.
" Apple haven't sued Codeweavers over QuickTime under GNU/Linux so why would they do it over this?
"
Because Apple is making a significant amount of money out of it?
First of all, it claims that Apple basically does nothing to reap its one-third cut of the price of a song on iTunes. What about the front-end costs of bulding the iTMS backend, developing the client application (for multiple platforms) and the ongoing costs of the bandwidth? I guess that's "basically doing nothing"?
Secondly, if a recording artist is making 11 cents per song on iTunes, isn't that 11 cents that the artist would never otherwise receive? I mean, an artists' overhead for selling on iTMS ought to consist of: (a) rehearsal and studio time, (b) mixing services, (c) hiring session musicians and maybe a famous producer or something, and (d) marketing. The label gives them an advance for all that stuff, and takes it back (and then some) in their 53 cents per song cut of sales on iTMS.
So, once the artist has paid back the label for any advance money, every 11 cent per song sale on iTMS is pure profit, right? The artist has no ongoing expenses for selling on iTMS, right?
And Apple has lots of really expensive ongoing overhead, right? And Apple says they're barely breaking even on iTMS today, right?
So how is Apple screwing artists?
I've always considered $1 for a good song to be a great deal when thrift store record shopping. If the album contains 1 good song (good being a relative term) then I've done pretty well. Even better if I average that ratio over the course of a day's finds.
Now with iTMS, I am pretty much guaranteed that ratio. I know what song I'm getting and its usually one I've been wanting for a while. To me it is worth it. Also you don't have to buy a whole album or buy from RIAA members. It really is that easy. But if you don't want to do either, fine, but I get tired of those who pronounce judgment against those of us who do find it useful.
Insightful my ass. Could parent or parent's moderator please explain, how the hell it is supposed to affect Apple's bottom line if Apple's customer using iTMS with iTunes for Windows client is actually some other os, which just happens to provide the same interfaces iTunes for Windows needs? That customer is still shopping on iTMS, and DRM is still effective. That customer may still own an iPod, too.
Theoretically one could explain that it is easier to bypass DRM on Linux than on Windows, but as we now have things like a commercially licensed PowerDVD for Linux and Hymn for Windows, I think that argument won't really hold any water.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
So... have you hit the Codeweaver's Store and purchased it?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
At least 95% of the population can't tell the difference-- 128kbps AAC sounds great. The other 5% or less can suffer the inconvenience of buying physical CDs or using P2P.
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Saying that artists only receive $0.11 per song or less isn't just unperceptive, it's wrong.
Most artists have up-front contracts with their labels, paying them millions in advance. Musicians don't make their profits from album commissions.
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Have you heard of QuickTime Streaming Server? Or Shake?
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If Apple sees enough demand for iTunes for linux from iPod owners or prospective iPod owners than they might do it. But generally most linux users I know of don't want to deal with Fairplay AAC in the first place.
Just because you can re-route audio that doesn't mean you are breaking the DRM.
Yes it does. Maybe the RIAA isn't aware of it yet, or just hasn't reacted because it doesn't consider the threat either immient or solvable. But it IS breaking the DRM. It's a way you can get a perfect digital copy with no analog degradation, which is exactly what the RIAA moans about.
DRM today is in an embryonic state- there are many ways to break or avoid it, and this is just one of them. But the foot is in the door. We can expect DRM to increase in power on proprietary OSes, so that Windows and MacOS will refuse to play DRMed music if your audio-driver and soundcard don't match a pre-approved list of Trusted players.
When that happens, the RIAA (or the computer/audio hardware companies that work with them) will try to make iTunes, and every other DRM-trusted player, incompatible with emulated environments. There will be technical steps, and legal steps (DMCA).
In a future with strong-DRM or Trusted Computing, it will not be possible to simply pay for a commercially produced Trusted media player to run on a Free OS (unless code signing was used to guarrantee that although you have the OS's source code, you didn't edit & recompile)
If that's what he wants, it's relatively easy (just requires a CTRL+A, then Delete to refresh)
Set a Smart Playlist with, say, Random 25 songs from library, Live Updating, and (for grins) Only include checked songs. When you want to refresh, clear the contents and the playlist will regenerate to fill the criteria. As long as Live Updating is turned on, this works for ALL Smart Playlists, the only caveat being if you use one of the "Not played in..." criteria, in which case it works no differently than the Party Shuffle.