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iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition
mallumax writes "The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes. There are no plugins or themes. Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available. But today the wait is finally over. Not one, but two music players have become credible contenders.
Songbird: An open source music player which has been in the works for more than 2 years has finally released its 1.0 Release Candidate builds. The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine. It has support for extensions and themes ('feathers' in Songbird parlance).
Amarok: The undisputed champion among Linux music players is finally coming to OS X, thanks to KDE 4 being ported there. Amarok developer Leo Franchi has been able to run a Amarok on OS X natively. So we can expect a reasonably stable Amarok to hit OS X in a few months' time.
Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions."
Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported. Yeah, big contender.
Since when has Apple cared about software competition? Especially if the competition can't play Protected AAC?
Why do i want themes? I would much rather have a clean simple music player. Though having a music player that automatically scan a specific folder for new music is useful if your music libary changes all the time.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes
I don't think of this as a basic feature... essentially you are asking for automated library updates whenever new files are added to the system. iTunes is built around two methods of file importation: Rip from CD or add from iTunes Store. The third option is manual: Drag and drop files to the library.
Plugins are even listed at Apple's website.
Themes are missing, I admit, but for many people this is not a "basic feature", either.
GPL Deconstructed
I just wish Apple hadn't gimped the iPod by not providing a filesystem browser :(
It's not a replacement unless it can sync with and manage my iPhone and iPod.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
I like iTunes specifically because it doesn't waste my time with themes and skins and color choices. How cares what your music player looks like? How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows.
The features it is missing are niche features. How many of these "more feature complete" players you are using have features like Genius playlists? Video podcasts? How many also seemlessly manage the songs on your mp3(iPod) player? Smartphones(iPhone)? How many offer iTunes music sharing/streaming on the local network? How many seamlessly integrate with the most popular music store?
That's not even including the non-music features of itunes, such as syncing calendars, contacts, photos, applications, and songs with iPods and iPhones. It offers video podcasts, downloadable tv shows, and streaming internet radio.
iTunes missing one feature compared to other players does not mean it has less features overall.
This may be a little off-topic, but I'd like to recommend mpd.
mpd (music player daemon) is a minimalistic audio-playing server that can be accessed using a variety of clients, including those with command-line, web, and GUI interfaces.
Separating the GUI from the core of the audio player increases stability and decreases the chance for problems. I've never once had the mpd core crash, even though the GUI clients do sometimes crash. When my X server dies for whatever reason, my music continues playing while I fix things!
Additionally, you can do some very cool things, like copying or moving the mpd player state between networked computers. For instance, with the command 'mpmv desktop tvserver', I can move the currently playing song, the current position in the song, and the current playlist. With some occupancy sensors, your music can literally follow you around the house
My favorite GUI client is QMPDClient. It has a very powerful music library interface, including a: playlist; a queue within the playlist (to jump around the playlist); library, directory, and playlist views, with artist/album/track views. This is excellent, because I keep my music directories well organized, so the "Directory" view lets me take advantage of this easily (a feature that I've not found in other music library clients).
And yes, mpd does work on MacOS :)
MPD: http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki
QMPDClient: http://havtknut.tihlde.org/qmpdclient/
We don't use iTunes because there's no credible competitor - we use iTunes because it links to the iPod and/or the AppleTV and/or Front Row. brFurther, I don't understand why people always whine about "not monitoring a folder for library changes." Who cares? I mean, apparently some people do, because they whine about it... but the iTunes Library is your music manager, not your OS folders. Treat it that way and monitoring a folder becomes irrelevant.
-Daniel
There is a simple way to automatically add items to iTunes, set up a folder actions script. Its simple, it works with anything, and its built in.
"The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp"
Ah, I was wondering why 'skins and themes and monitoring a folder for new music' were considered missing features. Now I know the answer.
No thanks, guys. I consider simplicity a feature in a music player, not spending 3 minutes wondering where the 'Play' button went on some new skin made to look like Batman's tool belt or something.
I just want something that will let me drag and drop my music onto my device.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Blarg, last time I used it, it was horribly slow, and that was just a couple months ago. So unless they went through some amazing code changes that sped it up like crazy, I don't see it as being able to survive as competition. Maybe as an alternative for those who just hate itunes, but not competition.
Is it just me, or does Amarok appear to be damn ugly? I'm sure the functionality rocks, but it looks pretty typical of work-in-progress Linux apps in that it's in need to a good GUI designer...
Is there more to it than what you see in the author's screengrab?
Also, I'm with "rogabean" further up - it's not a true iTunes replacement 'til it can deal with my iPhone. Until then, it's just duplicating an already-running app.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I specifically like itunes because it has /few/ settings and fully supports my ipod (touch) with adress book, calendar, bookmarks etc
I just copied my osx ipod library onto my friends vista, merged the artwork folder into her old artwork folder and told itunes to add the new music folder, it works perfectly (albeit way slower on vista than osx;)
But the dead rat was removing missing songs, as itunes still cannot sort by (!) so i selected all, in info set rpm to 42 and sorted by rpm, now the missing files were at one end, fully deletable;)
I have been using Songbird for about a year now. I really like it. Yeah it's kinda fat but no worse than iTunes. It's cool to have all the media integrated like it is. On audio-related websites it will automatically bring up a list of tunes from the web page and you just click to play/stream/download (handy for the various audio blogs). Shoutcast plug-in, Last.Fm plug-in, album art plug-in, all sorts of stuff.
Really it's my favorite choice on Linux (now if someone would get FireTray working correctly for it). It has iPod support but I haven't tried it.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
I see that Songbird has something similar to Coverflow, but here's my question: can one create a playlist that meets such criteria as
1.) all tracks are tagged with track numbers (1 of 12, etc).
2.) all tracks are part of an album with at least x tracks.
And the long shot...
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
I really preferred Coverflow before it was integrated into iTunes. Much more useful as a stand alone app as you could filter using criteria 1 and 2 above.
This is just another example of how Apple is a weighted sink on the entire open source community. Open source applications flow from Linux and Windows to Apple, but you NEVER see Apple applications flow back.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php
... pay a crap load of money for this barren an OS (which is inseparable from the hardware) while superior choices exist for free OS'es (that run on more hardware) and even Windows. Always thought apple users were status wh***s with a pathological desire to look hip to the frat boy/meaning of life empty-talk crowd with a complimentary membership of the Steve Jobs cult (while looking monumentally stupid to the technically proficient or even people with any common sense). This is just more evidence.
IMHO one of the main reasons for iTunes sucking is that it is more a storefront for Apple to sell music than a player. (Imagine what could those arrows point to instead of the song on the shop)
[webmonkey.com] has a very good article on this.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_Top_Ten_Reasons_iTunes_Sucks
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
Out of curiosity...why is that useful or desirable? Why are any of your points useful actually?
Not trying to be a smartass, I just really don't get why you would care about those things?
It seems a bit unfair to say that iTunes has had no competitors under Mac OSX as a music player when VLC does an admirable job at playing my music and TV shows, on OSX, and has done for a long time now.
Blog
Until I'm able at least dock songbird in linux I don't see myself using it. It's just one of those stupid little things that I simply cant live without.
Is Banshee available for OS X? There's one player I'd still want to use if I ever bought a Mac. It feels just simple enough to be usable, but is also very powerful and unbloated.
However, Songbird and Amarok are both pretty fantastic.
The other Linux music-related app I've seen Mac users drool over very recently is LMMS. This is basically a Fruityloops clone that is mainly used by Windows and Linux people so far. It should run on a Mac but there's no Mac maintainer, just a bunch of source code sitting around. Pretty amazing piece of software with a fast dev cycle and awesome features.
Monitoring a folder is something you can script. Slashdotters ought have no problems with this...
Applescript (weird, english-like language that it is) is actually pretty powerful - Apple do make an effort to open up their apps for scripting, even though they're really GUI apps, and it's a really under-used feature. Shame.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Amarok has lost its main advantages (for me, personally) over iTunes in the 2.0 release.
1.4.x has:
-- Selectable fields (columns) in the playlist, you can select "last played time", which is great for weeding out stuff you've just heard in the last couple of days. iTunes has this, Amarok 1.4 had this, now Amarok 2 doesn't, and I personally miss it.
--SQLite collection.db, which allows you to very easily write applications which query your collection. Now they use an internal MySQL DB, which I'm sure I can move wherever and re-attach, but now I get to rewrite my stuff to use mysql instead of sqlite.
IMHO a music collection is the perfect vehicle for flat file DBs, my SQLite Amarok DB is like 11MB, for about 1500CDs. However, for Album Cover grabbing, it still WASTES iTunes, since it uses Amazon, and Amazon has way more CDs than iTunes does. Lyrics and Wikipedia integration are great, Last.FM integration is great.
Very happy to see this in a native package, I haven't run the latest from Rangerrick, I've been waiting for it to be Official. It's looking great on my SuSE desktops though.
I like music
Starting an argument by claiming that "iTunes is an average music player," then linking to an alternative that looks like a pixel-for-pixel rip-off of said application is a very poor way to make a point. Seriously.
The only "real" advantage I see here is support for Vorbis, and even still -- the reality is that 99.99% of users do not care -- or even know what it is, for that matter.
And as for Amarok... I don't know how much "sexy" there was in there previously, but if I was willing to put up with this sort of mess, I wouldn't be using a mac in the first place. A for effort, but I think I'll stick with iTunes, thanks...
Carry on.
what I really would like to know is why the fuck they thought it was a good idea to put a browser in the application by using mozilla code?!!
So they can someday build in a storefront/catalog browser? Like how iTunes appears to use some kind of hybrid Safari browser for the iTunes store? Or like how Steam uses Internet Explorer for its storefront and catalog browser? Just a thought.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
According to Songbird's site, it doesn't support folder monitoring either. It also doesn't support iPhones, the iPod Touch, Airtunes, CD ripping (?), or video. I forget, why would I choose it over iTunes?
This is stupid, when you can the original iTune for free, why would anyone want to use clone which happen to look like iTune. Try selling knock off against original for same price. The thing is, there is no lower prices than free can exist.
Good luck and please stop wasting time developing what has already been done.
Surely you know that there arepeople out there that are colour blind.
And that is just for starters.
Applications that are monolithic and unconfigurable will not serve properly many users.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But found the interface chunky and slow. It uses twice the RAM of iTunes and sounds like crap (when playing the same file in both).
Don't even think of trying to run this on your iPhone. Remember, Apple doesn't like competing applications.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player.
itunes is significantly better than average.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
How exactly is that a basic feature? Music enters itunes 3 basic ways:
1 you rip a Cd with itunes.
2 you buy a song from itunes music store
3 you drag a file from your computer onto the itunes library
and one advanced way:
4 you tell itunes to import music from a folder
Setting up itunes to monitor a folder would be number 5, and in the 'advanced feature' category.
Secondly, how exactly do the "latest music files" get into this monitored folder? If you manually dragged them there, then you might as well have just manually dragged them onto the itunes window. If they arrived there through any other means, that just further underscores that its an advanced feature.
There are no plugins
That is certainly not a basic feature either. And its probably the ONLY thing I sort of agree with.
I'd like iTunes to support automatically syncing with non-Apple players. I'd like iTunes to support syncing with programs other than Outlook on Windows.
[There are no] themes.
I call that a feature. I'm not 13 anymore. I am happy to let my programs to feature well designed UI, without delegating the task to other 13 year olds who variously have an unhealthy fascination with celebrities, movies, or just want everything to be some sort of gothic red and black. If anything, I think iTunes on Windows should look MORE like a windows app.
Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
Its few faults and many strengths actually. The biggest advantage it has over other players is that it works with =all= ipods/iphones seamlessly.
Songbird: An open source music player which has been in the works for more than 2 years has finally released its 1.0 Release Candidate builds. The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp and the Yahoo Music Engine.
Hardly a ringing endorsement if you look at either of those products.
It has support for extensions and themes ('feathers' in Songbird parlance).
Right, because inventing non-standard gimmick terminology is always a good idea. I'm glad Thunderbird has addons not 'feathers' and firefox...? 'hairs'? 'teeth'? Spare me.
Amarok: The undisputed champion among Linux music players is finally coming to OS X, thanks to due KDE 4 being ported to OS X. Amarok developer Leo Franchi has been able to run a Amarok on OS X natively. So we can expect a reasonably stable Amarok to hit OS X in a few months' time.
'reasonably stable' with a KDE4 look on OSX? Yeah that's going to create an army of converts.
Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users,
They won't. They will make a very small niche (self)-satisfied. That's not a bad thing, per se, mind you, but don't make more out of it than is really there.
which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions."
See above. It won't. Even though I really do want iTunes to work with Thunderbird instead of Outlook...
Beauty is relative and subjective btw....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They were the original guys who brought themeing to Macintosh music players. The player had the chance to become the base of iTunes, but fate is such a fickle thing. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Songbird may be coming along, but it still has a ways to go. Looking around the feature list, I don't see anything special. Sure, iTunes doesn't find concert tickets for me, but I can honestly say that was a feature I wanted in a music player/manager. CD ripping is still only in beta, as is the much vaunted watched folder feature (add me to the list of folks who don't get why that is such a necessary feature). Maybe in a couple more years this will be big enough to be noticed by Apple, but don't count on it anytime soon...
As for Amorak, you link to a blog entry in which one of the developers managed to get it to run on his Mac... woo hoo. As it requires mysql and KDE (close to 500 MB of downloads - talk about bloat...), this hardly seems like something the average user is going to turn to.
Don't get me wrong - competition is good. iTunes works well for me, but it doesn't fit everyone's model of what such a tool should do. However, if your goal is to prod Apple into implementing your favorite features into iTunes, these projects aren't going to do it. Why not file a feature request with Apple? They do read them...
iTunes takes care of my iPhone, remote speakers, play (most) formats, show rentals, buying music, streaming music from my shared server, and managing my library just fine. Does it do that? If not, no thanks.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
How is Amarok the undisputed champion when it reportedly it can't handle massive playlists? (I haven't tried it myself, but that's what I'm reading.)
I'm looking for a linux player that can handle thousands of songs, and ideally would allow me to rate each song as I hear it.
I tried Audacious, but it had so many bugs it was unusable (it kept loosing the playlist, or using 100% cpu, or deleting all the prefs). I tried juk but it's playlist was far too annoying to use - I want it to play all the songs, not stop at the end of an album just because I happen to be looking at the album playlist.
So, any suggestions? I'm using xmms right now, which works fine, but is discontinued (and doesn't have the rating feature, or an easy way to search for songs).
Anyway, I'd like to use amarok - it looks like it has all the features I want, except being able to handle thousands of songs.
-Ariel
Cog has been on the scene since 2006, is fully GPL'd, and supports most formats.
A nice, lightweight player designed to play music and not get in your way. Highly recommended.
http://cogx.org/
isn't that a collection of beautiful UI?
I always hated iTunes. When was on PC it was unbelievably slow. When I made a switch to Macbook Pro, I finally hoped iTunes would work normally. It was faster than on my PC (Windows XP), but it still is slow as hell, particularly after latest upgrade with new introductions (genius recommendation thing). The only reason I deal with damn iTunes is to sync iPhone's calendar, playlist and other stuff like that.
o_O
I don't understand the need for any features in a music player other than playing music. Themes? Leave that crap for programs I actually want to look at. A music player needs to play music well. Minimal is better. I use a 7 year old version of Winamp. Works great!
Random access to all online media formats? Integration of podcasts from anywhere on the web? No need for a bucket of plugins and Add-ons for basic media integration?
Try it before you bash it.
SongBird is nice, that other one look like yet another horribly designed and ugly Linux GUI.
And while SongBird has plug-ins and even touts an SDK, it doesn't yet support iRemote or Speakers. Being that I have my iTunes library on a network share and use a single MacMini as my media server across a 5 room airTunes + AppleTV setup, having the speakers selector is critical. SongBird is essentially a single zone setup which would totally destroy my very nice multizone setup that I can control via wifi with the iRemote app on my iPhone
Considering the sheer amount of effort Apple has put into their media center offerings as a whole, I do not think it is likely that SongBird will replace iTunes as my OS X media player any time soon. But, if they can work in device support for AppleTV and airTunes, they might have something.
I tried Songbird, and noticed it was using up about 3 times the RAM iTunes uses. And for what? A bunch of extra crap I wonâ(TM)t use. Itâ(TM)s like these guys took notes from the OpenOffice team on how to make a crappy interface that loads slowly and then goes on a RAM eating rampage.
plugins used to be supported before apple bought soundjam mp and turned it into iTunes. I am not sure why they removed it, but I bet the framework to add them is still in the codebase. I bet apple didn't want any plugin architecture to be able to add other music stores or the like.
today is spelling optional day.
iTunes doesn't use Safari, it just looks web-like. It's custom rendering.
if only there would be mediamonkey for mac... i'd be happier. way happier.
who cares about itunes, it. just. sucks.
mod me up scottie!
So don't get a retarded proprietary music player*.
* It's not their fault you don't think before you buy.
So I guess most OSX users won't use it*.
*It's not their fault that developers don't think about why most of the people are using iTunes when they are trying to compete with iTunes.
I use itunes but I really wish they'd put in nested playlists; the more music you have the harder it is to browse.
2570 items in my SongBird playlist.
147 megs of memory used, no items with album art. No web pages open. 0_o
I would suggest that Media Monkey has long been a credible competitor to iTunes with its support for iPods, a broad array of file formats, plug-ins, theming, file renaming, and many other features.
I use if for clean-up general management because it's very easy to customize where my files go and how they're named. I'm hamstrung by my used of an iPhone so I don't use it always.
Really an excellent alternative to iTunes and has been around for years.
Most iTunes users run it on Windows where there are plenty of alternatives. This hasn't forced apple to make any changes. Why would the availability of these alternatives on a much smaller subset of iTunes users make any difference?
"The truth is, iTunes is an average music player." Uh-huh. Ironically, it's the spreadsheet-like interface that keeps me coming back. People like to rag on it because it isn't skinnable, or it doesn't have as much pizazz maybe as WMP... but seriously, isn't that usually the opposite of the argument made against Apple? That Apple's stuff is always form over function, and now someone's going on about how x linux player has "feathers"? wtf? iTunes also has had the benefit of years of polish - a whole plethora of small features that keep power users satisfied... gapless playback, sorting rules, AirTunes, iPod/iPhone remotes. And don't forget: Apple did eventually kill brushed metal.
This results in iTunes giving me weird errors when I try to interact with the iPod. Everything added to it *after* I used Songbird shows up properly sized, but the other 65 gigs before it does not.
After 2 weeks of trying to fix it, I had no choice but to back everything up, wipe the iPod clean, and restore it all, a process that took literally 10+ hours.
That was just one of several bugs that I ran into while using it. It crashed repeatedly, it hung on my library (~70 gigs), it imported videos from iTunes but then wouldn't play them back...no thank you.
...when it came out. And it trounced it. That was back when said competition had themes, visualizers, and a host of features iTunes didn't. iTunes, on the other hand, is excellently designed software, and killed off Audion and others.
Songbird and Amarok will fail utterly on the Mac. Songbird will use the same non-native XUL engine that Firefox and Thunderbird use with far fewer benefits, and Amarok will be QT-based, which in many cases looks and feels even less native than XUL. Neither will have any platform integration with the huge number of iTunes addons, scripts, widgets, etc. And of course, neither of them will work with the iPod, let alone the iTunes Music Store (if you care for such a thing).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Here's an idea that'll have Apple fans foaming at the mouth: Apple should be split up.
This anti-competitive behaviour in tying their devices (namely iPod and iPhone) to their applications, and by extension their computer products, should be stopped. This article talks about competition, but until these media players are able to communicate with Apple devices -- on an equal standing with Apple's own tools -- they will not be widely adopted.
The simplest, cheapest way to stop this monopoly leveraging is to split Apple into two companies. One dealing in computer products, the other in consumer goods. By the way: demanding protocol documents, imposing fines and 'monitoring' doesn't work (see Microsoft vs. DOJ/Europe). It's also extremely expensive for the tax payer.
"Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions."
OSS should not merely serve to encourage closed-source applications to become better. There's no reason why Songbird or Amarok couldn't eventually replace iTunes as the music application of choice. And that should be the goal. Otherwise, it's just a lot of wasted effort if all you want to have happen is get Apple to write a better app.
1) if you look at the songbird UI - they have obviously tried to imitate itunes in layout and functionality - only they haven't done it as well as itunes - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
2) itunes works well, and is solid solid solid - never lost anything with it - ever. that my friend is the #1 feature.
3) it works with iPhone and all iPods, and it syncs calendars & contacts with outlook & apple addressbook - does songbird or amarok do this? no - thus, they aren't even viable for these uses.
for what iTunes doesnt do -- OS X 10.5 includes a command line audio player (in /usr/bin) called afplay. This is very useful if you want to play a sound file from the command line, shell script, Automator action, etc. The /usr/bin directory is in your path by default, so you can just type afplay file.mp3 to play that file.
I've seen a bunch of articles about how bad iTunes is recently, and while I'm happy to concede there there are some negatives (the dumb software update process that replaces everything and quicktime and safari, the lack of FLAC support), but there are others which I just don't get.
Resource usage: people keep telling me how iTunes is a real resource hog, but I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm currently running both iTunes and Songbird on my first gen (Core 2, not duo) MacBook.
iTunes: 78MB real memory used. 8% cpu, steady.
Songbird: 170MB real memory used. 10% cpu, spiking to 18% frequently and 30% occasionally.
Firefox: 150MB. Between 3 and 10% cpu just sitting here idle.
Is the resource problem more an issue for the Windows version? I have never had a problem with iTunes slowing things down.
Themes: whenever people criticize iTunes on Windows, they point out that it doesn't fit in with the look and feel of windows (I'll concede that one, I think it should). But then people complain that it doesn't have theme support so they can have some wacky look and feel that is nothing like the base system. What is so important about what your music player looks like? Mine spends most of its time minimised. I guess it's a nice to have, but I'd rather they spent time on features like CoverFlow (which I use extensively to browse my music) than pretty niche features.
It organises your music for you: perhaps it's just me, but that's exactly why I use it. I don't *want* to have to organise my music. I import my music and then forget about it. It's just there. The internal directory structure is pretty sane if you really want to fiddle around, and you can always stop iTunes from organising your music (it's in the preferences).
Plugins: Ok, I can see that there might be some nice plugins about, but most people just use it to listen to their music.
I'm genuinely interested, can someone point me to a plugin for another player that would make me reconsider and go "wow, that's really useful"?
Paul
Paul Leader
Yeah, that would be really useful, and the opposite so that you can see at a glance what you're missing or what you need to fix the tags on.
Those are the desktop's job.
Stop reinventing the wheel and bloating up our apps. If the desktop's mechanisms aren't good enough, then help improve them. That will add value to all applications that use those mechanisms, instead of just your single application.
So two nice strawmen there. There are other things to pick on iTunes for (like still being a Carbon app.), but outright lying (or making statements when you're completely ignorant of the truth) isn't doing their argument for alternatives much good.
Yaz.
And what's so bad about just giving a link to the browser and start the browser from the music playing instead? If I'm supposed to buy music from a web page why not let me do that from whatever browser I already have installed? To get basic functionality such as telling if the songs is available in the store and such they don't need a complete browser, especially if the store is developed by themself as well.
To integrate Safari in OS X, IE in Windows or even a browser in JAVA there is a difference since I believe you use integrate a browser component so to speak. You don't include the source code and roll your own browser, you just use the one which already exist but from within your own application. If there for instance is some bug fixes to your systems browser your application will still benefit from them.
But in this case will they update their music player for each new bug fix in Mozilla? How convenient ...
It's just a custom XSLT wrapped around the iTunes Store's XML output, rendered by Webkit with an iTunes user-agent. I can't remember whether the XSLT is provided by iTunes or specified in the Store's XML (been a while since I've screwed around with that kind of stuff via spoofed user-agents, etc).
No, it's not technically Safari, but it's definitely using the same rendering engine. Just like every other html/xml-based window in OS X.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
A long time ago someone posted here something similar along these lines, stating emphatically that iTunes was a crappy MP3 player because it wasn't skinnable. Why the average computer user would need or want a skinnable MP3 player was beyond me. However I remember the early days of Winamp and Macamp. Those were the days out on the edge when people ripped MP3s and they were just starting to get popular, and file sharing was harder because not everyone had a CD burner and connection speeds were a lot slower and only file sharers had MP3s.
As a badge of honor these file sharers would play their songs on their PCs or Macs, and would have the most gaudy obnoxious skins they could create for their own players. However, at the time, I found the players didn't make sense to me, and had very few other features, and basically did not make it fun to play MP3 files... but OMG I could skin the hell out of it!
So for someone who liked simplicity and ease of use, I said F*** this I'll stick with CDs.
Later, iTunes came on the scene and I decided to try it. After a few minutes of fiddling, it made sense! And half that time was basically ridding myself of the expectations I had set for myself thanks to Winamp and Macamp.
Love them or hate them, Apple makes good software, and iTunes is designed with a more mainstream user in mind. This MP3 player is designed with those file sharing MP3 ripping technoheads who like to show off their leet skillz by skinning their MP3 software to show how badass they are. iTunes is designed to work well and manage content for everyone else.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
iTunes has far too many features (and thus too much bloat) for me as it is. I use Music Player Daemon + Sonata. This gives me a very minimal yet functional interface, and allows me to keep my music going even if I close X.
My gripes with iTunes.
I have not figured out why Apple, the shining knight/star of software development according to some, has not released iTunes for Linux. Surely it's not hard to release a somewhat Unix based operating system to Unix based operating system port? Yeah I know, Wine, blah blah blah... iffy at best. I ended up using a VM.
Regardless of what people say, there IS no competition right now, because of iPods, iPhones, etc. Everyone and their mother's cook's dog has an iPod (except me, and proud of it!), so until that is implemented... or allowed to be implmented by Apple... there won't be much competition for iTunes.
Another annoying thing about iTunes that I find VERY frustrating is the playback. I like the library system, more or less, but the playback is awful... even in comparison to Windows Media Player. Especially if my speakers are set up with 5.1 or something like that, it only comes out the front speakers and I have not been able to find an iTunes option to enable 5.1 playback or even 4 speaker playback, etc.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
why not let me do that from whatever browser I already have installed?
User lock-in? And I'm not saying the browser is a good or bad thing, just throwing out ideas here
No. The iTunes store uses a layout that is decidedly non-html. HBoxes and VBoxes, fixed position containers, and gridboxes.
You cannot translate that into html with xslt.
I think it depends on what the definition of "safari" is. It is webkit, the same thing Adobe uses for AIR. You can do the same thing in Qt, which also supports webit, and code Qt custom widgets and have your browser look-alike instantiate the widgets from HTML....
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Wow, that's surprising but you are right. The webkit team has a list of all apps that use webkit and, indeed, iTunes is not one of them.
I'd be willing to bet that they use *some* form of html/xml renderer, but the decision to not use Webkit is curious. I wonder if they are afraid falling in the same trap that IE did, where exploits discovered in the renderer could be leveraged in other applications that use it (most notably Outlook).
Trying the 1.0 RC. Often getting "Internal Data Error" even in middle of song -- might as well be a BSOD. Yes, I will report it as a bug there too.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Luckily, though, it's built into the operating system!
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
$ strings /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes | grep WebKit
[nothing]
$
It's not technically Safari, and it's not technically WebKit, and it's not technically WebCore. It's not HTML anything. It's just an unconnected rendering engine stringing up XML in some very un-HTML ways. It has links, came around a few months after Safari was revealed and perhaps evokes table layouts, but that's about it.
I like how the freetards think they are riding in like some kind of hero with their unstable, ugly as sin, checklist-of-features garbage ware.
Just to make it clear from the majority of Mac users... much like any woman you will meet in your life, our answer to you is:
FUCK OFF.
I know that being a mac user means liking what you are told to like but the whole thing with Apple marketing is about
Were talking choice. I might think Celine Dion sounds like a dying cow but some douchebag somewhere might like a Celine theme.
His choice.
Just like with homo marriages.
its pretty revolting and disgusting (hot lez sex is good though!) but as long as it doenst interfere in my life, why should I give a rats ass what fudgepackers want to do?
>but please please please can we stop acting like >altering the UI of a program does anything even >remotely useful?
Neither do rounded corners, chrome gui and buttonless hardware.
its not useful, its about the look w/ Apple.
its all about how it looks.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Exactly it.
I have around 40 days worth of music. Most of that is albums, but some is also random tracks I've downloaded over the years. I want a playlist that is only complete albums.
Yes, I can manually put one together, but being able to make a smart playlist that auto updates would be nice.
No, it's not WebKit. Dave Hyatt, the development lead on WebKit and Safari has said as much himself. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_06.html#005666
The iTunes store uses Quicktime, not WebKit for rendering. Quicktime has supported interactive features in movies for ages, and for a static layout with lots of dynamic content this is easier for Apple to use than HTML - particularly since they make the authoring tools.
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I mean really?
They use Quicktime. When the iTunes store was launched, Quicktime was a lot more mature than WebKit. It's been able to display interactive content for over ten years, and it was already needed for music playback in iTunes so didn't add another dependency.
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Most likely they wanted to optimize for a very specific layout and some controls that were hard to implement efficiently in HTML and Javascript at the time. (Like the "swoosh" on the front page.) Reducing the surface area for attacks and not having to reimplement everything that could be in both the track list and the content area probably played a part, too.
It integrates well with hypemachine, for example. It was the original USP of Songbird, before they went all-out on the iTunes cloning.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
I've seen few applications that generate the kind of fanboy zealots that iTunes does. Since they've been breaking a sweat trying to point out how wrong the /. is about iTunes not having folder monitoring support, let me offer my own, more valid, top-10 iTunes-suxxors flame baits.
1. No auto-cover-fetch for artwork. Amarok has it. So, do quite a few other players. I'm guessing Apple is too chicken-shit to do it because of copyright concerns, but I simply don't care.
2. iTunes (ALL versions) refuses to store MP3 cover art in the ID3 tag even though it's been done for ages in other players in a compatible way. Don't try to tell me it's only because there is no ISO, ANSI, RIAA-approved way to do this. It "just works" elsewhere outside of iTunes and has for years. Inside of iTunes it uses it's proprietary metadata for this.
3. The only way to backup your iTunes library is to use it's own internal backup feature. If you have another backup program which backs up it's metadata files while they are open, then you get copious errors upon restoring them. You may still have your non-DRM music, but you'll have to re-authorize your DRM music (if you have any authorizations left) and you'll lose all your playlists and ratings. This also happens if you restore to a different username than you backed up (not using iTunes backup).
4. The interface is butt-ugly, IMHO.
5. The "mini-mode" sucks. You can't see your playlist, an EQ, or shit-else while in it. If you use the non-mini mode you have to look at it's ugly ass taking over half the screen in omg-my-desktop-is-covered-with-a-bunch-of-huge-windows mode.
6. You get strong-armed by Apple to upgrade every other week. Some folks, like myself, find this annoying. Oh, sure, you can say no, or turn off the "check updates" feature. Then you'll get owned by some security patch you needed, though. It's nag or nothing.
7. It's MP3 or stupid-ass low-quality AAC (the default) for encoding. You can't change the filename format things get encoded with or choose another codec like OGG. Let's not confuse the fanboys with choices, or have to compete with a superior format, eh?
8. It's censorware "family-friendly" features make me want to vomit. If you can't keep your porn away from your 3 year old, then call the state and have the brat hauled off.
9. The way it garbles your filenames onto the iPod into 4-character unreadable crap is just a tad annoying. Especially considering Rockbox and other players don't pull this little stunt.
10. Last but not least, it doesn't support Internet radio directories for Shoutcast, Icecast, Magnatunes, or anything besides it's own oversimplified "Radio" of nice, friendly, Apple approved stations.
Thanks for playing Apple. You figured out what the drooling masses wanted like you always have. Now back to the this message from our sponsors.
"Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions."
Here's hoping the users will stop using proprietary software altogether and switch to open source Amarok. Not just to force Apple to make Itunes better.
What has Slashdot become? Open Source just there to force the others to make their proprietary stuff better so we can continue to use it? All hail to our proprietary masters?
OK, if iTunes is your music manager, why is it not managing your music?
Why do you think iTunes is not managing your music?
That's why people want automatically updating folders. See new file, add to library, silently. We've had inexpensive filesystem monitoring for years, and we know OS X has pretty good control over what files exist on your system.
Because many things in OS X do things the UNIX way - do one simple thing well. Why should my MUSIC PLAYER be doing crazy things like watching a folder?
No, instead Finder should be watching folders and run actions based on directories or file types. That's why the system has Automator.
You want music files to be loaded into iTunes automatically when placed in a specific folder? Well then use Automator which can do this simple task quite well today. Please do not try to load iTunes down with more crap than it already has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
According to the the Songbird Licensing FAQ, Songbird is entirely open, mostly under GPLv2.
On installation, the Songbird binary presents you with a EULA, and unless you accept it, installation will abort. This is unlike the Mozilla EULA of a few months back which you could choose to ignore without stopping the installation, and which Mozilla removed entirely after receiving masses of negative feedback about it.
Fully free/open-source software doesn't need a EULA to be agreed, because you obtain all of your rights merely by complying with the terms of the copyright/copyleft license. No agreement of any kind is required in order to merely *USE* the software (only to distribute it). Usage is entirely unrestricted.
Why then does Songbird require a mandatory pre-agreement on usage?
Songbird is a XUL application. It would actually be more accurate to say that they've put a music player in the mozilla web browser.
Once you are using XUL, you might as well render HTML using Gecko.
I second your observation... Monitoring a folder is the job of the OS not the App. And mac OS has folder-actions that let you monitor a folder and add songs to any app, not just itunes.
Can either of these new music players
(1) connect to the iTunes music store and buy music?
(2) play any music you have that uses Apple's fairplay DRM
(3) See 1 ans 2 above but with video in place of music
These programs can't replace iTunes for most users
Pretty much the only issue that keeps me from using iTunes is the lack of format support.
.. better in every sense other than the default GUI, in fact.
My music/recording collection [I am occasionally a sound recordist among other things] contains tracks in mp3, mp4, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, Wavpack, AC3, DTS, MPC, and a few other formats. iTunes under Windows supports only 2 of those formats for playback, let alone transcoding/conversion. I'll admit that I'm hardly the average user, but even for basic use iTunes simply doesn't cut it for me.
The other thing I'd like to see more players support is Replaygain, which, unlike Apple's volume levelling function, actually works properly for most material put through it.
Foobar2000 [even with it messy archaic default interface] is leagues better than either iTunes or Amarok in terms of format support, tag editing, transcoding
I've been watching Songbird with interest for quite a while; for me it has the potential to replace fb2k if people write format support plugins for it.
Ok... first of all, I'm a mac user. but i really don't like itunes. in my opinion, the best music player of all time was winamp 3 - seriously.
here's why:
1- i want separate applications for everything. one for ripping. one for burning. one for playing. it amazes me that i could play music 10 years ago on a pentium 2 under win98, and now i need. i want something simple... no playlists. click on a file and it plays. winamp did that.
2- itunes doesn't recognize alot of my id3 tags, which really bothers me. plus it's a huge program that taxes the cpu.
3- right now, i'm using a program called play under os x... it's the simplest i could find... does anyone know anything better?
also... i don't like ipods. i only use sandisk player.... for me i want to drag and drop my files like it's a drive.
If you use Apple, then expect to be stuck with their horrible software. I've never had to even touch iTunes and my iPod works wonderfully. Thank you, gtkpod.
I was using Songbird as it was the only decent music player I could find for OSX. The browser add-on isn't that 'un-focused'. They are obviously using mozilla as a base, because you get the same kind of interface for adding plug-ins and auto updating plugins (I had an alarm clock plugin for example). The main panel is similar to a web browser, and can browse web pages, but is mostly used for displaying music. The web pages come in for online music searches and work quite well. Lyrics, buying music and other things are possible too obviously.
If you aren't interested just because it is based off mozilla, that's pretty silly IMO. I was interested in Songbird because I read it was started by some Winamp developers, and Winamp is my all time favourite media player just for the combination of built in customisation options for playing music, ripping music, listening to radio, dynamic playlists, media library if you want to use that, etc etc. I even registered it! But I no longer use Windows now and I'd prefer to use a native player than go through WINE.
Installed Ubuntu over OSX this week and now am using Exaile. It's almost perfect for my needs - I prefer to use the file system to organise my music (though Songbird's library was almost as good when I ordered it by path and filename). The only thing lacking in Songbird for me was a proper dynamic playlist. I had a plugin that approximated one, but it didn't support arbitrary reordering of music in the playlist. Exaile is great for creating dynamic playlists, and as a bonus it has a plugin for showing your currently playing song in Pidgin. Previously the only apps that supported that feature in Messenger were Windows Media Player and iTunes, and I don't like either of those.
which is totally what she said
OSX's folder actions will let you automagically import all files placed in a folder into iTunes. And have since... oh... 10.0? If you used iTunes and really wanted this "feature", you could have done it yourself. Plus, given the AppleTV iTunes integration, I think it would take a hell of a lot more than skinning to lure away ATV users.
semantics are everything!
I really need any or all of these apps to support hard links or symbolic links/aliases -- I have sometimes 4.. 5.. 6 different files of the same version of a song when it is included in collections, movie soundtracks, etc.
Being able to specify multiple album memberships for the same track is a killer need.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
The browser is actually really cool. When you visit a site it parses the page for any audio files and puts links in a special window at the bottom. You can then start playing the music files (with only enough delay to buffer) while you browse the page. It's really neat if you visit sites for bands or mp3 blogs.
I've been using and recommending songbird for a very long time, it's a wonderful piece of software written by a group of very creative and dedicated individuals. I haven't used iTunes in probably 3 years. THANKS SONGBIRD!
Seriously, why does Songbird need to photocopy the look and feel of iTunes? Do they really have no sense of creativity?
I haven't been a real fan of Apple's business tactics of late, but at least they are creative and don't make a habit of copying other people's work like Microsoft and Open Source projects typically do.
Linux would be in a lot better place if the Open Source developers cleared the cob webs out and started innovating instead of following Microsoft's and Apple's coat tails. Ubuntu is about the only Open Source project I give kudos to for trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crud, yet keep a familiar enough feel so that their O/S is usable by everyday folk.
This is why the iPod failed as an mp3 player and the iPhone is such a disaster for Apple: they lack features other phones have.
So long as the OSS community remains focused on features as the primary mover of products, so long will the OSS community remain single digit players in the desktop market.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I use it because I have to to sync my iphone, but otherwise I wouldn't let iTunes near my computer with a 20 foot pole. It runs processes all the time in the background, has like 3-4 different ones going at once. It's ridiculously bloated -- 10 times the size of winamp with 1/4th of the features (and many people would consider Winamp bloated). Its got a clunky, non-intuitive UI, isn't extensible to work with new codecs (can't make it play DivX for instance).
It's an embarrassment to Apple and flies in the face of the image they market by being the opposite of everything they say they stand for. I could rant on all day long about reasons why I can't stand it, or how I absolutely hate being forced to install quicktime with it, and being forced to use it to sync any ipod because a hard-drive mode is apparently too convenient.
To the application you mean? Because when it comes to starting the default browser and visit an URL I believe you can have any browser as default in Windows to? It sure can be done in OS X at least (by the preferences in Safari, just choose whatever browser you want to be the default from there.)
This is a huge issue. As someone who has more than one computer it annoys the hell out of me that I can't just hook my iPod up to any of them and have it work. You can get programs like senuti, but I don't want to have to do that, I just want it to connect.
Also, iTunes has issue with very large music libraries, like 500+ GB. It gets kinda sketch.
A blog about stuff.
Back in the days the software was known as SoundJam MP, iTunes had all sorts of skins and UI enhancements.
When Jeffrey Robbins, the creator of SoundJam moved to Apple, all of those exotic features were stripped off of SoundJam MP. Instead, the UI was vastly improved and the whole project was relabeled iTunes.
And, that's why iTunes is so successful. It is simple and easy to operate. You put in a CD, and almost magically, the music is now in your iTunes library. You go to the iTunes store, click a button, and there it is in iTunes.
We heard many of the same complaint with the iPod when it first came out. The iPod had no microphone, it didn't have a radio, there was no slot for a memory card. You couldn't use it as a recorder. All it could do was play MP3s. It will never sell!
But, sell it did. What Apple had demonstrated time and time again is that features don't sell. Simplicity and elegance do. There are plenty of high end packages for Mac OS X -- including SoundJam's main competitor Audion (Freely downloadable from Panic's website). However, Apple's solution is to ignore the dross and concentrate on usability.
For more information, see the story of Audion at .
Dear poster :
Please, do not start with complaining about iTunes' "lack" of features. Given that BOTH Amarok AND Songbird lack the ability to RIP or BURN music CD's, I don't really wanna hear it.
Part of why iTunes works is because Apple does a pretty damn good job of making a player that does its job : Database player/sync for a portable device that holds all the music you're ever going to buy.
You know how agrivating it is to try to burn a CD and have it re-direct you to K3B, which then errors out because your audio format, which works fine in Amarok, isn't compatible with IT?
Batch encoding is a JOKE in Amarok, which is aggrivating given that you realize you're better off settling for converting to MP3 in iTunes using iTunes' crappy MP3 encoder.
In iTunes, not only is your music added to the player, but so are your playlists, and when you have 10 gigs of music, it's nice to have immediate access to the arrangements of the 20 some odd songs you're enjoying at the moment. I've yet to see a sync app on the market that does this aside from maybe the Zune, and the purchase of that device will happen on a cold day in hell.
Don't talk shit about Apple's setup 'till you can present an app that's better or at least EQUIVILANT. I'm not talking about compatibility with a handful of devices, I'm talking about actually having that great handful of FEATURES in syncing.
UGH. >_
I've used Songbird on OSX, because it's the next-best thing to Winamp on the OS. iTunes is tolerable, but I hate the way it organizes music and -- in characteristic Apple style -- is inflexible about letting the user customize its behavior.
Unfortunately, Songbird (0.7, anyway) uses about 2-3x the RAM that iTunes does. It's slower to load MP3s than iTunes. It searches the library and playlists more slowly than iTunes (even after they somehow improved its behavior from an even-worse search design). And it can't play all MP3s -- that's right, I have MP3s in my library that Songbird simply won't play. Why? Beats me -- they play just fine in iTunes and Winamp.
And then there's music-player device interop. Let me know when I can sync music with my Windows Mobile phone (over Bluetooth, or wi-fi, or (god forbid) ActiveSync)...
Songbird has potential, but it needs to lose weight and refine its technique before it can fly with the big birds. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
I find Amarok functionally awful too. Calling the main menu "Engage" is corny. But that's not the problem. It insists on showing a visualizer, by default, which is gimmicky and pointless, especially considering I use it under VNC. I can't figure out how to disable it in the Ubuntu packaging. It has a bunch of list windows, some of which have a search function, some of which don't, and the use of them is inconsistent. It always loses items I've added to its radio function when I close it. The only reason I use it is rhythmbox is even worse. I'll check out Songbird, but my feeling is this is an area where open source can't find the right combination of simplicity, originality and functionality, instead it ends up being a grab bag of "standard" but tired features (like the visualizer) and half baked elements. I thought nautilus was going to be the be-all "file" manager, but they lost their way too.
I have an iPod. I buy music from the iTunes Store. Show me a music player which integrates with those two as well as iTunes (it Just Works), and I'll be interested.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Anyway, what I really would like to know is why the fuck they thought it was a good idea to put a browser in the application by using mozilla code?!! To show the lyrics or what?
To go to last.fm or pandora, or shoutcast, etc, etc.
I use iTunes, because the amount of players in OS X is fairly limited, I don't own an iPod or would ever buy one. I don't have a problem with the player not supporting MTP or iPods. If it did support them? Good, but not a requirement.
I don't know how podcasts work, but in most cases all you need to be able to do is to connect to the web server, request a page and filter out/save/... whatever parts you care about from the result. No need for a complete browser being able to present and interpret it all.
Folder monitoring should be built in to iTunes, and iPhoto.
Picasa has folder monitoring, and it is fantastic.
Yes, many get music from the store, and CDs - but many do not.
Importing music into iTunes is painful and unnecessary (look at at Picasa)
iTunes should NOT be managing my contacts, calendars, photos, activating my phone, playing me movies, doing my dishes etc.
Skins are the absolute last thing on my shopping list - yes, most of them are ugly and unnecessary.
The iTunes interface is a little annoying.
The library management is really dumb. If songs go missing (the actual file) iTunes gets confused - and this should never be the case - there needs to be better management (like Picasa has)
iTunes lacks a lot of innovative features that I believe would be solved by opening up to plugins.
My car has a USB slot, I put music on a pen drive, and play in the car. This is a perfect setup for me - getting music out of iTunes is annoying. Try it, drag 100 songs from iTunes onto a pen drive. iTunes hangs, crashes, or refuses.
Try importing music this way.
Try importing photos into iPhoto this way.
Try migrating to iTunes with a few GB of music and you'll go crazy waiting for 'import'
I have converted many people to iTunes, but I believe the claim that it is a very average music player is accurate.
It is trying to do too much.
By default in iTunes prefs, on one of the platforms at least, "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" is not checked. So, an average end user, gets an MP3 sent to them one way or another, double clicks it, and magically iTunes has it. User is happy. Adds songs to playlists, etc. User then later empties their downloads folder, moves the MP3 to another folder, or whatever - and poof, iTunes is confused - and this is what, a good design? This should never happen.
The end user didn't know they needed to adjust prefs. They didn't know they couldn't delete the file from their desktop, after all, it's "in iTunes" and "iTunes manages your music" Not very user friendly.
Oh, if you have DRM music... and you change your password to the iTunes store or whatever... Your song goes to play, and fails, and provides a login box.. And just stops playing your music. Wow, that's a great design, I was listening to music here - thanks for acting like a Microsoft product, interrupting me, and annoying me when not necessary, thanks iTunes.
We all know, these features (contacts, calendars etc) are nice, but they really should not be part of our music player - some of us just open the player and play music, and iTunes is pretty bloated for just that.
I'd like to see Mozart by Google - their Picasa for music - I think it would be a good offering, with no bias toward iPods, iPhones, etc.
Just my $.02
As a user of iTunes, I hate it - it's a resource hog and too damn slow already. Allowing other people to add extensions would just make it that much worse.
A better option would be for Apple to dramatically improve iTunes or watch its user base make the switch to something better like Media Monkey, etc.
iTunes doesn't use Safari, it just looks web-like. It's custom rendering.
[[citation needed]]
Honestly would be too stupid even for Apple, I'm sure iTunes uses WebKit and least some safari code!
But... the future refused to change.
I think open source contenders are failing to understand the mentality of the average Mac user, the ones that put them in the powerful position they are.
Apple wants you to 'Think Different', but not freely. They want you to think differently than Windows, but more like Apple everything.
Many people accept this, they get drafted into a specific process and the only efficient way to use OS X is to do it the way Apple intends for you to, but it's DAMNED EASY to work with and that's incredibly easy to appreciate.
Open Sourcers want freedom, options, the preemptibility that if there comes a point when something needs to change, it can be done. Mac users don't want that, they don't need it. They want their shit to work, and if you eliminate the variables, it almost always will.
Expecting Apple to open up is like expecting McDonalds to eliminate their fatty foods; What they're doing now is working for them INCREDIBLY WELL, ethics are a hard thing to propose when the process in indisputably effective.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Actually, it's not a replacement unless it can distinguish audiobooks and podcasts from music, so I don't go from "Stairway to Heaven" to chapter 20 of "Oliver Twist," when I'm listening with random play on.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
As usual, the reasons are rooted in history.
The iTunes Music Store opened on April 28, 2003. Safari 1.0 shipped on June 23, 2003.
Furthermore, iTunes supported Mac OS X 10.1 for a long time afterwards, whereas Safari (and therefore WebKit) always required at least 10.2.
If they were doing it today you can bet that they would jump right for WebKit.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Yes, user lock-in to the application is what I was thinking of. They can keep you browsing in their window, and that way while you're looking for that song you want, you won't stumble upon it cheaper somewhere else, or think, "Hey I wonder if Amazon/whoever is selling it cheaper" and just abandon your purchase entirely.
I think one reason iTunes does so well is because it's a one-stop shopping trip, sure, you can probably find that song somewhere else, but it's here in iTunes now, you listened to it and liked it, it's just one click away from being yours... so I see the philosophy behind it, anyway. Works for me (only iTunes Plus though.)
In response to your other point, I run OS X at work and have changed the default browser to Firefox successfully.
And thanks to the other posters for analyzing the browser in iTunes, it's always puzzled me what it actually is.
Oh cool! These will drive my Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, let me rip cd's, convert files, stream radio, subscribe to podcasts, drive network speakers, create genius playlists, discover other libraries on the network and allow me to listen to them (at work), and purchase music and video online?
Obviously iTunes is mediocre and lagging in features...I've been missing out! /sarcasm
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors. Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone. It's great if that's the only thing you care about, but there are cheaper and better sounding mp3 players out there that I cannot really use with my Mac right now.
Certainly it's hard to add support for iPods and the iPhone when Apple is trying to prevent anybody else from adding support. Other mp3-player producers welcome at least some open standards for accessing their devices, while I've never heard similar ideas from Apple.
Another issue is iTunes speed. Some things are strangely slow using iTunes. Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player.
The truth is, iTunes is an excellent player for most people. The fact that only now has there been another real contender shows that most users are satisfied with it and don't need or want a replacement. Perhaps if you had started it off with something like "Although iTunes is a good music player for most people..." it wouldn't have come off sounding like someone who has no understanding of what makes a good piece of software. I mean... come on... themes?
Okay, I've been on Apple gear since '79. and I have used DEC, IBM, other big PC brands, a SPARCStation at one time, and had Linux loaded on Titanium PowerBooks, etc. I am not an expert on anything, I admit that. But, the Finder, and iTunes, are using cnodes to try to figure out where things are, and Finder, the file manager, scatters little breadcrumbs called DS_store files, that supposedly remember window position and size, and they have these huge indexes all over the place, hooked into Spotlight, and you want to know something?
A simple UNIX inode-oriented file manager (like say, Xfile from Rixstep) will absolutely slaughter the Finder and all its friends at the same tasks. It's not even close. But so what? I used Win 98 on an 8-yr old machine hooked to a server that was so ancient the single monitor for it made you think you were stone cold drunk in terms of vision, on a military project... and i could find files faster than on any Mac at the time. Period. And one other thing: That old Compaq Win98, ancient server system didn't need so much as a reboot in the 22 months I was on it. Not one.
Meanwhile, on an Aluminum PowerBook, running Leopard 10.5.5, I get a spinning ball if I so much as move the mouse within the iTunes scroll bar. And Apple, as far as I know, has the only OS that, if you add or delete or even rename sa single file in a directory, will rewrite the entire list of files to simply add or delete the actual focused target. That is nothing short of insane. They have everybody brainwashed into thinking they they need twin quadcores to do the same operations we were doing in OS 7 with a minus factor less resources and hardware back then.
I do NOT care how wonky either one of these releases is. I do NOT own an iPod, and I will never be stupid enough to buy an iPhone. All I want iTunes or any file manager related to audio tracks to do is this: Play the fucking music, and get the fuck out of the way.
How difficult is that? Answer: it's not.
I realize that, as ironic as it is, I will get modded Flamebait or whatever, just like the AC up there, that I happen to be in 100% agreement with, DESPITE having admitted to having invested more time and money in Apple gear, year-in year-out, than many of the more normal or 'smarter' people here.
Apple made a decision to support carbon/OS 9 'legacy' to avoid alienating the handful of developers that were still writing for the Mac, back when 10.0.1 was released. It was an understandable [no balls] choice but it was still totally wrong wrong wrong. And today with a couple gigs of RAM, on an OS that was installed to a completely wiped, multipass-overwritten zeroed-out internal drive, I get spinning beach balls for having the audacity (no pun intended) to rename a file in the iTunes window, or click in the scroll bar, in iTunes, and I call Bullshit. Amarok? Maybe a little buggy? That sounds like a walk in the park to me. Bring it on, I'll go through the betas and write little bug reports or whatever is necessary to help them make a decent entry into the market on the Mac, no problemo. Enough is enough, and I'm in.
I apologize for typos or a missing word here or there. It's the chemo, no kidding, and I just have a limit on how much precious time I can afford to 'waste' on revisions towards turning out quality text. And that really sucks big time, when you care about quality. I don't how Apple sleeps, because I'm losing sleep, and they're costing me time on top of time.
One other thing that Songbird doesn't support is PPC Mac computers. Millions of us.... It only has an Intel version !!! Their home page has 0.7.0 for all platforms. NOT...... Had tried a PPC version a year or so ago, but it wasn't user friendly and looked like crap !! Don't think I'll lose any sleep over not trying it now.......
The best part about songbird is that if my computer can play the file songbird will have no problem adding it to the library, means things like ogg/vorbis, flacc, ape, are all supported
Like how iTunes appears to use some kind of hybrid Safari browser for the iTunes store?
There's a big difference though: iTunes may use WebKit for some of its iTMS rendering, but Songbird uses XUL for its entire interface. Songbird has (when last I checked) zero native controls (barring the menu bar.)
Actually, I'm not even sure that iTunes uses WebKit at all. The stuff it gets from phobos.apple.com sure ain't HTML, and it seems to be some form of XML-based format designed specifically for iTunes. I don't know if WebKit is what's actually doing the rendering.
The real litigious bastards...
It's not their fault that developers don't think about why most of the people are using iTunes when they are trying to compete with iTunes.
I'm sure glad that they don't.
I know some people actually like iTunes but I really have problems wrapping my brain around it. One thing they tend to have in common is limited experience with good media players like Winamp and Amarok. Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
Parent was saying that the content in the windows is done with XML/XSLT, not the window itself.
Get me a meat pie floater!
I disagree. Why not at the application level? PDF creator monitors a folder for new files and automatically converts them to PDF (or at least, it did last I heavily used it). I'd rather my OS not do something like that if it's not needed.
Having to manually update the iTunes library on all 4 computers in the house is dumb and annoying.
KM
Kinda like Moe, but just a little more Kool
And you know, nearly three years later, my opinions on it remain... exactly the same.
It'd be cool to see it succeed, but it's basically trying too hard to be a jack-of-all-trades. It offers a bunch of cool toy features, many of which will likely make a small portion of the user base absolutely delighted (things like concert ticket listings, for example). Unfortunately, it does so at the cost of many features that a large potion of the potential user base cares about, such as syncing with music players, maintaining a reasonable memory footprint, keeping the UI light and responsive, and improving the speed and ease with which people can manage their music libraries.
This is becoming a (disheartening) pattern:
Enter Songbird. Three years after its first release, it doesn't support two popular MP3 players from the leading company. Its UI has been redesigned at least twice, and is now even less familiar to users than its first release was. It doesn't look like a native app, and on top of all that, it consumes more memory than it's closed source competitor.
I really would like Songbird to succeed, but at this point I can't honestly say that it's any better than (or even as good as) iTunes.
The real litigious bastards...
I took a look at Songbird recently after aquiring an android phone (t-mobile G1).
Since iTunes won't sync it I was hoping that some open source solution existed. While I was very impressed by how far Songbird has come as a music player, the lack of sync options made me go back to iTunes :(
BUT, since songbird can use fancy plugins, maybe some smart person will realize that we need music sync support for non-ipod devices (and ipods too, I suppose) and write some plugins.
I know some people actually like iTunes but I really have problems wrapping my brain around it. One thing they tend to have in common is limited experience with good media players like Winamp and Amarok. Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
It's really a matter of taste (or lack thereof). The one time I tried Windows Media Player it confused the hell out of me and I went back to iTunes. iTunes may not have all the advanced features, but to me the interface is more intuitive. All I want to do is play my music.
Furthermore, iTunes supported Mac OS X 10.1 for a long time afterwards, whereas Safari (and therefore WebKit) always required at least 10.2.
While you might be right, that is flawed logic. Safari depends on WebKit, WebKit does not depend on Safari. WebKit could be supported on 10.1 if it so chose.
Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
Spoken like someone who has never used iTunes or Windows Media Player.
Or is it just that you don't know what usability means? iTunes is not the paragon of UI design, but it's far beyond the train wreck that is WMP.
Citation granted in my other comment: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1021097&cid=25669385
It's not that he really wants to promote Amarok. He's probably fed up with folks claiming Apple's products to be greater than they really are. I've seen a lot of this lately and I'm sure you did too.
Btw, he might not like Apple but he still fell victim to their propaganda. Genius-like features have been available on a bunch of software players and hardware players (my sister's old Walkman has both a Genius-like feature and a shake-to-change-song function).
Just give me Amarok. It is the only thing I miss from Linux.
That thing is fantastic.
I don't follow. Safari could be supported on 10.1 too if Apple felt like developing it that way. Obviously they did not, and obviously they did not feel like doing that with WebKit either.
Don't discount the left-hand/right-hand effect. It is unlikely that the iTunes team would have been able to convince/force the WebKit team into supporting 10.1 simply because iTunes needed it. Even if WebKit had been ready in time, which it wasn't.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Having the OS monitor the file system is the right way to do things. Otherwise, you end up with hundreds of apps all running background processes unnecessarily. If the OS provides hooks for applications to register themselves as interested in file system events for certain files and/or folders, then the OS can start the application only when needed.
Apple is almost there with their fsevents stuff that they put into Leopard. Now they just need to create a developer-friendly way to use that facility to have their applications "wake up" based on certain file system events.
"(iTunes) UI is simple and good"
Wow! Please give me the inter-universal coordinates for your universe!
I wanna come and see an iTunes that works intuitively and simply!
Meanwhile, here in the RealVerse.....
Can it access the iTunes store? Will it sync with my ipod/phone? Can I access my iTunes-U account with it? Answers: No.... So there is no competition really. Sorry to disappoint.
Songbird has potential, but it needs to lose weight and refine its technique before it can fly with the big birds. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
So it's song is a symphonic siloquy of a solo soaring
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao
How could this happen? Sounds like someone forgot to enable the OS X kill switch!
Amen to that. It has been said before, of course, but never in such a clear, yet funny way.
Open Source is not and cannot be the answer to everything. Open Source is mainly interesting for developers. There is a lot of it out there and almost all of it has a very limited potential. I guess that is because most developers cannot complete the product to a professional level and then support it for a longer period. There is no incentive to make them do so, apart from a bit of recognition. Recognition comes from other developers; users only bitch, and other developers can actually help you sort out your problems. Consequently, developing for other developers is much more rewarding. Hence the success of the Linux kernel and GNU tools.
Anything at a higher level is not aimed at developers, but at users. The only reason to make them competitive is developer incentive. Money, if you like. Open source does not make you any money though, and other rewards are scarce. A few companies have stepped in to support open source development (think OpenOffice), which makes development move a lot faster, and even then they don't get it right. E.g. OpenOffice's presentation package consumes much more resources than PowerPoint (under OSX, at least).
This is not a complete analysis of why Open Source is not the panacea some believe it to be. But while the situation stays as it is, $GEEKY_FEATURE is the way to go.
And anyway, in OSX you can tell the Finder to add songs to iTunes if they appear in a specific directory. Would that be a download directory, perhaps?
That's what I'm saying.. the markup language that the itunes store uses is not compatible with html. You cannot possibly make an xslt that translates it to html unless you make every element on the page absolutely positioned and use javascript to control the layout.
iTunes does not use html, doesn't use webkit to display the store, it uses its own proprietary layout engine.
What about musikcube? It only runs on Windows, though.
This touring musician can only hang his head while folks here bicker about which method makes my work more futile.
We lose from the MAFIAA, we lose from piracy, we lose from DRM's, we lose from gas prices, but we still fucking tour. Would it kill you to get out and see a live band once in a while? The only indie bands that still tour are for the mostpart really fucking good.
I also house tech (meaning I mix bands that tour through my venue), so I hope you'll give this post some thought. Live music right now is endangered, meanwhile the touring talent is on average the best I've ever seen.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The ability to browse the filesystem! It seems strange but the lack of a filesystem browser is a major drawback of iTunes and iTunes-like players (songbird, banshee). This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders. This is the classical elephant in the room.
Check out my cross-platform apps
I think being a "music player" is not the way to go, people already have a choice of media players and their mp3-players too, skip the licensing issues and leave that out already.
The key feature that i'd like to see in an iTunes "Killer" is seamless integration with free creative commons licenced content - all of it - a proper sock-it-to-the-man approach would be to ONLY allow integration with legal-no-payment services and then to shout it from the rooftops.
No more rummaging through archive.org, no typing funky strings into google, no browsing miriads sites like ccTunes and no jumping through hoops with torrents like at legaltorrents*
All integrated, seamless, smooth scrolling and zooming, click to download via ttp,ftp,bittorrent,mule or pigeon so long as after a minute or three it's in your media folder, auto-sync with [usb-attached-thingy], all databased up so you can log in from another system and re-download your collection and totally completely legal and free.
I even have a name for this piece of software, should I ever have time to write it, and the dotcom isn't taken yet, i simply do not have the time (dedicated husband, father of two, full time job) but i'd love to mount a coordinated attack on the media cartels this way - imagine if one day truly independent movies and "tv" shows were too released via this platform, and that it ran on a box connected to your telly...
*disclaimer: my own music is hosted at legaltorrents.com
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
If only PB made their own itunes / torrent look alike that synced content to mp3 players direct from the torrents ;)
Any one want the make the killer app? Azurus plugins ?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Have you ever tried using a shared itunes library on a shared drive? I don't know how itunes would cope with having its library changed from underneath it, but it's worth a shot.
Time and time again, sometimes apple or jobs is way behind the curve.
Maybe they did try to do this feature, but itunes was super slow, or their code has bad threading ability and cant do it well.
Maybe google will make a Jukebox-google organizer thats 1/50th the size of itunes and runs on everything and uses google-shop.
gTunes, :)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And THIS is why I will not use iTunes on any machine: Because I will not destroy the entire OS by installing Quicktime. Consequently, I have never bought or regularly used an ipod. mp3 cd players are $20, and do most of what an ipod will do provided I'm not jogging or something gay and yuppie like I never do anyway.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Don't discount the left-hand/right-hand effect. It is unlikely that the iTunes team would have been able to convince/force the WebKit team into supporting 10.1 simply because iTunes needed it.
I didn't suggest it was likely. I just said that you used flawed logic which could be correct in this case but isn't necessarily true. Besides, WebKit is open source, Apple doesn't necessarily need to convince a team to support 10.1.
Seriously, Amen again. I think we need a few more amens to this comment. I even liked his string variable notation.
Unless a FOSS app is faster and lighter on the memory than #Market_Leader (I made mine a hash, how you like me now?), then it has no business even pretending to be a competitor. Further, the interface should have LESS options, LESS clutter, and look MORE like a native app. Firefox is perfect example of one FOSS product that gets it right.
I'd mention Pidgin too, but I think Voice and Video are now #Basic_Feature, and it has never been remotely good at those features.
VLC is a good example though, simpler and superior to both WMP and every other vid player on the market. Even includes most important codecs out of the box!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I mentioned VLC further up in the discussion. I don't use it for music, but for video, it has no equal on any OS, and works on all three!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12
iPod Device Support Addon - already there
To the casual observer such as myself, Songbird looks heavily inspired by iTunes. The screenshot of Songbird looks very similar to the way I have iTunes configured, with gimmicks like coverflow turned off.
Songbird needs to dramatise its differentiating idea. Right now, it's not obvious what that is.
No gapless; no interest
You seem informated.
Are there any example code we can see?
Bikers.....The only people that understand why a dog hangs his head out a car window.
There's a big difference though: iTunes may use WebKit for some of its iTMS rendering, but Songbird uses XUL for its entire interface. Songbird has (when last I checked) zero native controls (barring the menu bar.)
Safari has zero native controls also, except the menu bar.
Is there one solution for managing your music, photos, videos, documents and other data you download/generate? I don't think so. Files and folders are good for basic media management and easy to implement, but it just doesn't cut it when you need to manage >5000 songs or photos. That's when you need an application that's able to handle the specific properties of the kind of media you want to manage. Music has artist/album/genre/play count/rating, photos have rating/event/keywords/version, and so on.
The problem is two-fold. On the one side there's the problem of storing the data (which, like you said, should be the task of the OS), on the other hand there's the user interface for managing the data, and that's 100% the task of the application.
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player. Though the UI is simple and good like most Apple products, it has lagged in features compared to music players available on Linux and Windows. [...] Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
iTunes plays music? Really?
I must not have realized, since all I use iTunes for is to purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod. Seriously, that's all I use iTunes for. It's a program to buy stuff, and an iPod loader. I've never used iTunes to play music because I'm always on the road when I do that.
Yes, I know that other programs exist to dump tracks to my iPod, but they miss the critical first piece: purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store. I find ITMS very convenient, and I really like the price point of $1 per song, so I can just buy the 1-2 songs that I like from a CD without shelling out $20 for a physical disc with 2 good songs on it.
Tool Player 0.2.5
Seriously give it a try. It's small, easy to use, all the features you need for quick music playing, and uses a trivial amount of power. This is what all you minimalists should be using! It's a tiny download give it a shot.
Monitoring a folder is the job of the OS not the App.
I have 3 Macs sharing a music folder off the house fileserver. Your excuse for why I have to manually go to each Mac and add new music after ripping it onto the server is pretty awful, especially since Amarok has this feature working.
Let me put this another way: monitoring a folder is a perfectly reasonable service for the OS to provide to applications. If OS X can't do it, then it's the only Unix I use that doesn't.
Note that Amarok takes the more sane approach of actually looking at folder contents from time to time. That might offend your purist sensibilities, but it's pretty darned handy in practice.
And mac OS has folder-actions that let you monitor a folder and add songs to any app, not just itunes.
And that works on (increasingly common) shared folders, and it knows that more files have been added since the last time it connected? Give me a break.
I'll remember this the next time a Mac user teases me for manually performing some tasks that OS X does automatically. I still have to add printers by hand, but at least I only have to do that one time. With iTunes I'm working behind the scenes every time I get new music.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
First step: Jailbreak your iPhone and install an ssh server on it. I'm not willing to void my warranty while playing catchup with each firmware update, so I think I'll wait.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
And Apple, as far as I know, has the only OS that, if you add or delete or even rename sa single file in a directory, will rewrite the entire list of files to simply add or delete the actual focused target.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I have an iPod and I use iTunes. There are features it lacks, but there is no other software that reliably syncs over songs with artwork, podcasts, audiobooks, and keeps them sorted properly, so that when I shuffle songs, it excludes the podcasts and audiobooks.
At this point in it's development, iTunes is designed to work with the iPod before desktop features are considered.
All the controls would be native, if you used a sensible OS ;)
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I started using Songbird a few weeks ago when I finally upgraded Ubuntu Gutsy to Hardy and found that the XMMS player was no longer available.
I tried many of the other players available, and came across a mention of Songbird and found I it meets my needs. I have links to Shoutcast streams, MP3 and MP4 videos and they all play just fine with Songbird. I like using m3u playlists and had trouble finding a player that would use them. Some claimed to but were broken.
My MP3 player is an IPod running Rockbox so I don't need my desktop music player to manage my music, I use the file manager. The various CD ripping tools create the correct directory entries.
To me this works out much better. My desktop symlinks the music library to match the directory structure on my IPod, so that I can create playlists either in Songbird, on the IPod or with a text editor and they work in either location.
This model works well for me and I think the Songbird team has done a really good job. That's my 2cents, buy YMMV.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Why on earth would I need to add such an esoteric feature to a music player, instead of having a smart folder that does the same thing using Applescript or Automator?
There are no plugins or themes.
Application level theming is evil, a nasty horrible idea. Themed applications invariably interact poorly with the OS and fail to provide all the features of the native user interface... this even happens on UNIX where there isn't a native look and feel! If anything, iTunes is already too "themed", though Apple has been toning that down over time.
And iTunes certainly DOES have plugins... I'm using iScrobbler right now... as well as a rich Applescript library that makes it possible to interact with iTunes in ways that make plugins unnecessary.
Has the author of this abstract ever used iTunes?
Or even a Mac?
Downloading random files from a web server? Don't know whether that will catch on.
Many podcast are accompanied by a blog entry as well, and opening a web browser to visit the site is an extra nuisance.
I use iTunes most of the time but sometimes I want to do things it can't do or doesn't do the best. I am really not crazy about having a music library. As others have said some of us have a pretty good folder layout for finding music. I still use XMMS (even though I have to run X11 and esd) quite a bit. Also I occasionally use MPlayer as well. What I like about XMMS is that you can sort currently playing music. In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that. At least not without making a playlist, and then you won't play that list seamlessly. You have to stop listening to the song you just clicked on in the library to start playing the playlist. Its just kind of annoying. I would be greatly happy to see XMMS made to run nativity on OS X, and have support added for protected / unprotected ACC files so I don't have to convert them first.
Just my 2 cents, take it how you will.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Those shots of Amarok are beyond ugly. I don't think iTunes is all that great-looking - I mostly keep it hidden and control it via Quicksilver - but damn, Amarok looks like ass.
Songbird looks a little better but that's mostly because it's a half-assed knock-off of iTunes, visually.
I used to use Audion, but I switched to iTunes because everything supports talking to it. And now I've fallen in love with the way it completely insulates me from the file structure my music happens to be in.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Songbird doesn't run on PowerPC Macs.
What thoroughly pisses me off is Mac software that doesn't ship as a universal binary, but is compiled only for Intel Macs. UNIX-targeting Open Source software should be CPU architecture independent, or have a damn good reason not to be. I can't fathom why would an Open Source music player software targeting (among others) Linux be bound to Intel CPU architecture.
I have a mixture of PowerPC and Intel Macs in my household. The iMac G5 my wife uses is less than 3 years old and has plenty of horsepower. I just hate it when software publishers artificially obsolete this CPU platform because they're lazy to add that single additional gcc command line flag to emit both ppc and x86 code in a single executable.
Yes, you might actually end up having to update your code in few places because it was not architecture independent, but if you're proud enough of your work on the code, that actually benefits you, and you should do it.
If you're an open source provider wanting to compete for users on Mac OS X, you'll need every user. Cutting off everyone who bought their last Mac more than two and a half years ago doesn't strike me as wise.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
On OS X, if you have Fink (unstable) installed, you can install Amarok 1.x stable right now. It does a damn good job too.
Links:
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/browse.php?summary=amarok
Only thing is, you will run it through X11. As Leopard's X11 issues are over with the recent updates, it is not a issue. No issues on Tiger too.
Of course, Amarok.app and the rest of KDE 4 running natively is a big deal.
In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that.
"Play next in Party Shuffle"
If you don't use Party Shuffle you're missing a good deal.
As for XMMS, I used to use XMMS when my desktop was free UNIX, and I hated its user interface. Horrible crippled thing that used this amazingly broken theming engine - no regular UI for the main window at all. If I couldn't hide it most of the time and drive it from a dock app in Windowmaker I'd have gone stark raving batshit crazy.
Moving to iTunes was painless. My library structure was already pretty much identical to iTunes, so it took me no time at all to decide to let iTunes manage it. I was able to use an Applescript to use the library I had to fix the missing ID3 tags, and Bob's your uncle...
This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders.
I bet there's an Applescript in one of the Applescript archives on the web that will take your folders, use the folder structure to add any missing tags, and pass them on to iTunes.
It's what I did when I started using iTunes. Don't ask me for the script: that was years ago and I can't be arsed seeing if I can dig out my undocumented Applescript that you'd only have to modify for your folder layout. Get a nice polished on from the web.
The music player that I really love, which doesn't do any of the fancy stuff that players seem to have to do today (some even burn CDs - wtf?), is muine. It's probably not available for OS X, but it does what the title 'music player' implies - it plays music. Without harassing me with stupid views of my music library, but by offering excellent, quick and simple search functionality. It also doesn't bother me with web music stores, or dozends of podcast sources or whatever - it just displays my albums like the real thing (the shelf in my office) does, an alphabetical list of album covers, where I can quickly recognize and chose whatever I feel like, in case I feel more like browsing that searching for something specific. It also doesn't manage iPods, or whatever other music playing device - I don't own any besides my M600i anyways, and I'm well able to copy the stuff I want over on notebooks or USB devices by myself. Basically, I love muine because it only plays music... (It's been broken in Ubuntu for a long time, but started to work again out of the box with 8.10)
intoxicated, adj.: When you feel sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
I love what Songbird has become, there are some things that it still lacks like being able to minimize to a try on my Ubuntu system, or giving out what song it is playing with a bubble window, but other than that it is awesome! Finally after years Songbird is ready to fly! P.S. Sorry for the corny title!
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
I don't know where the hell the original author got Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users, which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions. because iTunes has always supported plugins. Some of them are actual plugins, going in the iTunes plugins folder in your preferences folder, and some are external apps that use Applescript to control iTunes.
Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Solving them by writing plugins is not a solution for the average user either. The average user no more cares whether the plugin they're using uses Applescript, Automator, or the existing native plugin API.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone.
I must have been dreaming that I was using my cheap generic off-brand USB-memory-stick-MP3-player from iTunes for three years before it broke and I got an iPod Shuffle. And it worked better with iTunes, in my opinion, than my shuffle does. Drag a playlist out of iTunes into the player. One step. Done. None of this waiting on iTunes when I sync.
Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
Gee, and I'm doing that every day. No, wait, I'm not, I use iTunes to play music instead.
But then I'm more interested in listening to music than obsessively collecting mistagged torrents, or whatever it is that all you people who seem to spend all their time using obscure features of other players that I never used even when I was using mPlayer and XMMS under Windowmaker and X11 on free UNIX are doing.
I personally don't see the point in porting to a architecture that is incapable of attaining new users and dying quickly.
Used PPC Macs are still selling well. In fact a used G5 or G4 is pretty much the only entry-level Mac option.
No themes and no "hot" folder?
/.*, and to nudge Apple into opening up iTunes, which will never happen.
/.?
This is blindingly obvious to be nothing more than a sad attempt to get "face" time for a few applications for: *enter any reason for it to NOT be on
How did this get on
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
That was EXACTLY why,although I don't know if that is still the plan or not. But I remember reading the original press release and at the time all the music stores sold incompatible DRM infected music files. Songbird was to be an Open Source music player/store that would allow you to buy DRM free files from a number of stores.
That said,I have been giving this out to my customers for a couple of months in my "Handy Free Software CD" that I hand a customer when they pick up their machine. So far I have nothing but good reviews,especially for the "visual Jukebox" extension that I put in the folder with it. Basically it displays the album covers like those jukeboxes you see in the pizza joints above the track selection. really cool and makes it easier to find the album you want to listen too.And combined with this extension it can download any missing album art. I have been using it for awhile myself and it really is a nice player,and the themes(feathers) make it really easy to match the look of your OS. Anyone who hasn't given it a shot yet ought to give it a spin because it really is quite nice.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just look at the UIs, especially Amarok. It is a dog's breakfast. The screens are way too cluttered. iTunes performs well on OS X, it supports the iPhone/iPod,iPod Touch and now comes with some pretty cool visualizers. What exactly is lacking that the "average" users would want or even need? IMHO, nothing. What it does not have can be added by plugins and third-party apps like Synergy.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Ahh, I see what you're saying. I actually agree--an "only full albums" option would be nice, though I doubt I would use it often if ever.
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
What relevance does this have to anything in the summary or anything else you said? (Answer: Nothing, but let's distract attention from the preceding weak argument with a veiled insult to anyone who disagrees with it!)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
Yes, we can do that, right after someone designs a UI liked by every single living human being and every single human being that will ever be born. Perhaps we can dig up and clone a copy of Michelangelo to design it?
Until then, since I am the one using these programs and not their developers, I will continue to switch my applications to skins that look better than default.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. iTunes auto-adds cover art and the like, both with purchased and non-purchased music (assuming the ID3 tags are accurate).
-Daniel
Scroll bars, check boxes, tabs, text fields, the drop down with the magnifying glass in the search bar, etc. Compare the preference dialogues for instance and its blindingly obvious that Safari is a native app while Songbird has been ported. Wherever native UI widgets exist, Safari uses them, Songbird rarely (if ever) does.
Oh ye of little faith. Here's an example courtesy of Google.
What are you talking about? What flawed logic? Seriously, I make what appears to me a very reasonable post and all I get is attacks? Come on, now....
Apple released WebKit with a requirement for 10.2 and up. That is a simple fact. Given that simple fact, this would make it unusable for iTunes, which needed to support 10.1.
WebKit was not open source at the time, and in any case there is no way that Apple is going to allow the iTunes team to maintain a separate fork of WebKit just to support 10.1. WebKit (not to be confused with WebCore or KHTML) did not get open sourced for at least a year or two. Please do not attack me based on your obviously flawed understanding of the history of this framework.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
Oh ye of little faith. Here's an example courtesy of Google.
But that doesn't seem to handle the case where the folder is being shared to the Mac, not from it. For example, my fileserver is a FreeBSD machine in the back of the house. Suppose I mounted the music directory on a Macbook and created a folder action to automatically add new music.
First, I'm not at all certain that this would work in the first place, because I don't know whether Samba has mechanisms to handle this or if they work perfectly. Even if they did, though, what happens if I add music while the Macbook is turned off? Are folder actions smart enough to say "show me all files that've changed since I last looked, which was at $DATESTAMP"?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player
Yes, and that is EXACTLY how Apple design the majority of their products and software, and that is also why it is so popular. 95% of users don't want all that extra crap thrown in. When will people like you understand this?
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes
Utter rubbish, this is not a basic feature. The more crud like this you pile on the harder it is to maintain the product, the more support you have to do, and besides hardly anyone will ever use it.
Apple know when to stop, that's one of their strengths. A large amount of open source developers have no idea when to stop, that is one of the reasons it never becomes main stream. Instead of coding nonsense like this, how about making the thing stable and functional? This is one of the reasons why Ubuntu is doing so well, concentrate on the basics and stop shoveling on irrelevant features.
Orlando..
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
whereas Safari (and therefore WebKit) always required at least 10.2
Which is not logically equivalent to what you should have said:
whereas WebKit (and therefore Safari) always required at least 10.2
Probably just some OCD pedantry, but I agree that you did have your ipso facto backwards; in your original statement it is not clear that WebKit requires 10.2 when used in a context aside from it's integration in Safari and thusly it would not necessarily follow that WebKit would not be usable in 10.1 as would be required for it's integration in iTunes. So can we all get along now?
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Hi. I'd be happy to. But I just woke at the crack of Noon and I want to re-verify that the same process is happening, for the same reason, in Leopard, 10.5.5,here. In the meantime, any one of us on the Mac OS can see huge discrepancies between core [Unix] and GUI management of files.
The simplest illustration is to make a duplicate of a folder containing files one wants to delete, and selecting either all of them or, in a real world situation, only the files that we actually want to delete, and using the Finder mechanism (Command-delete, followed by Command-shift-delete) to Move to Trash, and Empty. Watch what happens in the GUI.
We'll see an alert that says something about 'Preparing to Empty Trash', which is rather absurd, since the Apple default command for Empty Trash has just been invoked, by the User, and this alert is basically saying 'executing the command.' So, why don't we get a similar redundant 'alert' following each and every user-authorized process? (Don't try to answer that, of course, because logic doesn't enter into it, but a sort of 'intermittent' Apple version of logic is clearly at work here.). Then, of course, if there's a lot of files we'll see the "preparing" alert, and a graphic representation of the system 'counting' down the the number of files to delete, followed by another alert window (after the Empty Trash command is then being executed) which shows the number of files being deleted in a 'countdown' sort of manner. When the process is done, the alert window closes.
Now. Using the duplicate of the folder that you made before the test, open the Terminal, do a rm -R followed by a space, of course, and then simply drag and release the icons of the same files or folders and files to anywhere in the Terminal window, and hit the Return key. When the process completes we find ourselves back at the 'prompt' as always. Now ask yourself, why did one process take so long compared to the other, on an identical number of 'targets'?
The answer to that question is: That's the difference between using the cnode-based Finder file manager, and a bash or tcsh process, which, like every file manager in Unix/Linux, for forty years now, uses the inode for file management.
An argument can be made that what if a newbie Mac user 'accidentally' selected a bunch of files, chose move to trash and then selected Empty Trash, and didn't really want to do any of those things? Wouldn't having an alert give them a point where they could intervene and kill the process? The answer to that used to be Yes, but I'm not so sure about even THAT, these days, and besides, why should the overwhelming majority of users be hampered, time-wise, by a process that could only possibly be useful in a one-in-a-million number of process events, at best? (I heard a rumor that, to speed up their hackneyed file management, Apple has decided not to actually open and close files before clobbering the original, and THEN, writing the 'new' tmp file to disk, meaning that if anything goes wrong in the 'write', the original data is already gone, and that's a violation of Unix methods AND Apple's own API)
I'm open to answers, or, more likely, comments or opinions on this, but after years of seeing this behavior, I chose to keep a terminal open, to be used any time files needed to be moved, copied or deleted in some sort of 'bulk' number. There's always the interactive (rm -i) version of the rm process in the shell, for people who want to go and 'bulk' dump files one-by-one with a y/n choice on each and every file. I've never used that option, and in all my years I only lost data once, and that was a 72 hour session that ended when I realized I'd selected all the
They are only not logically equivalent of you are unaware of the history of the two products.
Safari and WebKit were joined at the hip from day one. The way you originally got WebKit on a machine running 10.2 was to install Safari. WebKit came with it. There was no other way to obtain it. Later, Apple bundled both Safari and WebKit with the 10.2.8 update, so that it was no longer a separate installation.
The system requirements for Safari and WebKit have always been the same, because they were simply part of the same package. WebKit's requirements were Safari's requirements and vice versa. Therefore the ordering is irrelevant.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
No preferences, ignores proxy settings, tries to call home, when you close the main window the currently playing song stops (no background operation)... forget it.
You can nest smart playlists. I have a series like:
two star = rating is 2 stars and last played is more than 28 days ago ... ...
three star = rating is 3 stars and last played is more than 14 days ago
four star = rating is 4 stars and last played is more than 3 days ago
five star = rating is 5 stars and last played is more than 24 hours ago
combined = playlist is two star or playlist is three star
noise = genre is opera or genre is hip hop
unambient = a regular playlist for music I like but don't want coming up in party shuffle
good no repeats = playlist is combined and playlist is not noise and playlist is not unambient
Feeding that into party shuffle gets a much better "mix" than letting apple's magic 'play higher rated songs more often' fail to work for me...
I just said that you used flawed logic which could be correct in this case but isn't necessarily true.
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Not sure how you can say someone used "flawed logic" but not say that they're wrong.... In any case, my logic wasn't flawed unless you're ignorant of the subject being discussed.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
First, before I get anyone messed up, the HFS+ creation of Apple's that is involved is the CNID not, as I wrote, cnode. The CNID is trying to accomplish the same thing as the Unix inode, so I always have misnamed the Apple creation as cnode. Sorry about that, but, except for the nomenclature, it changes nothing.
Here's the deal with my original post and your question: Unix directories (the file that has the list of included files) only contains the file names and inodes of the files. Every device (drive) has one list of all the inodes on the drive. So finding a file only requires multiplying the node times the default inode block size, and the 'result' is a pointer to the location of the file itself. One disc operation, no matter how many files or nested directories exist on the device. Simple, one search, one disk I/O.
With Apple's HFS+, this is not the case, at all. Apple uses a thing called a Binary Tree, but it's their own 'version' of the same 'tree' concept that is on windows and Unix. It has three 'nodes', with the actual file info (name, last modified, etc) at the end of each file in the 'leaf' node.
If we think of the 'tree' as it is usually portrayed graphically, as in the tree view of Windows Explorer, it is left-to-right. This comes into play in a big way. In the HFS+ file system all the folders/directories have to be pre-sorted. Why? Because the node at the top simply points 'down' to the leaf node that contains the info, and the 'pointer' for every folder/directory on the disc MUST POINT to the exact midway (middle) of the folder, so that the location process can start whittling down the location using compare half list, if located, compare next smaller half list, and on and on,until the file is actually located. That's the binary nature of the B-tree. But the huge drawback is that any time a file is deleted or added to ANY directory/folder, the B-tree for that folder and all parent folders has to be redrawn. Why? Because changing anything in the list has the effect of changing the real location of the list half-way point, and the pre-sorted requirement forces the OS to rewrite the directories to 'balance' the new reality as far as where all the halfway points are.
Obviously, that looks like trouble, so Apple came up with a that could be a crazy long search process, so Apple added another file to the drive root called a Catalog File at block 2 on the drive. The catalogFile is grouped into nodes that each have a block size that mirrors the block size of the disk's original formatting, and contains all the info as far as where node begins with a 14-byte descriptor, which contains information about what kind of node (index, leaf), how many records it has, where it is in the B-tree, where the next and previous nodes are, etc. It needs this info for two reasons: One, to cut down on the time that a B-tree only search might require on a complex drive, and two, to act as a reference when it came to balance those CNIDs and B-trees after any delete or addition of a file, anywhere.
Let's pause, because right here, even without more info, it seems obvious that a lot more steps of some kind are going to come into play, compared to the maximum one disc operation required in Unix. And it is the case. OSX X tries to cache a lot of this catalogFile info in RAM, as a helper, but a deep search, or any operation on a deeply nested file, will always result in numerous trips back and forth to the extents of the Catalog. Apple has stated that, on a drive with 500,000 files, the '
In propositional logic there is a concept known as material implication, "if A is true then B is also true; if A is false then nothing is said about B." Such that it matters if one set is a subset or a superset of the other. I.E. All cars have wheels does not mean that all things which have wheels are cars. To wit, you could point to a thing with wheels and say "this is a car" AND it very well may be a car, but if the only reason that you think it is a car is because it has wheels would be illogical since that same inductive reasoning could also have you pointing at a train or a skateboard.
Don't mistake this post as some sort of argumentative bait. I am merely trying to clarify what I understood his comment to mean. In all honesty I don't know about nor do I particularly care about webkit, safari, or OSX...
-*The above statement is printed entirely on recycled electrons*-
Yes but my post is only logically unsound if you are unaware of the connection between the two items.
To take the car analogy, it's like saying "the car (and therefore the wheels) did not arrive until noon". That "therefore" clause appears to be illogical if you are unaware that a car and its wheels are fastened together strongly and will arrive at any given location at the same time.
So perhaps my comment about Safari and WebKit's availability appears illogical because of that. But in fact they were just two sides of the exact same product at the time, so there's nothing illogical about it.
The world isn't built on first-order logic. Context is always assumed....
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
It's true that the Catalog File is rather antiquated (and of course, Apple are moving towards a more modern file system, ZFS, for the future of OS X). But it's not true that HFS+ has to "rewrite the entire list of files to simply add or delete the actual focused target" -- the entire point of using an efficient data structure like a B*-tree is to avoid having to re-write the "whole list". If you don't understand the use of B*-trees in filesystems, may I recommend Dominic Giampaulo's book "Practical File System Design with the Be File System" (http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf).
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I know that book, but Apple doesn't use anything like the original implementation of the BeOS file system, BFS, at all. OS X doesn't even support a drive formatted that way. BFS runs with i-nodes, and its version of the B*-tree is the original version, not the Apple-modified b-tree at all.
I have SongBird installed, but it's just too slow !
iTunes runs pretty slowly on this MBP - it's a July 2006 model - but for the moment it seems better than the competition.
--
http://friendfeed.com/wstewart
Okay, I know this is not a Mac-like answer, but I simply rsync my iTunes library between computers and it works perfectly. The music is on a (read-only) share that can be reached on all computers. To sync the computers I launch a simple AppleScript application containing the rsync command.
But I don't want multiple copies of a 30GB music directory.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
Right now I have SRS iWow and Volume Logic loaded as DSP plugins, Lathe, Jelly and Stix loaded as third-party visualizers and sometimes I load up iScrobbler to scrobble songs I'm listening to in iTunes.
All of this is running on an Intel iMac running 10.5.5 with iTunes 8.0.1.
I don't know what they were smoking but I'm sure it is illegal in most countries.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Ok, that's a reasonable question and one which I do not know the answer to. Though if you're running a multiplatform network, you're probably the kind of person that could do something combining a shell-script and folder actions. The Apple solution works well within a homogenous Apple environment, but breaks down outside of it. And I guess folder actions isn't a solution for Windows iTunes either.
"Preparing to empty trash" is shown because the system may have to wake up sleeping filesystems, which may take a human-noticeable (and possibly long) time during which some other visible I/O operations may block.
Counting the number of files to delete and then reporting the number of those that have been deleted is mainly because placebo countdown stripes annoy many more people much more than this annoys you. A recursive descent is the only practical way to know how many files are to be deleted (and their sizes), and takes time.
In principle, it could do recursive unlink(2) calls entirely in the background with no non-error status messages. This has been tried and was unpopular, especially with slow media, which are also most likely to be ejected and physically removed from the system soon after an "Empty Trash".
Only 30GB? :-)
No I don't sync the Music library, I sync iTunes' settings (iTunes Library; Album Artwork/; iTunes Library Genius.itdb; iTunes Music Library.xml ;iTunes Music; iTunes Library Extras.itdb), as I said the Music library itself is on a common share.
To play the same music from outside your local subnet there are all sort of possibilities. For instance there's MyTunesRSS which let you play your music from any web browser supporting Flash (with a little bit of Apache configuration all you need is port 80 so it works almost everywhere); then there's a simple hack where you locally copy all traffic over TCP port to another TCP port and inject the proper mDNS stuff in a computer outside of your network and play your music anywhere using iTunes itself; or simply use Simplify Media and play your enitire music collection anywhere even using an iPhone over 3G in your car. And that's just three examples.
If you think even a little bit out of the box a lot of cool stuff is possible. I can't understand why all these Slashdot unix geeks are suddenly so limited and "locked up" as soon as they hear the word Apple. Behind that "pretty ui" there's another environment where a lot of nice stuff is possible.
I know that BFS and HFS+ are different -- my point was that characterising the collection of files as a "list" is misleading -- it's a much more efficient data structure -- and characterising the affected part of that data structure as "the entire" is even worse.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
That is fine except now you have to learn applescript.
If you have never done that before, prepare for several
hours of confusion and frustration just to modify existing scripts.