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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.
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.
...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.
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.
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?
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.
You're trolling, right? iTunes plays anything Quicktime plays and you can get Quicktime plugins for all the formats you mentioned...
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/