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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."
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.
specially if the competition can't play Protected AAC?
As the most overused phrase of 2008 says, "Yes we can."
Two words and a hyphen love; in Linux world we call it
libxine-extracodecs
Face your daemons!
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php
No, the problem is just that you're dumb.
If you use the Amazon MP3 Downloader (as I do) then simply include the top level folder.
As your download finishes, iTunes automatically picks it up and it shows up. Artwork included, coverflow shows up.
iTunes works very well at what it does. You are not the main stream audience, liking to think you're more technically advanced. I'm not sure how you can convince yourself and still miss such a basic feature that iTunes has had for ages, but hey, it's your label for yourself.
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!
iTunes doesn't use Safari, it just looks web-like. It's custom rendering.
What usually ends up happening with skins or themes, is the user selects one they like atheistically the best. Then they sit there in confusion. They can't figure out how to use the thing because the buttons are all shaped and colored strangely. They don't make good usability decisions. Heck look at myspace vs facebook for what you should and should not allow for themes. Myspace allows anything and as a result every one's page is ugly as sin and difficult to look at much less use, Facebook allows less ui modifications and is thus more usable.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
...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.
Amarok can sync both iPods and iPhones. It is therefore a replacement by your working definition.
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?
iTunes can already do this - or rather OSX can already do this FOR iTunes. It's called Applescript, and scripted folders. Build an Applescript that automatically moves new content to your iTunes library either instantly, or at a scheduled time (once a day, once a week - whatever). Put that folder in a handy place like on your desktop or in the sidebar, then just drop your tunes onto it and let Applescript do the rest for you. Applescript can do anything you can do yourself through the GUI. If you have a tedious repetitive task that you regularly carry out, build an Applescript to do it for you automatically or on demand. That's it's beauty (oh, that and its simplicity). Automator is just a simple GUI for Applescript - and it's so underused by most people.
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.
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).
$ 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.
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
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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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.
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.
On OSX, iTunes _does_ pick things up. It will monitor your downloads folder and add any mp3s etc. to its library.
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?
Amarok can sync both iPods and iPhones.
So can Rhythmbox, Or gtkpod. Though I believe the iPod Touch requires a bit of messing around to get it to work...
Bullshit.
Themes are an excuse to create completely no-standard UI, round windows, that a branded with tiny low contrast controls and giant pictures of either latest movie, latest hot girl, or better yet, the latest hot girl in the latest movie.
UI is hard, and it's not for amateurs.