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Songbird the Open Source iTunes?
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"
Well, its about time someone did do it. Its got immense possibilities - but how would music stores react to it? For all you know, they might (as in the case of IE) have ActiveX controls/or propreitary media formats which tell you to go and use their own software.. or activate some locks/feature constrictions which would be solved given time, but would still render the service unusable.
/. is falling behind the times?
I remember Fairplay (or was it Playfair), the tool which allowed encoded Apple music files to be played on any MP3 player - what a ruckus that caused!
I read about this about 2 days ago though - is this is a sign that
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed...oh, wait a minute - he already does.
On to the article:So this is just a product announcement.Nothing to see here, move along....
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
But this gets me wondering, maybe the web browser shouldn't be splitting up content? On one hand we have Google with tools like AJAX trying to bring everything together in one browsing experience (Video, maps, mail, etc.). On the other, you have extra programs like iTunes and Thunderbird. For both experiences, the kernel is having content being independent of the medium. I would say that having everything blended together is a much better internet experience. Maybe this is what Microsoft was trying to do integrating Internet Explorer into the OS? Or maybe the web browser really is going to be an operating system for the future.
Aren't amaroK and Rhythmbox the open source iTunes?
Anyone remember Flock? Totally magical! Will change the way you browse the web! Will shine your shoes and feed your cat!
Or not. It's essentially Firefox plus some random blog-editing tools and a "pretty" interface. Songbird, IMHO, will be much the same. So far the only feature that people like is the "URL Slurper"... which basically amounts to wget recursively. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for competition, especially when it's Open-Source vs. Closed-Source. That said, I can't see much worth getting hyped up about: the interface is nothing new (but more cluttered than iTunes), the "URL Slurper" isn't anything the world hasn't seen with wget and curl, and I think the project might be at risk legally.
The optimist in me will make sure I download and try it the first day that it's available. The pessimist reminds me that getting hyped up will make me less receptive to a good product.
The real litigious bastards...
It only works on Linux and other Unix-like systems. It does not work on Windows or the Mac (it is in fink, but audio out doesn't work making it quite useless).
Hopefully it will one day work everywhere, since it is an awesome player. IMHO, amaroK could easily take over if it worked on more platforms.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Make an add-on for Amarok.
IMHO it is second to none when it come to managing your music collection. Imagine adding an optional Buy-Here tab with x+1 companies to buy your music from.
I have never bought music online, I never will. I would disable any tab that I saw like that in Amarok.
But my point is; Itunes is/was a good jukebox style player. iTunes has it's issues, alas it's not available natively for Linux.
Amarok excells as a music center, AND runs natively in Linux.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Its kind of easy to get caught up with the iTunes comparisons. But if you look hard you'll see a url-bar. Its a browser/rss feed-reader with integrated music play/download/management features. Its a damn slick idea. If you read a little bit more about it (either the CNET article or on the songbird site itself) you'll see they've got some great plans to take advantage of the Mozilla code end of things, custom music stores, easy web-based integration for individuals/start-ups/stores.
The project is ambitious. But if it succeeds, it could change the face of the web, at least the music portion of it in a way that's really benificial to us all (musicians included).
Amarok is a great project, but its approach is a a single platform media player/manager. This is a media outlet/portal, with management thrown in for excellent measure.
Of course it may never happen, or it could flop. According to the website we'll all have at least a year to wait before we can declare it anything other then an interesting project. My hat's off to them.
Quack, quack.
With Firefox or MSIE I cannot click on a link to download an mp3 and have it play while it's downloading. I can use MS Media (yuck) to download it and play it, but then I have to "save" it somewhere. And in linux I can click on the "part" file if I know to do that or I can use wget and play it as it downloads, but those are both geeky non-easy things for newbies to do.
Having a music shopping app where you can (for example) "audition" a track at a streamable (but ugly) 32kbps then click a "buy" button and have it (and the artwork) automatically download to the proper folder and be available in your playlist immediately would be much easier than just using Firefox or IE to browse generic web pages.
It's not the same thing. Firefox was made by Mozilla, who made Netscape, IE's past only concurrent. "Firefox vs. IE" is the same "Mozilla vs. Microsoft" that's been on since the first release of Internet Explorer. here, MS's rival only re-bore from its hashes under a new name.
You just got troll'd!
Moderated to insightful?? Unless you mean that you write all of your C code as inline-assembly this makes no sense at all. And of course if you do mean that then this just mostly makes no sense since the # of lines of assembler the compiler has to interpret may have nothing to do with the efficiency of the code.
There is a strange mixing of concepts between interpreters, compilers, assemblers and random words that I just can't follow.
You were awful close to stringing together enough intellegent sounding pieces of "conventional wisdom", but why do I get the feeling that your code looks like:
for(;P("\n"),R-;P("|"))for(e=C;e-;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2 ))P("|"+(*u/4)%2); /P
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
It isn't iTunes that prevents me from "buying" from any of the other online music stores. It's the clients required by those stores that prevent me.
I'm sure plenty of stores would love to sell songs to iTunes users using Apple's FairPlay DRM. But Apple won't license the DRM, effectively shutting them out. If they try reverse engineering the DRM, Apple will just shut them out (see: Real). So they mostly turn to Microsoft, who seems to be willing to license their DRM'd Windows Media formats to just about anyone.
Or, to be more fair/accurate: that's a matter of opinion.
How is it a matter of opinion? Care to back that up? I can say "You claim the BMW 7 series is better than a Yugo, but that's just a matter of opinion" -- but that doesn't make it so. As Paul Graham pointed out, saying something is simply "a matter of opinion" is the way to avoid arguments, not find the truth.
I personally think the iTunes interface is an absolute piece of shit, I hate it.
You seem to be in the minority.
I could list specific examples but it's Christmas day and I can't be bothered, given that an Apple fanboy will mod this to oblivion whether I give specific examples or not.
Aah, good response: I'm right, and I won't bother defending my position because somebody will disagree, anyway. Good show!
To me, I actively dislike the Apple way of doing things, not just in iTunes, but throughout OSX, and vastly prefer the WinXP approach.
What part of the WinXP approach?
- no hardware-accelerated compositing manager, so you get to watch windows redraw?
- no first-class applications, so you have to run SETUP.EXE before you use a program, and drag-n-drop is horribly inconsistent?
- no desktop-wide searching functionality, so searching for anything takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r...?
- ambiguous button labels like "Yes" and "No", so you have to read all of the text of any dialog box carefully to decode what they actually do?
I use Linux at home, but I've used both Macs and WinXP for work, and (as a software engineer for most of my life) the "WinXP approach" is terribly unprofessional. I'd be embarassed to have written anything as bad as that.
If you're going to try to defend a position as seemingly absurd as "the WinXP approach is better", you can't shy away from providing actual examples, or you *are* a troll, sir.
P.S. I think that communism in Russia worked out better than the American free market ever did. This is not a troll, or flamebait, or funny -- this is my honest opinion. I'm sick of people acting like it is an unarguable truth that the free market is guaranteed always the best. It's a matter of opinion.
Sure, "Buy it now" works just find in a web browser.
Does your web browser have an 8-band graphic EQ? What about full-screen movie playback? Visualizations? Library management? CD Burning? Audio file format conversion? CDDB lookup (sure, there are web frontends for that, but you'd have to manually input the cd's serial number)...
iTunes is a lot more than a "web browser".