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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.'"
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.
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"Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said."
Praise the Lord!
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
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.
...I give them about 5 minutes post-release before they are hit with the mother of all cease-and-desist notices from Apple Legal.
I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but come on here. At least try to make your cut-and-paste jobs a bit less obvious.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
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?
I'd feel more sympathy to this cause if it wasn't for the fact that all the other music stores* sell DRMed content that only works on Windows. Apple at least had the consideration to get iTunes working nicely under Windows. WMP still sucks under the Mac (typical of Microsoft though).
* - Well save for the oddball one that sells actual MP3s of some band that I've never heard of and doesn't sound that particularly good or a particular Russian one who gives no money to the artist at all.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I guess that MusikCube fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.
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...
Apple might want a little more than a simple "thank you"... money talks.
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)
The Microsoft and Linux APIs are so jarringly hideous and clunky it is painful to have to use for anyone who has grown up on OS X.
If you are a Windows or Linux application developer, please, if you don't have a Mac or haven't really spent time with OS X. Pick something like a button or text field AND STUDY IT. And I mean really look closely at it and nothing else. Note the timing, shading, feedback, action, EVERYTHING.
First, GUI != API.
API is the application programming interface; usually a collection of objects, which have propteries and methods you can use or extend or override. The API is the roadmap to these items.
As for the OS X button/text fields vs Linux & Windows button/text fields... are you serious? Study them? Timing, action? Let's get real here, it's a bitmap swap. The OS X versions have a pretty glass look to them, the Windows versions look like smooth beveled plastic, and Linux ones look however you want them to look.
I love my Mac, and I think it has the best looking operating system of the three mentioned, but I don't really see where the interface elements are better in any other regard than their outward appearance.
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.
Don't get so hung up on looks. Its a browswer, look at the url-bar. Seems to me they've pushed the apple thing for a number of reasons, but there is no lock-in with the look or style of the thing. Its not even in *any* form of release at this point and it sounds to me like he's trying to generate some buzz, maybe get some developer support. I hope he does because if you look past the immediate iTunes comparisons you'll see it so much more really. He thanks Apple for showing what good design can look like, but he makes it clear (if you read the site) that this project can be so much more then just an iTune's clone.
:)
Anyhow, its early yet.
Quack, quack.
Klearlooks theme + the Clearlooks color scheme. Not quite as nice as Clearlooks yet, but it's getting there.
Lipstick is also quite nice.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
The Lord goes on to say "We love Apple." Of course, us die hard Apple fanboys knew that all along.
With names like Thunderbird, Firefox, and Songbird, I think we may just run out of open source animals.
Seriously, how many dead animals will we install linux on?
"I'm a well-wisher, in that I don't wish you any specific harm."
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!
At great risk to my Karma, I partially agree with that statement. Several years ago I worked for the Fink project (fink.sourceforge.net) porting OSS code to Mac OS X. There are some extremely well written open source applications, and they were a delight to port.
However, the bulk of applications available in OSS are indeed bloated and very difficult to port because the C code they were built on was dependant on too many third party shared libraries. The libraries change and change, and unless you keep an App updated it can break. This is what happened with OpenGL when I ported TuxRacer to Mac OS X. The code for the program was also god aweful and could have used a serious rewrite. The data types, pointers, etc. were crap.
Many projects do not suffer from this code bloat, especially with systems like CVS in place to keep everything in one place. I also worked on a Kazaa client called Neo for Mac OS X and, while functional, I changed so many things the original writer could not understand it anymore. I stopped developing Neo shortly thereafter.
People have different coding preferences, I am a minimalist and I like sleek, elegant code that gets a lot of work done in a few lines. Other people prefer to write their code out so that is is more readable to them rather than efficient for the computer. Both systems have their place- don't get me wrong -but for production systems code efficiency is the key. The fewer the number of lines of assembler the compiler must interpret the better.
Anyway, that is my 1 + 1 = 3 cents (Which I do not agree with, 1+1 = 2 dammit).
iTunes is not similar to Internet Explorer what so ever, unless you're on a Macintosh, you need to download it or install iTunes manually, it's a choice you make.
You don't have to buy an iPod or use the iTunes Music Store. In fact you can happily go by using your computer and never have to know neither Apple nor iTunes.
Internet Explorer was the at the centre of a monopoly, it came preinstalled, full of bugs and consumers were crying for alternatives for almost 10 years before the Firefox project came and provided a reasonable "answer".
There are very few people out there crying for an iTunes alternative, the iTunes popularity is rather justly earnt and is only used by people who are interested in listening to music on an iPod or purchasing music from iTMS. Consumers aren't demanding that iPods or iTunes work with other online music stores or other music programs. In fact the only people I actually hear complaining are Real and Creative.
The other online stores are -amazingly- bad, poorly laid out, with pricing models that reflect one theme "greed", the model of "download as many or as few songs as you like, but pay for them until the day that you die otherwise we take them back from you" is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as the excessively under-designed garbage pieces of electronics they want you to play them on, where they franchise that a 64kbps Windows media file as a decent alternative to 128kbps AAC audio.
So if those are my "choices", I'm pretty pleased to be giving my attention to iTunes and Apple, as they certainly seem to have a much better clue about what they're doing and are satisfying what I'm asking for in technology vs. music and willing to upgrade their product regardless of what the competition is up to.
Smalltalk was, in fact, developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970's.
NeXT combines the Smalltalk programming model, the Stepstone Objective-C language, the GNU compiler, the CMU Mach kernel, and the Adobe Postscript language (not much original there, but at least NeXT paid for some of it). Jobs did a great job at putting together NeXT out of existing technologies, but he didn't exactly contribute a lot of technology.
Let me repeat: there is nothing wrong for Apple copying from other people, but Apple should stop complaining (and sueing) when people copy from them.
I think it's a masturbation reference.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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
A more realistic goal would be for Linux to drop KDE and GNOME and focus on GNUStep. That way you could have a free open source equivalent of Cocoa, with source code compatibility.
Of course, it'll never happen. Too many egos are invested in going in other directions.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Others have rightly pointed out that Apple's legal department will run this into the ground, but they've missed the most important reason why:
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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".
For production code, clarity is far more important than anything else, especially in the open source world, which tends to lack design and architecture documentation (and from what I've seen, in many cases there are few if any useful comments in the code either). The whole point of open source is the fact that the source is accessible to all, but there is more to accessibility than simply sticking something in a place where it can be downloaded.
NB: I am not saying that efficiency isn't important, but in most projects it will have a notable effect of at most 10% of the code base. Clearly written code (or the lack thereof) on the other hand impacts all of it.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Some group of thiefs stole iTunes interface and GUI. Making it opensource does not matter.
Apple actually bought the iTunes interface. Full details at http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/ . Good read for all developers.
Here is what Apple PAID FOR http://www.macupdate.com/screenshot.php?id=3714