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/

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.