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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."
Likely because those people are stealing music via torrents or Usenet and are too lazy to add newly arrived music to iTunes.
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It seems like that's always the way to do it with Apple products; their way, or not at all. Personally, I enjoy being to choose (and switch between) manual and automatic management of my music.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
SongBird is nice, that other one look like yet another horribly designed and ugly Linux GUI.
And while SongBird has plug-ins and even touts an SDK, it doesn't yet support iRemote or Speakers. Being that I have my iTunes library on a network share and use a single MacMini as my media server across a 5 room airTunes + AppleTV setup, having the speakers selector is critical. SongBird is essentially a single zone setup which would totally destroy my very nice multizone setup that I can control via wifi with the iRemote app on my iPhone
Considering the sheer amount of effort Apple has put into their media center offerings as a whole, I do not think it is likely that SongBird will replace iTunes as my OS X media player any time soon. But, if they can work in device support for AppleTV and airTunes, they might have something.
Those are the desktop's job.
Stop reinventing the wheel and bloating up our apps. If the desktop's mechanisms aren't good enough, then help improve them. That will add value to all applications that use those mechanisms, instead of just your single application.
From the latest version in Debian KDE 4.1.3 running Amarok one thought comes to mind: it's an absolute abortion.
Okay, I've been on Apple gear since '79. and I have used DEC, IBM, other big PC brands, a SPARCStation at one time, and had Linux loaded on Titanium PowerBooks, etc. I am not an expert on anything, I admit that. But, the Finder, and iTunes, are using cnodes to try to figure out where things are, and Finder, the file manager, scatters little breadcrumbs called DS_store files, that supposedly remember window position and size, and they have these huge indexes all over the place, hooked into Spotlight, and you want to know something?
A simple UNIX inode-oriented file manager (like say, Xfile from Rixstep) will absolutely slaughter the Finder and all its friends at the same tasks. It's not even close. But so what? I used Win 98 on an 8-yr old machine hooked to a server that was so ancient the single monitor for it made you think you were stone cold drunk in terms of vision, on a military project... and i could find files faster than on any Mac at the time. Period. And one other thing: That old Compaq Win98, ancient server system didn't need so much as a reboot in the 22 months I was on it. Not one.
Meanwhile, on an Aluminum PowerBook, running Leopard 10.5.5, I get a spinning ball if I so much as move the mouse within the iTunes scroll bar. 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. That is nothing short of insane. They have everybody brainwashed into thinking they they need twin quadcores to do the same operations we were doing in OS 7 with a minus factor less resources and hardware back then.
I do NOT care how wonky either one of these releases is. I do NOT own an iPod, and I will never be stupid enough to buy an iPhone. All I want iTunes or any file manager related to audio tracks to do is this: Play the fucking music, and get the fuck out of the way.
How difficult is that? Answer: it's not.
I realize that, as ironic as it is, I will get modded Flamebait or whatever, just like the AC up there, that I happen to be in 100% agreement with, DESPITE having admitted to having invested more time and money in Apple gear, year-in year-out, than many of the more normal or 'smarter' people here.
Apple made a decision to support carbon/OS 9 'legacy' to avoid alienating the handful of developers that were still writing for the Mac, back when 10.0.1 was released. It was an understandable [no balls] choice but it was still totally wrong wrong wrong. And today with a couple gigs of RAM, on an OS that was installed to a completely wiped, multipass-overwritten zeroed-out internal drive, I get spinning beach balls for having the audacity (no pun intended) to rename a file in the iTunes window, or click in the scroll bar, in iTunes, and I call Bullshit. Amarok? Maybe a little buggy? That sounds like a walk in the park to me. Bring it on, I'll go through the betas and write little bug reports or whatever is necessary to help them make a decent entry into the market on the Mac, no problemo. Enough is enough, and I'm in.
I apologize for typos or a missing word here or there. It's the chemo, no kidding, and I just have a limit on how much precious time I can afford to 'waste' on revisions towards turning out quality text. And that really sucks big time, when you care about quality. I don't how Apple sleeps, because I'm losing sleep, and they're costing me time on top of time.