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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."
I just wish Apple hadn't gimped the iPod by not providing a filesystem browser :(
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/
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
Agreed and this is my primary reason moving to the Mac. How well a GUI is laid out and how well it looks is a BIG deal to me. Believe it or not, it really helps me to keep moving on an otherwise very boring project.
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.
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
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.
The features it is missing are niche features. How many of these "more feature complete" players you are using have features like Genius playlists?
An apple specific feature (I know since I have a free ipod touch that came with my gf's mac). I know of plenty of music players that have things like inbuilt support for last.fm and magnatune.
Video podcasts?
Amarok and gtkpod have no issues handling these.
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?
Amarok works perfectly with my mp3 player. Why would I want my music on my communication device (no matter what flashy ads tell me) ? I don't buy my music from iTunes. Rhapsody works seamlessly.
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.
Typical apple user drivel. My phone syncs my google calendar, contacts, photos etc. Why would I give a rat's ass about whether it syncs with an ipod or not ? As to streaming internet radio, my ipod touch does not even support shoutcast, instead supporting crippled apps like Pandora etc. which do not give me any freedom in adding new streams. No wonder its collecting dust at home. Along with my gf's two month old mac.
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.
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
I use itunes but I really wish they'd put in nested playlists; the more music you have the harder it is to browse.
In that case, you want to use the Quicktime player, not iTunes.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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
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.
You're kidding, right? Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially /[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing. Of course having my player realize to look there periodically is better than it staring dumbly at me until I tell it to.
Have you ever looked at what itunes does when you tell it to organize your library for you? When you just keep your hands off?
songs/artist/album/song.mp3
if its part of a compilation its:
songs/compilations/album/song.mp3
hardly disorganized. Trivial to find anything if you ever need to do it manually. But you don't ever need to. It may not be what you would have chosen but so what? iTunes makes it trivial to sort by genre or artist or whatever you like... if I type 'card' into itunes quick search, it instantly pulls up the Cardigans track from the Romeo+Juliette sound track, along with its appearnace on a compilation disk I got free with some jeans. So the fact that they aren't together on the disk doesn't affect me. I can also browse by album, artist, genre, and trivially filter them.
I can define smart playlists that track how and when I've listened to track and sync it onto my ipod based on that. When I sync my ipod, it automatically rotates a chunk of music I like but have listened to recently with music I like but have not, while keeping my favorites on at all times. I can rerate tracks on the ipod itself, and it syncs back to itunes... etc, etc, etc.
Face it its an above average music player.
The truly sad part about your comment is that Apple could probably have this "advanced" feature added in two hours of work.
I agree they could. They could also add all sorts of pointless dangley bits and features to satisfy people like you, but then it wouldn't be the simple elegant app that it is. I'm not saying your feature idea is bad, but its pretty necessary. Especially since, on OSX at least, its relatively trivial to write an applescript to do what you want here.
You're right. Downloading or ripping the music directly into a destination folder is voodoo magic.
ripping music? itunes does this for you. why would you use 2 pieces of software for this?
downloading music? you mean using a torrent or something? Yeah, because dragging it to the itunes window is the hard part.
Congratulations. I'm happy you like people making your UI decisions for you, but not everybody agrees. To insult them by pretending that must mean they're 13-year-old goths or have "unhealthy fascination[s]" just makes you an asshat. Period.
I take it you haven't browsed the extensive library of Winamp themes?
http://www.winamp.com/skins/browse/2
Take a good hard look, find me one that's objectively better than itunes from an HCI perspective among their top rated? hell, find one anywhere on the site.
I think gimmick terminology is stupid too, but now could you possibly nitpick for no good reason any more than this? It has to be some sort of a record.
I'm sure I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't been in the summary. That the submitter felt it important enough to mention is what made it important enough to rebut.
At the end of the day I think its great that amarok and songbird are available for OSX; I don't even think it shouldn't be on slashdot... I just don't agree with the submitter with respect to the relative merits of itunes vs the new comers.
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...
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