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."

Comments

Try mpd (music player daemon)

[slifox]

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/

Re:Why is there a browser in the music player?

[Jabbrwokk]

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.

You're making the Audion guys cry.

[pizzach]

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/

Amarok: The undisputed champion

[ars]

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.

Re:Basic feature?

[mrchaotica]

Why have to "import" at all? Why does every music player have to manage a "library"? I've got a file system. I've learned to use it to manage files in ways I like. Just let me do that.

In that case, you want to use the Quicktime player, not iTunes.

Hard & Symbolic links.

[OgGreeb]

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.

Re:Allow me to break this down...

[vux984]

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.

Where have we seen this before...?

[maztuhblastah]

Ah. Right. Almost three years ago.

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:

1. Open source competitor arrives to challenge closed-source market leading freeware. /. and CNet publish headlines like "$SOFTWARE killer?" We brag about how it's awesome for allowing us to do $GEEKY_FEATURE.
2. Normal users point out that it doesn't yet provide $BASIC_FEATURE. Geeks point out that 1) users don't really want $BASIC_FEATURE, and they should instead use $GEEKY_SUBSTITUTE. 2) $BASIC_FEATURE will be included at some point in the future.
3. Normal users ignore the app, as it doesn't do the basic things they require.
4. Time passes. Development moves on with no unified focus. More geek features are added to the program. Eventually $BASIC_FEATURE appears.
5. User points out that the app's implementation of $BASIC_FEATURE is not an improvement on the existing solution, and that it is hard to find amidst a mass of misc. features.
6. Geeks cry "But it's an open source alternative to $MARKET_LEADER!"
7. Normal users ignore it because it still doesn't do $BASIC_FEATURE particularly well, and the UI is cumbersome.

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.