Slashdot Mirror
Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support
nbahi15 writes "Codeweavers has released v4 of its Wine implementation with the addition of support for iTunes. To quote their web site, 'iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable.' Finally I can use the single most important 'productivity' application on Linux."
...I really must say, Rhythmbox is junk. It does about a tenth of the things iTunes does. Besides, Linux users can now buy music. Awesome job, guys!
Take off every sig. For great justice.
"It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
As a developer myself, I know very well that what I think is usable is not always end-user usable. As close as I get to a project, knowing the code inside and out, I tend to miss the big picture stuff. It may sound logical and intuitive in my mind, but it usually takes some testing from non-geeks before I let anyone - especially a client - start using it.
Does it run as poorly as it does on Windows? Also, are you required to install the nagware called Quick Time? If not then how about a Windows port of Wine so I can run iTunes without QT or the performance problems?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Will it run under cygwin? ;)
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
get Syncpod (http://armin.emx.at/ipod/). Neat little perl script that syncs a directory of music and m3u playlists into the ipod. Works great for anyone who likes keeping music organized by directory and id3 tag and not by any particular program.
although I'm a little concerned with how difficult this will be to get working how I'd like it. I have a Windows partition strictly for iTunes and I'd like to dump it and move on with life.
Now if they just get Clippy support I'd be as happy as a pig in slop.
I say we just grow up, be adults and die.
"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."
So does it work or not? Here's my translation: "iTunes will now launch under WINE. Do not expect to listen to your music, burn CDs, sync with the iPod easily, or in short, do anything iTunes does."
Seriously though, I applaud their effort. It's just that saying iTunes works under WINE when it doesn't really work all that well is a bit of false advertising. If it gets more programmers on the bandwagon, good for them, but I'd hate to see people get turned off by (what sounds to be) a bad experience.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Well if they did, you would think they would have tied up the loose ends with Apple Records before launching it.
"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod."
"sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard"
So... Which one is it? How was this ready for release again?
but with their friendly upgrade policy i will be trying out 4.0 soon. they seem like a nice company. ahh, one day itunes will run flawlessly under linux, and that will be a GREAT day!
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
Hmmm... It plays music, and syncs with the iPod, but sound is tricky, and getting the iPod working is hard...
Oh well, I guess you'd expect some problems with running an app designed for Mac on a Windows emulation layer on a Linux box -- come to think of it, it's amazing it works at all! Nice job guys.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
dated Aug 2 here. Apparently the preview version has been available to CrossOver Office customers for a while.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
http://www.codeweavers.com/site/compatibility/brow se/name?app_id=206
Steam does work in CrossOver, but due to the lack of DirectX 9 support, Half-Life 2 does not work yet. On the bright side, all the Half-Life 1 engine games do.
-newman
Where are all the hackers and geeks these days, anyways? I like using my own scripts to copy and file and sort all my data.
Probably working on more important things, since iTunes does its job really well and saves me untold hours of time, freeing me up to work on other projects besides maintaining a music collection.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Yeah, because announcing the functional version of a project to run Apple software is just like handing them free money. Except the software is free to start with. But it does allow people to buy things from Apple. Except, Apple is not really making any money off of the sales. All this does is encourage people to buy ipods from Apple, and discourage them from buying computers from Apple. I can't really see how this is advertising for Apple. Especially given the semi-functional nature of the release. If anything, this probably annoys Apple, since it gives Linux users the ability to run one of their flagship pieces of software in a broken and semi-functional sort of way.
It was a pretty big undertaking to port it to windows. Porting it to linux will be no easier because the UI on itunes in written in carbon. Apple would also want it to look EXACTLY the same like the windows version does, with mac scrollbars and such. Aside from that, sound is still a bit of a headache in linux and burning audio cd's requires root privileges.
On that note, I don't think apple really likes writing ANYTHING for a platform other than mac, so they had to have a lot of incentive to write something for windows, which is mass marketshare and the possibility of having tons more music store and ipod sales. Neither of those incentives really exist on the Linux platform. Also, they would have to port Quicktime as well, I would guess.
Frankenwine apps are never a good replacement for the Real Thing(TM). I played the WineX game for a while and it sucked. Apple needs to get off their collective arses and port iTunes to Linux.
Apple talks about a new way of sharing music, appealing to our sense of "karma" to encourage us not to steal. Yet they leave Linux desktop users in the cold. This seems somewhat disingenuous to me.
I would be excited about the iTunes music store launching in Canada (finally), if it wasn't for the fact that it won't work in my operating system of choice.
Do Linux users have any legal recourse in listening to digital music at the moment?
Oh we're not in love with it at all. In fact, us hackers and geeks have quietly been scripting automatic posts to slashdot. The reasons we are doing this are two:
reason the first: we are practicing to beat the turing test, and feel that slashdot is full conversations that come close to beating the turing test, so this is good practice.
reason the second: we are lazy.
The current problem is that any story regarding iPods or iTMS creates a flood of posts about how much we love apple. This is being corrected but it will take some time to figure out the love apple / hate apple logic. I really shouldn't be telling you this because it is funny watching the few people who actually try to have conversations on slashdot, but I decided to give someone a hint to see if everyone else catches on or not.
For an example of an all script-generated conversation, look here. As you can see we've gotten quite good at using markov chains to produce seemlying meaningful responses without actually contributing everything. We have some troubles with grammar and spelling but that's alright because so do the people we're imitating. Anyway I hope someday you join in the fun! Really me, -Ignignot
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
No kidding, especially since XMMS, Rhythmbox, Amarok and Juk all natively support the DRMed AAC files that you buy from iTMS. Oh, wait...
I couldn't care less about Yet Another Music Player. I could get interested in a working client for the world's largest online music store, though.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I have cxoffice 4 and you can listen to music, add stuff to the library (though it is mighty slow, took half an hour to add 4 gigs of mp3s), and you can go on the iTunes music store (Which works very well btw). I used the cxitunespreview which ran iTunes, and they have improved the performance greatly. You can actually listen to music through iTunes now, and performance is drastically improved over the cxitunespreview. Sure, it's not like running it in windows. But it's quite fast.
They're going to be releasing another version soon which should help the cpu usage go down for iTunes (currently some kind of garbage iTunes is spewing is causing cxoffice to use 100% cpu, they think it's some kind of timing hack used by apple... Hey, windows/x86 isn't apple's primary platform, so I wouldn't be surprised).
All in all a nice product. Also soon they will be adding firewire support to the cxipod (currently only usb is supported, and my 4G ipod doesn't like usb on linux). But then I use gtkpod and am perfectly happy with that (I can transfer all the mp4's I get off of iTunes).
I'm just not convinced that I need to buy digital music. I'll keep on buying cd's, ripping them and storing them on my media server.
I just don't see the advantage in downloading music.
When you download from any source, legit or not, you're not in control of how the file was extracted.
The bit rate may not be what you wanted, there is always the possibility of some digital artifacts during playback, and i'm just not comfortable with it.
Plus, I don't own an iPod. I don't think I want one. I'm quite happy with my CD based MP3 player which uses CDRW's.
I can put 10 hours worth of music on one disc and it works nicely.
Besides I like to be in control of my music and my gear and I don't like when I can't replace the battery like the way the iPod is setup.
Is it 5:30 yet?
I mean come on, 99+% of all open source Linux apps can run natively on OS X
This is the difference. iTunes is not an open source app. It heavily uses proprietary code (Carbon) derived from the classic MacOS (9 and earlier). They would have to port that API to linux before they could port the app. That would be a large effort considering the small market share of Linux. Porting to Windows was a bit easier as there was a huge opportunity to expand iTMS and iTunes revenues, and they had already ported Carbon to Windows.
Someone's got their priorities seriously out of kilter here...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
CrossOver Office Professional 4.0 - 2004/11/15
New application support:
Support for iTunes and iTMS. Limited iPod support; drivers for ripping
are not supported.
SyncPod + more burners than you can imagine + online music stores like besonic
Support for Adobe FrameMaker 7.1
Support for QuickTime 6.5.2
Reviewed plugin support: removed some, updated others
Mplayer,xine,plugger, kmplayer etc....
Application bug fixes:
Office:
Fixed a bug that was causing IE to crash when a 'favorite' was added
Fixed a bug that prevented Office 2000 and Project from being installed
together
Some bugfixes for Outlook 2000
Fixed a bug that prevented WMP from playing local media files
OpenOffice,KOffice at a push etc..
Quicken:
Cleaned up Quicken installation process
Fixed several Quicken bugs
Reviewed and improved Quicken 2004 support
kmymoney &co
Others:
Fixed Dreamweaver uninstallation
Fixed several DreamWeaver bugs
Fixed installation problems with Scientific Word
CrossOver changes and improvements:
Installation:
Fixed several CrossOver installation and uninstallation issues
Improved CrossOver upgrade support
Fixed a bug that caused the menu database to be erased when
additional office components (such as the Equation Editor)
were added
Improved menu support for (among others) Suse 9.2 and Fedora Core 3
knoppix, many a live cd or Fedora Core, Gentoo etc..
Officesetup:
Added the 'Control Panel' tab to OfficeSetup
Improved officesetup startup time
Several improvements to OfficeSetup user interface; fixed keyboard
navigation
Fixed uninstallation of unsupported software
Solved a bug that sometimes corrupted downloadable installers
emerge openoffice-bin
So it looks like you get dreamweaver and Framemaker support for your$, and if you don't need those, send you $ to one of the projects you do use and would like to see improved.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
let me say that Crossover lets me do the one thing I need to - run Microsoft crap. Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, and Solomon (an accounting/timecard application).
:)
I'd use Evolution - but we're on Exchange 5.5 and I can't use the calendar (very important).
I do use OpenOffice also, but sometimes you actually do need the real deal, for crazy marked-up contracts with goofy checkboxes and whatnot. It's good to be able to open network diagrams in Visio. Also, I like to fill in my timecard so I get paid.
Obviously, the situation is not ideal, but it lets me run Linux at work, which is vastly helpful to actually doing my job. It's just that all the other junk associated with having a job - HR, Legal, etc kind of things - require me to have Microsoft products.
I saw initial iTunes support demonstrated several months ago at OSCON, too, but now it's in the released version.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Oh wait, it still doesn't run the apps that regular end-users want. Oh well.
As an aside, I was reading a very funny Usenet discussion I had in *1996* (!!), where someone was saying that Linux was almost ready for the desktop, and I said (paraphrase), "I'll meet you back here in 10 years and I predict that we'll have an interesting Linux product, but it will lag behind the commercial market in critical ways."
Only eight years later, but yup. An interesting product that still can't do what normal users want to do.
(I'd post the real discussion -- it's pretty funny -- but it was under my real name, heh). You could cut and paste the discussion today and no one would know it was from 1996. It's hysterical.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
No, but I bet you could get hymn to compile on linux :-).
Yeah dude! Just the other day I was trying to load this XML into the kernel and it just wouldn't take it!!!! WTF!!!
Im STILL waiting to see some sort of support for sonys horrible NETMD minidisc protocol under linux. I know there has been some open source developments but it is still impossible to transfer files to the device under linux. I know that minidisc is nothing compared to ipod in terms of popularity - but Im still sure there are a lot of linux geeks using this portable audio medium.
spend money here
I've upgraded to version 4, installed IE6 and I finally can access my bank's homepage. WOW!!!
One more reason to get off Windows.
Though, seems like the upgrade borked the fonts in MSWord. Ouch.
The fact that the Linux commumity is so bent on getting iTunes to run on Linux is a testament to how great of a program iTunes is.
... and maybe Windows later on if they feel like recoding it ;)
Linux users are usually a lot more critical of their software. While a lot of Linux doesn't have the polish or fit 'n' finish of some Windows software, the quality of the code is taken more seriously, as is the functionality of the software. It may not always LOOK pretty, but it is usually very powerful and well written.
There are a lot of programs that try to emulate iTunes, both on Linux and Windows (LTunes anybody?). But it seems that the Linux community would rather see iTunes itself running on Linux than a knock-off. I see this as a 'kudos' to Apple from the Linux community, for producing software so good that linux devs bust their balls to get it working.
I applaud the efforts of Codeweavers and hope that they are able to get full functionality very soon. While I would like to see Apple write a version of iTunes for Linux (in a way legitimizing the platform as a desktop alternative), this is certainly welcome and very impressive.
To everyone involved with this: Awesome job. Keep up the good work. Now if we could just get Apple and linux devs working together on more projects (khtml, for instance) perhaps we'll see a day where Apple software could be run on both Linux and Mac OS X
Try dragging the .m3u into the playlist pane. It should create a new playlist containing those songs (as well as add them to the library).
So then why wouldn't it encourage Apple to fix the problem? As in, people obviously want to run iTunes in Linux and use their iPods in Linux, so why not release a Linux version of iTunes? It would solve the semi-functional problem, and open up the iPod market to gadget-loving geeks just a little more.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
iTunes does not equal DRM, the iTunes music store does. iTunes is just a music player.
I have been using iTunes on Linux since the earliest betas. To be a little less cautious than Codeweavers it works well. It plays music, music shares work, iTMS works, iPod sync works. I would say that is is rock solid. What is annoying is the lack of CD support which is planned in an upcoming release. The only other hassle is they need to support the latest Windows Media Player so people that have WMA files can convert them to AAC or MP3.
Please note the quote in the article from Codeweaver's is part of their REAL DIRT policy. They are cautious in making claims about the software working perfectly on every system, in every circumstance.
and they had already ported Carbon to Windows.
Your reply is excellent, but when I came to this... whoa! Unless you know something I think this is quite misleading.
By all accounts, modern iTunes is a mix of Carbon, Cocoa, and QuickTime. The QuickTime API has been ported to Windows, but historically speaking Carbon consists of about 70% of the original Macintosh APIs, which have then been extended for modern OS X capabilities.
Carbon is in effect the procedural, lower level API interface to Mac OS X. The API you use when you aren't using Cocoa.
But for porting it to Windows, to say Apple had ported Carbon is misleading. What they probably have done is ported part of Cocoa's WebKit to render the iTunes store pages, and are possibly using QuickTime's API calls for the sound playback. I'm pretty sure the rest would be calling native Win32 APIs.
However, since a lot of the Win32 APIs are eerily similar to the original Macintosh, it might be truer to say that Microsoft ported Carbon when they first ripped off the Mac!
"[...]I'm running Win4Lin[...] think I'll go download iTunes for Windows something soon."
Good luck getting a WinNT/XP program to run under Win4Lin. Last time I checked Win4Lin only supports Win9x/Me.
Actually, they use WebObjects for the store pages, not HTML and WebKit.
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
The latest iPods (mini, click-wheel, limited edition and photo) have problems getting mounted on Linux. The issue is discussed here. The fix, is to disable EFI partition support in the kernel and recompiling it.
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
Besides I like to be in control of my music and my gear and I don't like when I can't replace the battery like the way the iPod is setup.
I think by now, anyone bitching that they "can't" replace an iPod battery is just looking for something to bitch about. Seems to me that there are more than one place to get replacement batteries for the iPod, and it even only takes about 5 mins to do the replacement yourself.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;