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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.
This is has honestly been the only reason that I still boot up in Windows.
Also seems I not the only one:
"iTunes has been our No. 1 most requested application," CodeWeavers CEO Jeremy White said in a statement.
And presumably a free open source version cannot be far behind? Now, if I can just take this opportunity to ask the iTunes people to please add some (a lot) more to their back catalogue then the world will become perfect.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Bender: What better way to celebrate our success than by me showing Bubblegum this globetrotters uniform I made myself.
BubbleGum: Let me see.
Bender shows him his uniform.
BubbleGum: Hello lawsuit *rubs palms*.
Jonathanjk.com
Apple haven't sued Codeweavers over QuickTime under GNU/Linux so why would they do it over this?
It's running whatever software Apple offer. No DRM is being tampered with.
I think they will worry far more about RealNetworks than this.
Join the Free Software Foundation
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?
I have been in love with iTunes since I first used it in Windows late last year, I have all my music in it, and allow it to keep everything organized. While in Windows, everything is nice and neat and tidy, however, as soon as i switched to Linux and loaded up my tunes in XMMS, or Juk, or Kaffeine or any other multimedia player, all the titles and ID3 tags would look messed up.
While some of the open source projects out there have been doing a great job emulating iTunes, none have yet to duplicate the easy of use and great interface that Apple gives us. I wouldn't say this is the only reason why I use Windows, but I would say that while in Linux, I rarely listen to any of my music because I find it too difficult.
Thank you code weavers, and I will be looking forward to the release.
tourettes
You mean that he purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Windows on Linux?
iTunes is not an X windows app. That's why porting it to Linux won't be much easier than porting to Windows.
Oh and the parent is moderated interesting! No it's not it's rubbish. Repeat after me Aqua is not X! CoreAudio is not ALSA (or OSS)!!!
Yes Mac OS X has got BSD kernel, but 95% of things above that level (exlcluding OpenGL) are proprietary Apple stuff and so a nearly full blown port is requeried from Mac OS X to Linux! Nowadays programs like iTunes use more then fopen(...); and printf(...).
No, they aren't. X11 is completely separate from Aqua/Quartz. One of the many reasons why you need either Xfree86 or Apple's modified X11 to run X applications. Additionally, like the grandparent said, iTunes is based on Carbon, which is separate from the BSD subsystem. For the most part, OS X uses BSD for its kernel and services only: all Mac OS X native programs are written in Cocoa, Carbon, or Java.
You are not the only Linux user in the world. Some of them might even have these "iPods" you mention.
You know, I've never found artists not getting a very big cut as a good excuse to not pay them at all...
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Even w/o an iPod or an interest in iTMS, iTunes can make a great music program. Like many other things Apple, iTunes doesn't necessarily have unique features, but (nearly) all its features are easier to use than in (nearly) all other software (there are always exceptions).
Things that you can do anywhere but are particularly easy, pleasant, or automatic in iTunes:
o Searching for songs
o Manipulating playlists
o Consistent sound quality/volume
o Smart playlists
Other nice things that some people use:
o AppleScriptable (OK, only applies to Macs but extremely useful nonetheless)
o Album art
o Rate your songs
Just a few thoughts...
-Rob
Cheers,
Ian
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".
Ummm... yeah. Great screenshot.
I looked at the screenshot and saw the OS X like buttons... my first thought was "Wow! They ported Crossover to OS X so now I can run iTunes on my mac!!"
Then I realized what I was thinking, and felt dumb.
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...
Contrary to popular belief, you don't have an inherent right to music, just like the RIAA has no right to sales. Listen to non RIAA bands, or go out and make your own music.....
I should have a right to the music I have paid for though. That's what anti-DRM people are usually complaining about.
Which OS? I used to use Tag&Rename when I ran my music stuff under Windows - excellent program. Don't know for Linux, and under OS X I just use iTunes to manage stuff.
Cheers,
Ian
Don't tell anybody, but this must actually break the iTunes DRM good and hard. CrossOverOffice almost certainly uses a standard Linux sound driver to get the sound data to the sound chip. This is bound to mean /dev/dsp, which is "hackable" in the sense that anyone with root access can snarf the digital audio data between when it gets decrypted by iTunes and when it gets sent to the sound chip. You can then make unlimited unencumbered copies. Additionally, knowing that the file was uncompressed from lossy AAC compression, it should be possible to recompress it in such a way as exactly to recover the original compressed file, just sans DRM encumbrance.
The same would, of course, also go for any successful attempt to run Windows Media Player under Linux.
DRM is a pipe dream. There is a fundamental physical reason why it will never work, though a formal mathematical proof escapes me right now. It's time to stop trying to do the impossible, even if that means having to swallow the unpalatable.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Why Apple Needs iTunes for Linux.. PHP-Nuke As of Late, I have been looking into buying an ipod, they are so cute and sexy, but I cant get over the fact that I cant download music legally for it. You might ask me, why cant you go onto Apple's iTunes and pay for your music, well because THEY DONT support Linux! I have been using Linux for the last 5 years and I feel that it is the perfect desktop for me. It has loads of functionality and it always seems like things are getting updated, so it feels like a new experience every time I turn on my computer. (most people don't like that, but it keeps me productive). I have everything I have ever wanted in Linux, except a legal way to download music. I have even gone as far as buying a ibook to play around with macosx and use iTunes, but I was soon disappointed that I couldn't transfer my iTunes collection I had just purchased to my Linux computer. Now there is a very cool open source project called playfair, that takes the DRM (Digital Rights Management) Software out of the AAC file that you download from apple and allows you to play it on your Linux computer. But this is again not legal, and it could be used for wrong doing. Apple doesn't understand if they would have supported the Linux community in the first place, they wouldn't have programs like this all over the Internet. The only thing they have done to support Linux at all is creating a ton of open source software that helps the open source community, but not Linux in general. I would even go as far as saying there are probably more Linux users out there than Mac users and it only hurts Apple not to create a Linux version of iTunes. Come on apple help stop Piracy and come out with iTunes for Linux!
keanmarine.com
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/
First Real makes their player compatible with the iPod. Now someone makes iTunes available on Linux.
Apple hardly needs to do a thing to improve iTunes. Their competitors are doing it all for them.
Peace be with you,
-jimbo
XML Tools for Mac OS X
Great... now only if I could get firewire to work easily and reliably on linux.
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.
Cocoa apps are, in theory, not hard to port over to GNU Step unless they use a lot of the new features. GNU Step apps can usually just be tweaked a bit and recompiled as Cocoa apps.
That's all well and good, but like the parent said, iTunes is written in Carbon, which is like the old OS 9 api's, so it doesn't use ANY of the bsd like api's for anything.
Also, many OS X apps like iTunes, iPhoto, etc. store their data in XML files and easy to navigate file systems, so you can get at them with your own software/scripts/etc. I bought a Mac because OS X in general has the overall quality newcomers have found in apps like iTunes. It is a rare thing to be able to build a complete OS that is easy enough for newbies but powerful enough to satisfy software developers/hackers/power users/etc.
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?
Repeat after me: "iTunes is not just a music store."
Good, I knew you could do it.
I have a shitty sig!
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
I love being able to use embedded quicktime in firefox in linux =) It rules.
Actually, it's still in carbon. Very easy test: attempt to execute an operation that would normally hang Finder (emptying the trash, etc.). Notice the wait cursor you get (hint: it'll alternate between the pinwheel and the stopwatch). Unless the developer has added the stop watch resource into the program (which Apple hasn't), the stopwatch is a legacy wait indicator from OS 9 and Carbon.
http://crossover.codeweavers.com/pipermail/announ
Hopefully it will be added soon so I can rid myself of Windows once and for all.