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iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition

Posted by timothy on from the file-managers-that-also-play-music dept.

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."

4 of 668 comments (clear)

  1. Folder actions by MushMouth · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. link by SpiceWare · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php

  3. Re:iPod by ojustgiveitup · · Score: 5, Informative

    Amarok can sync both iPods and iPhones. It is therefore a replacement by your working definition.

  4. Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? by wootest · · Score: 5, Informative

    $ 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.