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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."
Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported. Yeah, big contender.
Since when has Apple cared about software competition? Especially if the competition can't play Protected AAC?
Why do i want themes? I would much rather have a clean simple music player. Though having a music player that automatically scan a specific folder for new music is useful if your music libary changes all the time.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes
I don't think of this as a basic feature... essentially you are asking for automated library updates whenever new files are added to the system. iTunes is built around two methods of file importation: Rip from CD or add from iTunes Store. The third option is manual: Drag and drop files to the library.
Plugins are even listed at Apple's website.
Themes are missing, I admit, but for many people this is not a "basic feature", either.
GPL Deconstructed
I just wish Apple hadn't gimped the iPod by not providing a filesystem browser :(
It's not a replacement unless it can sync with and manage my iPhone and iPod.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
I like iTunes specifically because it doesn't waste my time with themes and skins and color choices. How cares what your music player looks like? How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
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.
The features it is missing are niche features. How many of these "more feature complete" players you are using have features like Genius playlists? Video podcasts? 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?
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.
iTunes missing one feature compared to other players does not mean it has less features overall.
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/
We don't use iTunes because there's no credible competitor - we use iTunes because it links to the iPod and/or the AppleTV and/or Front Row. brFurther, I don't understand why people always whine about "not monitoring a folder for library changes." Who cares? I mean, apparently some people do, because they whine about it... but the iTunes Library is your music manager, not your OS folders. Treat it that way and monitoring a folder becomes irrelevant.
-Daniel
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.
"The team behind Songbird has members who previously developed for both Winamp"
Ah, I was wondering why 'skins and themes and monitoring a folder for new music' were considered missing features. Now I know the answer.
No thanks, guys. I consider simplicity a feature in a music player, not spending 3 minutes wondering where the 'Play' button went on some new skin made to look like Batman's tool belt or something.
I just want something that will let me drag and drop my music onto my device.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Blarg, last time I used it, it was horribly slow, and that was just a couple months ago. So unless they went through some amazing code changes that sped it up like crazy, I don't see it as being able to survive as competition. Maybe as an alternative for those who just hate itunes, but not competition.
Is it just me, or does Amarok appear to be damn ugly? I'm sure the functionality rocks, but it looks pretty typical of work-in-progress Linux apps in that it's in need to a good GUI designer...
Is there more to it than what you see in the author's screengrab?
Also, I'm with "rogabean" further up - it's not a true iTunes replacement 'til it can deal with my iPhone. Until then, it's just duplicating an already-running app.
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I specifically like itunes because it has /few/ settings and fully supports my ipod (touch) with adress book, calendar, bookmarks etc
I just copied my osx ipod library onto my friends vista, merged the artwork folder into her old artwork folder and told itunes to add the new music folder, it works perfectly (albeit way slower on vista than osx;)
But the dead rat was removing missing songs, as itunes still cannot sort by (!) so i selected all, in info set rpm to 42 and sorted by rpm, now the missing files were at one end, fully deletable;)
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
I see that Songbird has something similar to Coverflow, but here's my question: can one create a playlist that meets such criteria as
1.) all tracks are tagged with track numbers (1 of 12, etc).
2.) all tracks are part of an album with at least x tracks.
And the long shot...
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
I really preferred Coverflow before it was integrated into iTunes. Much more useful as a stand alone app as you could filter using criteria 1 and 2 above.
This is just another example of how Apple is a weighted sink on the entire open source community. Open source applications flow from Linux and Windows to Apple, but you NEVER see Apple applications flow back.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php
Apple iPhones, iPod Touch and Microsoft Zune devices are not yet supported. Yeah, big contender.
So don't get a retarded proprietary music player*. Also I guess they never claim to be a manager for your music players, it's an application for playing music on your computer.
* It's not their fault you don't think before you buy.
From the features page of their web page:
Web Browser
Songbird includes an integrated web browser with features like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and more.
Anyway, 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?!!
To show the lyrics or what?
Kind of say enough about the developers than they thought that was a good idea because it was possible, un-focused bloatware.
I doubt I'll start to use it thanks to that "feature."
... pay a crap load of money for this barren an OS (which is inseparable from the hardware) while superior choices exist for free OS'es (that run on more hardware) and even Windows. Always thought apple users were status wh***s with a pathological desire to look hip to the frat boy/meaning of life empty-talk crowd with a complimentary membership of the Steve Jobs cult (while looking monumentally stupid to the technically proficient or even people with any common sense). This is just more evidence.
IMHO one of the main reasons for iTunes sucking is that it is more a storefront for Apple to sell music than a player. (Imagine what could those arrows point to instead of the song on the shop)
[webmonkey.com] has a very good article on this.
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_Top_Ten_Reasons_iTunes_Sucks
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
Out of curiosity...why is that useful or desirable? Why are any of your points useful actually?
Not trying to be a smartass, I just really don't get why you would care about those things?
It seems a bit unfair to say that iTunes has had no competitors under Mac OSX as a music player when VLC does an admirable job at playing my music and TV shows, on OSX, and has done for a long time now.
Blog
Until I'm able at least dock songbird in linux I don't see myself using it. It's just one of those stupid little things that I simply cant live without.
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.
Monitoring a folder is something you can script. Slashdotters ought have no problems with this...
Applescript (weird, english-like language that it is) is actually pretty powerful - Apple do make an effort to open up their apps for scripting, even though they're really GUI apps, and it's a really under-used feature. Shame.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
Starting an argument by claiming that "iTunes is an average music player," then linking to an alternative that looks like a pixel-for-pixel rip-off of said application is a very poor way to make a point. Seriously.
The only "real" advantage I see here is support for Vorbis, and even still -- the reality is that 99.99% of users do not care -- or even know what it is, for that matter.
And as for Amarok... I don't know how much "sexy" there was in there previously, but if I was willing to put up with this sort of mess, I wouldn't be using a mac in the first place. A for effort, but I think I'll stick with iTunes, thanks...
Carry on.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
According to Songbird's site, it doesn't support folder monitoring either. It also doesn't support iPhones, the iPod Touch, Airtunes, CD ripping (?), or video. I forget, why would I choose it over iTunes?
This is stupid, when you can the original iTune for free, why would anyone want to use clone which happen to look like iTune. Try selling knock off against original for same price. The thing is, there is no lower prices than free can exist.
Good luck and please stop wasting time developing what has already been done.
Surely you know that there arepeople out there that are colour blind.
And that is just for starters.
Applications that are monolithic and unconfigurable will not serve properly many users.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
But found the interface chunky and slow. It uses twice the RAM of iTunes and sounds like crap (when playing the same file in both).
Don't even think of trying to run this on your iPhone. Remember, Apple doesn't like competing applications.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player.
itunes is significantly better than average.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
How exactly is that a basic feature? Music enters itunes 3 basic ways:
1 you rip a Cd with itunes.
2 you buy a song from itunes music store
3 you drag a file from your computer onto the itunes library
and one advanced way:
4 you tell itunes to import music from a folder
Setting up itunes to monitor a folder would be number 5, and in the 'advanced feature' category.
Secondly, how exactly do the "latest music files" get into this monitored folder? If you manually dragged them there, then you might as well have just manually dragged them onto the itunes window. If they arrived there through any other means, that just further underscores that its an advanced feature.
There are no plugins
That is certainly not a basic feature either. And its probably the ONLY thing I sort of agree with.
I'd like iTunes to support automatically syncing with non-Apple players. I'd like iTunes to support syncing with programs other than Outlook on Windows.
[There are no] themes.
I call that a feature. I'm not 13 anymore. I am happy to let my programs to feature well designed UI, without delegating the task to other 13 year olds who variously have an unhealthy fascination with celebrities, movies, or just want everything to be some sort of gothic red and black. If anything, I think iTunes on Windows should look MORE like a windows app.
Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
Its few faults and many strengths actually. The biggest advantage it has over other players is that it works with =all= ipods/iphones seamlessly.
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.
Hardly a ringing endorsement if you look at either of those products.
It has support for extensions and themes ('feathers' in Songbird parlance).
Right, because inventing non-standard gimmick terminology is always a good idea. I'm glad Thunderbird has addons not 'feathers' and firefox...? 'hairs'? 'teeth'? Spare me.
Amarok: The undisputed champion among Linux music players is finally coming to OS X, thanks to due KDE 4 being ported to OS X. 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.
'reasonably stable' with a KDE4 look on OSX? Yeah that's going to create an army of converts.
Hopefully these players will gain traction among OS X users,
They won't. They will make a very small niche (self)-satisfied. That's not a bad thing, per se, mind you, but don't make more out of it than is really there.
which will finally force Apple to either step up in terms of features or open up iTunes for extensions."
See above. It won't. Even though I really do want iTunes to work with Thunderbird instead of Outlook...
Beauty is relative and subjective btw....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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.
Songbird may be coming along, but it still has a ways to go. Looking around the feature list, I don't see anything special. Sure, iTunes doesn't find concert tickets for me, but I can honestly say that was a feature I wanted in a music player/manager. CD ripping is still only in beta, as is the much vaunted watched folder feature (add me to the list of folks who don't get why that is such a necessary feature). Maybe in a couple more years this will be big enough to be noticed by Apple, but don't count on it anytime soon...
As for Amorak, you link to a blog entry in which one of the developers managed to get it to run on his Mac... woo hoo. As it requires mysql and KDE (close to 500 MB of downloads - talk about bloat...), this hardly seems like something the average user is going to turn to.
Don't get me wrong - competition is good. iTunes works well for me, but it doesn't fit everyone's model of what such a tool should do. However, if your goal is to prod Apple into implementing your favorite features into iTunes, these projects aren't going to do it. Why not file a feature request with Apple? They do read them...
iTunes takes care of my iPhone, remote speakers, play (most) formats, show rentals, buying music, streaming music from my shared server, and managing my library just fine. Does it do that? If not, no thanks.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
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
Cog has been on the scene since 2006, is fully GPL'd, and supports most formats.
A nice, lightweight player designed to play music and not get in your way. Highly recommended.
http://cogx.org/
isn't that a collection of beautiful UI?
I always hated iTunes. When was on PC it was unbelievably slow. When I made a switch to Macbook Pro, I finally hoped iTunes would work normally. It was faster than on my PC (Windows XP), but it still is slow as hell, particularly after latest upgrade with new introductions (genius recommendation thing). The only reason I deal with damn iTunes is to sync iPhone's calendar, playlist and other stuff like that.
o_O
I don't understand the need for any features in a music player other than playing music. Themes? Leave that crap for programs I actually want to look at. A music player needs to play music well. Minimal is better. I use a 7 year old version of Winamp. Works great!
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.
I tried Songbird, and noticed it was using up about 3 times the RAM iTunes uses. And for what? A bunch of extra crap I wonâ(TM)t use. Itâ(TM)s like these guys took notes from the OpenOffice team on how to make a crappy interface that loads slowly and then goes on a RAM eating rampage.
plugins used to be supported before apple bought soundjam mp and turned it into iTunes. I am not sure why they removed it, but I bet the framework to add them is still in the codebase. I bet apple didn't want any plugin architecture to be able to add other music stores or the like.
today is spelling optional day.
if only there would be mediamonkey for mac... i'd be happier. way happier.
who cares about itunes, it. just. sucks.
mod me up scottie!
I use itunes but I really wish they'd put in nested playlists; the more music you have the harder it is to browse.
2570 items in my SongBird playlist.
147 megs of memory used, no items with album art. No web pages open. 0_o
I would suggest that Media Monkey has long been a credible competitor to iTunes with its support for iPods, a broad array of file formats, plug-ins, theming, file renaming, and many other features.
I use if for clean-up general management because it's very easy to customize where my files go and how they're named. I'm hamstrung by my used of an iPhone so I don't use it always.
Really an excellent alternative to iTunes and has been around for years.
Most iTunes users run it on Windows where there are plenty of alternatives. This hasn't forced apple to make any changes. Why would the availability of these alternatives on a much smaller subset of iTunes users make any difference?
"The truth is, iTunes is an average music player." Uh-huh. Ironically, it's the spreadsheet-like interface that keeps me coming back. People like to rag on it because it isn't skinnable, or it doesn't have as much pizazz maybe as WMP... but seriously, isn't that usually the opposite of the argument made against Apple? That Apple's stuff is always form over function, and now someone's going on about how x linux player has "feathers"? wtf? iTunes also has had the benefit of years of polish - a whole plethora of small features that keep power users satisfied... gapless playback, sorting rules, AirTunes, iPod/iPhone remotes. And don't forget: Apple did eventually kill brushed metal.
This results in iTunes giving me weird errors when I try to interact with the iPod. Everything added to it *after* I used Songbird shows up properly sized, but the other 65 gigs before it does not.
After 2 weeks of trying to fix it, I had no choice but to back everything up, wipe the iPod clean, and restore it all, a process that took literally 10+ hours.
That was just one of several bugs that I ran into while using it. It crashed repeatedly, it hung on my library (~70 gigs), it imported videos from iTunes but then wouldn't play them back...no thank you.
...when it came out. And it trounced it. That was back when said competition had themes, visualizers, and a host of features iTunes didn't. iTunes, on the other hand, is excellently designed software, and killed off Audion and others.
Songbird and Amarok will fail utterly on the Mac. Songbird will use the same non-native XUL engine that Firefox and Thunderbird use with far fewer benefits, and Amarok will be QT-based, which in many cases looks and feels even less native than XUL. Neither will have any platform integration with the huge number of iTunes addons, scripts, widgets, etc. And of course, neither of them will work with the iPod, let alone the iTunes Music Store (if you care for such a thing).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Here's an idea that'll have Apple fans foaming at the mouth: Apple should be split up.
This anti-competitive behaviour in tying their devices (namely iPod and iPhone) to their applications, and by extension their computer products, should be stopped. This article talks about competition, but until these media players are able to communicate with Apple devices -- on an equal standing with Apple's own tools -- they will not be widely adopted.
The simplest, cheapest way to stop this monopoly leveraging is to split Apple into two companies. One dealing in computer products, the other in consumer goods. By the way: demanding protocol documents, imposing fines and 'monitoring' doesn't work (see Microsoft vs. DOJ/Europe). It's also extremely expensive for the tax payer.
"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."
OSS should not merely serve to encourage closed-source applications to become better. There's no reason why Songbird or Amarok couldn't eventually replace iTunes as the music application of choice. And that should be the goal. Otherwise, it's just a lot of wasted effort if all you want to have happen is get Apple to write a better app.
1) if you look at the songbird UI - they have obviously tried to imitate itunes in layout and functionality - only they haven't done it as well as itunes - imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
2) itunes works well, and is solid solid solid - never lost anything with it - ever. that my friend is the #1 feature.
3) it works with iPhone and all iPods, and it syncs calendars & contacts with outlook & apple addressbook - does songbird or amarok do this? no - thus, they aren't even viable for these uses.
for what iTunes doesnt do -- OS X 10.5 includes a command line audio player (in /usr/bin) called afplay. This is very useful if you want to play a sound file from the command line, shell script, Automator action, etc. The /usr/bin directory is in your path by default, so you can just type afplay file.mp3 to play that file.
I've seen a bunch of articles about how bad iTunes is recently, and while I'm happy to concede there there are some negatives (the dumb software update process that replaces everything and quicktime and safari, the lack of FLAC support), but there are others which I just don't get.
Resource usage: people keep telling me how iTunes is a real resource hog, but I don't see any evidence of that.
I'm currently running both iTunes and Songbird on my first gen (Core 2, not duo) MacBook.
iTunes: 78MB real memory used. 8% cpu, steady.
Songbird: 170MB real memory used. 10% cpu, spiking to 18% frequently and 30% occasionally.
Firefox: 150MB. Between 3 and 10% cpu just sitting here idle.
Is the resource problem more an issue for the Windows version? I have never had a problem with iTunes slowing things down.
Themes: whenever people criticize iTunes on Windows, they point out that it doesn't fit in with the look and feel of windows (I'll concede that one, I think it should). But then people complain that it doesn't have theme support so they can have some wacky look and feel that is nothing like the base system. What is so important about what your music player looks like? Mine spends most of its time minimised. I guess it's a nice to have, but I'd rather they spent time on features like CoverFlow (which I use extensively to browse my music) than pretty niche features.
It organises your music for you: perhaps it's just me, but that's exactly why I use it. I don't *want* to have to organise my music. I import my music and then forget about it. It's just there. The internal directory structure is pretty sane if you really want to fiddle around, and you can always stop iTunes from organising your music (it's in the preferences).
Plugins: Ok, I can see that there might be some nice plugins about, but most people just use it to listen to their music.
I'm genuinely interested, can someone point me to a plugin for another player that would make me reconsider and go "wow, that's really useful"?
Paul
Paul Leader
Yeah, that would be really useful, and the opposite so that you can see at a glance what you're missing or what you need to fix the tags on.
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.
So two nice strawmen there. There are other things to pick on iTunes for (like still being a Carbon app.), but outright lying (or making statements when you're completely ignorant of the truth) isn't doing their argument for alternatives much good.
Yaz.
A long time ago someone posted here something similar along these lines, stating emphatically that iTunes was a crappy MP3 player because it wasn't skinnable. Why the average computer user would need or want a skinnable MP3 player was beyond me. However I remember the early days of Winamp and Macamp. Those were the days out on the edge when people ripped MP3s and they were just starting to get popular, and file sharing was harder because not everyone had a CD burner and connection speeds were a lot slower and only file sharers had MP3s.
As a badge of honor these file sharers would play their songs on their PCs or Macs, and would have the most gaudy obnoxious skins they could create for their own players. However, at the time, I found the players didn't make sense to me, and had very few other features, and basically did not make it fun to play MP3 files... but OMG I could skin the hell out of it!
So for someone who liked simplicity and ease of use, I said F*** this I'll stick with CDs.
Later, iTunes came on the scene and I decided to try it. After a few minutes of fiddling, it made sense! And half that time was basically ridding myself of the expectations I had set for myself thanks to Winamp and Macamp.
Love them or hate them, Apple makes good software, and iTunes is designed with a more mainstream user in mind. This MP3 player is designed with those file sharing MP3 ripping technoheads who like to show off their leet skillz by skinning their MP3 software to show how badass they are. iTunes is designed to work well and manage content for everyone else.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
iTunes has far too many features (and thus too much bloat) for me as it is. I use Music Player Daemon + Sonata. This gives me a very minimal yet functional interface, and allows me to keep my music going even if I close X.
My gripes with iTunes.
I have not figured out why Apple, the shining knight/star of software development according to some, has not released iTunes for Linux. Surely it's not hard to release a somewhat Unix based operating system to Unix based operating system port? Yeah I know, Wine, blah blah blah... iffy at best. I ended up using a VM.
Regardless of what people say, there IS no competition right now, because of iPods, iPhones, etc. Everyone and their mother's cook's dog has an iPod (except me, and proud of it!), so until that is implemented... or allowed to be implmented by Apple... there won't be much competition for iTunes.
Another annoying thing about iTunes that I find VERY frustrating is the playback. I like the library system, more or less, but the playback is awful... even in comparison to Windows Media Player. Especially if my speakers are set up with 5.1 or something like that, it only comes out the front speakers and I have not been able to find an iTunes option to enable 5.1 playback or even 4 speaker playback, etc.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Trying the 1.0 RC. Often getting "Internal Data Error" even in middle of song -- might as well be a BSOD. Yes, I will report it as a bug there too.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Luckily, though, it's built into the operating system!
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
I like how the freetards think they are riding in like some kind of hero with their unstable, ugly as sin, checklist-of-features garbage ware.
Just to make it clear from the majority of Mac users... much like any woman you will meet in your life, our answer to you is:
FUCK OFF.
I know that being a mac user means liking what you are told to like but the whole thing with Apple marketing is about
Were talking choice. I might think Celine Dion sounds like a dying cow but some douchebag somewhere might like a Celine theme.
His choice.
Just like with homo marriages.
its pretty revolting and disgusting (hot lez sex is good though!) but as long as it doenst interfere in my life, why should I give a rats ass what fudgepackers want to do?
>but please please please can we stop acting like >altering the UI of a program does anything even >remotely useful?
Neither do rounded corners, chrome gui and buttonless hardware.
its not useful, its about the look w/ Apple.
its all about how it looks.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Exactly it.
I have around 40 days worth of music. Most of that is albums, but some is also random tracks I've downloaded over the years. I want a playlist that is only complete albums.
Yes, I can manually put one together, but being able to make a smart playlist that auto updates would be nice.
I mean really?
I've seen few applications that generate the kind of fanboy zealots that iTunes does. Since they've been breaking a sweat trying to point out how wrong the /. is about iTunes not having folder monitoring support, let me offer my own, more valid, top-10 iTunes-suxxors flame baits.
1. No auto-cover-fetch for artwork. Amarok has it. So, do quite a few other players. I'm guessing Apple is too chicken-shit to do it because of copyright concerns, but I simply don't care.
2. iTunes (ALL versions) refuses to store MP3 cover art in the ID3 tag even though it's been done for ages in other players in a compatible way. Don't try to tell me it's only because there is no ISO, ANSI, RIAA-approved way to do this. It "just works" elsewhere outside of iTunes and has for years. Inside of iTunes it uses it's proprietary metadata for this.
3. The only way to backup your iTunes library is to use it's own internal backup feature. If you have another backup program which backs up it's metadata files while they are open, then you get copious errors upon restoring them. You may still have your non-DRM music, but you'll have to re-authorize your DRM music (if you have any authorizations left) and you'll lose all your playlists and ratings. This also happens if you restore to a different username than you backed up (not using iTunes backup).
4. The interface is butt-ugly, IMHO.
5. The "mini-mode" sucks. You can't see your playlist, an EQ, or shit-else while in it. If you use the non-mini mode you have to look at it's ugly ass taking over half the screen in omg-my-desktop-is-covered-with-a-bunch-of-huge-windows mode.
6. You get strong-armed by Apple to upgrade every other week. Some folks, like myself, find this annoying. Oh, sure, you can say no, or turn off the "check updates" feature. Then you'll get owned by some security patch you needed, though. It's nag or nothing.
7. It's MP3 or stupid-ass low-quality AAC (the default) for encoding. You can't change the filename format things get encoded with or choose another codec like OGG. Let's not confuse the fanboys with choices, or have to compete with a superior format, eh?
8. It's censorware "family-friendly" features make me want to vomit. If you can't keep your porn away from your 3 year old, then call the state and have the brat hauled off.
9. The way it garbles your filenames onto the iPod into 4-character unreadable crap is just a tad annoying. Especially considering Rockbox and other players don't pull this little stunt.
10. Last but not least, it doesn't support Internet radio directories for Shoutcast, Icecast, Magnatunes, or anything besides it's own oversimplified "Radio" of nice, friendly, Apple approved stations.
Thanks for playing Apple. You figured out what the drooling masses wanted like you always have. Now back to the this message from our sponsors.
"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."
Here's hoping the users will stop using proprietary software altogether and switch to open source Amarok. Not just to force Apple to make Itunes better.
What has Slashdot become? Open Source just there to force the others to make their proprietary stuff better so we can continue to use it? All hail to our proprietary masters?
OK, if iTunes is your music manager, why is it not managing your music?
Why do you think iTunes is not managing your music?
That's why people want automatically updating folders. See new file, add to library, silently. We've had inexpensive filesystem monitoring for years, and we know OS X has pretty good control over what files exist on your system.
Because many things in OS X do things the UNIX way - do one simple thing well. Why should my MUSIC PLAYER be doing crazy things like watching a folder?
No, instead Finder should be watching folders and run actions based on directories or file types. That's why the system has Automator.
You want music files to be loaded into iTunes automatically when placed in a specific folder? Well then use Automator which can do this simple task quite well today. Please do not try to load iTunes down with more crap than it already has.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
According to the the Songbird Licensing FAQ, Songbird is entirely open, mostly under GPLv2.
On installation, the Songbird binary presents you with a EULA, and unless you accept it, installation will abort. This is unlike the Mozilla EULA of a few months back which you could choose to ignore without stopping the installation, and which Mozilla removed entirely after receiving masses of negative feedback about it.
Fully free/open-source software doesn't need a EULA to be agreed, because you obtain all of your rights merely by complying with the terms of the copyright/copyleft license. No agreement of any kind is required in order to merely *USE* the software (only to distribute it). Usage is entirely unrestricted.
Why then does Songbird require a mandatory pre-agreement on usage?
Can either of these new music players
(1) connect to the iTunes music store and buy music?
(2) play any music you have that uses Apple's fairplay DRM
(3) See 1 ans 2 above but with video in place of music
These programs can't replace iTunes for most users
Pretty much the only issue that keeps me from using iTunes is the lack of format support.
.. better in every sense other than the default GUI, in fact.
My music/recording collection [I am occasionally a sound recordist among other things] contains tracks in mp3, mp4, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, Wavpack, AC3, DTS, MPC, and a few other formats. iTunes under Windows supports only 2 of those formats for playback, let alone transcoding/conversion. I'll admit that I'm hardly the average user, but even for basic use iTunes simply doesn't cut it for me.
The other thing I'd like to see more players support is Replaygain, which, unlike Apple's volume levelling function, actually works properly for most material put through it.
Foobar2000 [even with it messy archaic default interface] is leagues better than either iTunes or Amarok in terms of format support, tag editing, transcoding
I've been watching Songbird with interest for quite a while; for me it has the potential to replace fb2k if people write format support plugins for it.
Ok... first of all, I'm a mac user. but i really don't like itunes. in my opinion, the best music player of all time was winamp 3 - seriously.
here's why:
1- i want separate applications for everything. one for ripping. one for burning. one for playing. it amazes me that i could play music 10 years ago on a pentium 2 under win98, and now i need. i want something simple... no playlists. click on a file and it plays. winamp did that.
2- itunes doesn't recognize alot of my id3 tags, which really bothers me. plus it's a huge program that taxes the cpu.
3- right now, i'm using a program called play under os x... it's the simplest i could find... does anyone know anything better?
also... i don't like ipods. i only use sandisk player.... for me i want to drag and drop my files like it's a drive.
If you use Apple, then expect to be stuck with their horrible software. I've never had to even touch iTunes and my iPod works wonderfully. Thank you, gtkpod.
OSX's folder actions will let you automagically import all files placed in a folder into iTunes. And have since... oh... 10.0? If you used iTunes and really wanted this "feature", you could have done it yourself. Plus, given the AppleTV iTunes integration, I think it would take a hell of a lot more than skinning to lure away ATV users.
semantics are everything!
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've been using and recommending songbird for a very long time, it's a wonderful piece of software written by a group of very creative and dedicated individuals. I haven't used iTunes in probably 3 years. THANKS SONGBIRD!
Seriously, why does Songbird need to photocopy the look and feel of iTunes? Do they really have no sense of creativity?
I haven't been a real fan of Apple's business tactics of late, but at least they are creative and don't make a habit of copying other people's work like Microsoft and Open Source projects typically do.
Linux would be in a lot better place if the Open Source developers cleared the cob webs out and started innovating instead of following Microsoft's and Apple's coat tails. Ubuntu is about the only Open Source project I give kudos to for trying to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crud, yet keep a familiar enough feel so that their O/S is usable by everyday folk.
This is why the iPod failed as an mp3 player and the iPhone is such a disaster for Apple: they lack features other phones have.
So long as the OSS community remains focused on features as the primary mover of products, so long will the OSS community remain single digit players in the desktop market.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
I use it because I have to to sync my iphone, but otherwise I wouldn't let iTunes near my computer with a 20 foot pole. It runs processes all the time in the background, has like 3-4 different ones going at once. It's ridiculously bloated -- 10 times the size of winamp with 1/4th of the features (and many people would consider Winamp bloated). Its got a clunky, non-intuitive UI, isn't extensible to work with new codecs (can't make it play DivX for instance).
It's an embarrassment to Apple and flies in the face of the image they market by being the opposite of everything they say they stand for. I could rant on all day long about reasons why I can't stand it, or how I absolutely hate being forced to install quicktime with it, and being forced to use it to sync any ipod because a hard-drive mode is apparently too convenient.
This is a huge issue. As someone who has more than one computer it annoys the hell out of me that I can't just hook my iPod up to any of them and have it work. You can get programs like senuti, but I don't want to have to do that, I just want it to connect.
Also, iTunes has issue with very large music libraries, like 500+ GB. It gets kinda sketch.
A blog about stuff.
Back in the days the software was known as SoundJam MP, iTunes had all sorts of skins and UI enhancements.
When Jeffrey Robbins, the creator of SoundJam moved to Apple, all of those exotic features were stripped off of SoundJam MP. Instead, the UI was vastly improved and the whole project was relabeled iTunes.
And, that's why iTunes is so successful. It is simple and easy to operate. You put in a CD, and almost magically, the music is now in your iTunes library. You go to the iTunes store, click a button, and there it is in iTunes.
We heard many of the same complaint with the iPod when it first came out. The iPod had no microphone, it didn't have a radio, there was no slot for a memory card. You couldn't use it as a recorder. All it could do was play MP3s. It will never sell!
But, sell it did. What Apple had demonstrated time and time again is that features don't sell. Simplicity and elegance do. There are plenty of high end packages for Mac OS X -- including SoundJam's main competitor Audion (Freely downloadable from Panic's website). However, Apple's solution is to ignore the dross and concentrate on usability.
For more information, see the story of Audion at .
Dear poster :
Please, do not start with complaining about iTunes' "lack" of features. Given that BOTH Amarok AND Songbird lack the ability to RIP or BURN music CD's, I don't really wanna hear it.
Part of why iTunes works is because Apple does a pretty damn good job of making a player that does its job : Database player/sync for a portable device that holds all the music you're ever going to buy.
You know how agrivating it is to try to burn a CD and have it re-direct you to K3B, which then errors out because your audio format, which works fine in Amarok, isn't compatible with IT?
Batch encoding is a JOKE in Amarok, which is aggrivating given that you realize you're better off settling for converting to MP3 in iTunes using iTunes' crappy MP3 encoder.
In iTunes, not only is your music added to the player, but so are your playlists, and when you have 10 gigs of music, it's nice to have immediate access to the arrangements of the 20 some odd songs you're enjoying at the moment. I've yet to see a sync app on the market that does this aside from maybe the Zune, and the purchase of that device will happen on a cold day in hell.
Don't talk shit about Apple's setup 'till you can present an app that's better or at least EQUIVILANT. I'm not talking about compatibility with a handful of devices, I'm talking about actually having that great handful of FEATURES in syncing.
UGH. >_
I've used Songbird on OSX, because it's the next-best thing to Winamp on the OS. iTunes is tolerable, but I hate the way it organizes music and -- in characteristic Apple style -- is inflexible about letting the user customize its behavior.
Unfortunately, Songbird (0.7, anyway) uses about 2-3x the RAM that iTunes does. It's slower to load MP3s than iTunes. It searches the library and playlists more slowly than iTunes (even after they somehow improved its behavior from an even-worse search design). And it can't play all MP3s -- that's right, I have MP3s in my library that Songbird simply won't play. Why? Beats me -- they play just fine in iTunes and Winamp.
And then there's music-player device interop. Let me know when I can sync music with my Windows Mobile phone (over Bluetooth, or wi-fi, or (god forbid) ActiveSync)...
Songbird has potential, but it needs to lose weight and refine its technique before it can fly with the big birds. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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.
I have an iPod. I buy music from the iTunes Store. Show me a music player which integrates with those two as well as iTunes (it Just Works), and I'll be interested.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Folder monitoring should be built in to iTunes, and iPhoto.
Picasa has folder monitoring, and it is fantastic.
Yes, many get music from the store, and CDs - but many do not.
Importing music into iTunes is painful and unnecessary (look at at Picasa)
iTunes should NOT be managing my contacts, calendars, photos, activating my phone, playing me movies, doing my dishes etc.
Skins are the absolute last thing on my shopping list - yes, most of them are ugly and unnecessary.
The iTunes interface is a little annoying.
The library management is really dumb. If songs go missing (the actual file) iTunes gets confused - and this should never be the case - there needs to be better management (like Picasa has)
iTunes lacks a lot of innovative features that I believe would be solved by opening up to plugins.
My car has a USB slot, I put music on a pen drive, and play in the car. This is a perfect setup for me - getting music out of iTunes is annoying. Try it, drag 100 songs from iTunes onto a pen drive. iTunes hangs, crashes, or refuses.
Try importing music this way.
Try importing photos into iPhoto this way.
Try migrating to iTunes with a few GB of music and you'll go crazy waiting for 'import'
I have converted many people to iTunes, but I believe the claim that it is a very average music player is accurate.
It is trying to do too much.
By default in iTunes prefs, on one of the platforms at least, "Copy files to iTunes music folder when adding to library" is not checked. So, an average end user, gets an MP3 sent to them one way or another, double clicks it, and magically iTunes has it. User is happy. Adds songs to playlists, etc. User then later empties their downloads folder, moves the MP3 to another folder, or whatever - and poof, iTunes is confused - and this is what, a good design? This should never happen.
The end user didn't know they needed to adjust prefs. They didn't know they couldn't delete the file from their desktop, after all, it's "in iTunes" and "iTunes manages your music" Not very user friendly.
Oh, if you have DRM music... and you change your password to the iTunes store or whatever... Your song goes to play, and fails, and provides a login box.. And just stops playing your music. Wow, that's a great design, I was listening to music here - thanks for acting like a Microsoft product, interrupting me, and annoying me when not necessary, thanks iTunes.
We all know, these features (contacts, calendars etc) are nice, but they really should not be part of our music player - some of us just open the player and play music, and iTunes is pretty bloated for just that.
I'd like to see Mozart by Google - their Picasa for music - I think it would be a good offering, with no bias toward iPods, iPhones, etc.
Just my $.02
As a user of iTunes, I hate it - it's a resource hog and too damn slow already. Allowing other people to add extensions would just make it that much worse.
A better option would be for Apple to dramatically improve iTunes or watch its user base make the switch to something better like Media Monkey, etc.
I think open source contenders are failing to understand the mentality of the average Mac user, the ones that put them in the powerful position they are.
Apple wants you to 'Think Different', but not freely. They want you to think differently than Windows, but more like Apple everything.
Many people accept this, they get drafted into a specific process and the only efficient way to use OS X is to do it the way Apple intends for you to, but it's DAMNED EASY to work with and that's incredibly easy to appreciate.
Open Sourcers want freedom, options, the preemptibility that if there comes a point when something needs to change, it can be done. Mac users don't want that, they don't need it. They want their shit to work, and if you eliminate the variables, it almost always will.
Expecting Apple to open up is like expecting McDonalds to eliminate their fatty foods; What they're doing now is working for them INCREDIBLY WELL, ethics are a hard thing to propose when the process in indisputably effective.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Actually, it's not a replacement unless it can distinguish audiobooks and podcasts from music, so I don't go from "Stairway to Heaven" to chapter 20 of "Oliver Twist," when I'm listening with random play on.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Oh cool! These will drive my Apple TV, iPod, iPhone, let me rip cd's, convert files, stream radio, subscribe to podcasts, drive network speakers, create genius playlists, discover other libraries on the network and allow me to listen to them (at work), and purchase music and video online?
Obviously iTunes is mediocre and lagging in features...I've been missing out! /sarcasm
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors. Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone. It's great if that's the only thing you care about, but there are cheaper and better sounding mp3 players out there that I cannot really use with my Mac right now.
Certainly it's hard to add support for iPods and the iPhone when Apple is trying to prevent anybody else from adding support. Other mp3-player producers welcome at least some open standards for accessing their devices, while I've never heard similar ideas from Apple.
Another issue is iTunes speed. Some things are strangely slow using iTunes. Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player.
The truth is, iTunes is an excellent player for most people. The fact that only now has there been another real contender shows that most users are satisfied with it and don't need or want a replacement. Perhaps if you had started it off with something like "Although iTunes is a good music player for most people..." it wouldn't have come off sounding like someone who has no understanding of what makes a good piece of software. I mean... come on... themes?
One other thing that Songbird doesn't support is PPC Mac computers. Millions of us.... It only has an Intel version !!! Their home page has 0.7.0 for all platforms. NOT...... Had tried a PPC version a year or so ago, but it wasn't user friendly and looked like crap !! Don't think I'll lose any sleep over not trying it now.......
The best part about songbird is that if my computer can play the file songbird will have no problem adding it to the library, means things like ogg/vorbis, flacc, ape, are all supported
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...
I took a look at Songbird recently after aquiring an android phone (t-mobile G1).
Since iTunes won't sync it I was hoping that some open source solution existed. While I was very impressed by how far Songbird has come as a music player, the lack of sync options made me go back to iTunes :(
BUT, since songbird can use fancy plugins, maybe some smart person will realize that we need music sync support for non-ipod devices (and ipods too, I suppose) and write some plugins.
It's not that he really wants to promote Amarok. He's probably fed up with folks claiming Apple's products to be greater than they really are. I've seen a lot of this lately and I'm sure you did too.
Btw, he might not like Apple but he still fell victim to their propaganda. Genius-like features have been available on a bunch of software players and hardware players (my sister's old Walkman has both a Genius-like feature and a shake-to-change-song function).
Just give me Amarok. It is the only thing I miss from Linux.
That thing is fantastic.
"(iTunes) UI is simple and good"
Wow! Please give me the inter-universal coordinates for your universe!
I wanna come and see an iTunes that works intuitively and simply!
Meanwhile, here in the RealVerse.....
Can it access the iTunes store? Will it sync with my ipod/phone? Can I access my iTunes-U account with it? Answers: No.... So there is no competition really. Sorry to disappoint.
Songbird has potential, but it needs to lose weight and refine its technique before it can fly with the big birds. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
So it's song is a symphonic siloquy of a solo soaring
The Tao that can be named is not the Tao
How could this happen? Sounds like someone forgot to enable the OS X kill switch!
Amen to that. It has been said before, of course, but never in such a clear, yet funny way.
Open Source is not and cannot be the answer to everything. Open Source is mainly interesting for developers. There is a lot of it out there and almost all of it has a very limited potential. I guess that is because most developers cannot complete the product to a professional level and then support it for a longer period. There is no incentive to make them do so, apart from a bit of recognition. Recognition comes from other developers; users only bitch, and other developers can actually help you sort out your problems. Consequently, developing for other developers is much more rewarding. Hence the success of the Linux kernel and GNU tools.
Anything at a higher level is not aimed at developers, but at users. The only reason to make them competitive is developer incentive. Money, if you like. Open source does not make you any money though, and other rewards are scarce. A few companies have stepped in to support open source development (think OpenOffice), which makes development move a lot faster, and even then they don't get it right. E.g. OpenOffice's presentation package consumes much more resources than PowerPoint (under OSX, at least).
This is not a complete analysis of why Open Source is not the panacea some believe it to be. But while the situation stays as it is, $GEEKY_FEATURE is the way to go.
And anyway, in OSX you can tell the Finder to add songs to iTunes if they appear in a specific directory. Would that be a download directory, perhaps?
What about musikcube? It only runs on Windows, though.
This touring musician can only hang his head while folks here bicker about which method makes my work more futile.
We lose from the MAFIAA, we lose from piracy, we lose from DRM's, we lose from gas prices, but we still fucking tour. Would it kill you to get out and see a live band once in a while? The only indie bands that still tour are for the mostpart really fucking good.
I also house tech (meaning I mix bands that tour through my venue), so I hope you'll give this post some thought. Live music right now is endangered, meanwhile the touring talent is on average the best I've ever seen.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
The ability to browse the filesystem! It seems strange but the lack of a filesystem browser is a major drawback of iTunes and iTunes-like players (songbird, banshee). This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders. This is the classical elephant in the room.
Check out my cross-platform apps
I think being a "music player" is not the way to go, people already have a choice of media players and their mp3-players too, skip the licensing issues and leave that out already.
The key feature that i'd like to see in an iTunes "Killer" is seamless integration with free creative commons licenced content - all of it - a proper sock-it-to-the-man approach would be to ONLY allow integration with legal-no-payment services and then to shout it from the rooftops.
No more rummaging through archive.org, no typing funky strings into google, no browsing miriads sites like ccTunes and no jumping through hoops with torrents like at legaltorrents*
All integrated, seamless, smooth scrolling and zooming, click to download via ttp,ftp,bittorrent,mule or pigeon so long as after a minute or three it's in your media folder, auto-sync with [usb-attached-thingy], all databased up so you can log in from another system and re-download your collection and totally completely legal and free.
I even have a name for this piece of software, should I ever have time to write it, and the dotcom isn't taken yet, i simply do not have the time (dedicated husband, father of two, full time job) but i'd love to mount a coordinated attack on the media cartels this way - imagine if one day truly independent movies and "tv" shows were too released via this platform, and that it ran on a box connected to your telly...
*disclaimer: my own music is hosted at legaltorrents.com
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
If only PB made their own itunes / torrent look alike that synced content to mp3 players direct from the torrents ;)
Any one want the make the killer app? Azurus plugins ?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Time and time again, sometimes apple or jobs is way behind the curve.
Maybe they did try to do this feature, but itunes was super slow, or their code has bad threading ability and cant do it well.
Maybe google will make a Jukebox-google organizer thats 1/50th the size of itunes and runs on everything and uses google-shop.
gTunes, :)
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
And THIS is why I will not use iTunes on any machine: Because I will not destroy the entire OS by installing Quicktime. Consequently, I have never bought or regularly used an ipod. mp3 cd players are $20, and do most of what an ipod will do provided I'm not jogging or something gay and yuppie like I never do anyway.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Seriously, Amen again. I think we need a few more amens to this comment. I even liked his string variable notation.
Unless a FOSS app is faster and lighter on the memory than #Market_Leader (I made mine a hash, how you like me now?), then it has no business even pretending to be a competitor. Further, the interface should have LESS options, LESS clutter, and look MORE like a native app. Firefox is perfect example of one FOSS product that gets it right.
I'd mention Pidgin too, but I think Voice and Video are now #Basic_Feature, and it has never been remotely good at those features.
VLC is a good example though, simpler and superior to both WMP and every other vid player on the market. Even includes most important codecs out of the box!!!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
I mentioned VLC further up in the discussion. I don't use it for music, but for video, it has no equal on any OS, and works on all three!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/12
iPod Device Support Addon - already there
To the casual observer such as myself, Songbird looks heavily inspired by iTunes. The screenshot of Songbird looks very similar to the way I have iTunes configured, with gimmicks like coverflow turned off.
Songbird needs to dramatise its differentiating idea. Right now, it's not obvious what that is.
No gapless; no interest
Is there one solution for managing your music, photos, videos, documents and other data you download/generate? I don't think so. Files and folders are good for basic media management and easy to implement, but it just doesn't cut it when you need to manage >5000 songs or photos. That's when you need an application that's able to handle the specific properties of the kind of media you want to manage. Music has artist/album/genre/play count/rating, photos have rating/event/keywords/version, and so on.
The problem is two-fold. On the one side there's the problem of storing the data (which, like you said, should be the task of the OS), on the other hand there's the user interface for managing the data, and that's 100% the task of the application.
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. [...] Despite the many faults, many of us continued to use iTunes because of the lack of options available.
iTunes plays music? Really?
I must not have realized, since all I use iTunes for is to purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store, and put it on my iPod. Seriously, that's all I use iTunes for. It's a program to buy stuff, and an iPod loader. I've never used iTunes to play music because I'm always on the road when I do that.
Yes, I know that other programs exist to dump tracks to my iPod, but they miss the critical first piece: purchase stuff from the iTunes Music Store. I find ITMS very convenient, and I really like the price point of $1 per song, so I can just buy the 1-2 songs that I like from a CD without shelling out $20 for a physical disc with 2 good songs on it.
Tool Player 0.2.5
Seriously give it a try. It's small, easy to use, all the features you need for quick music playing, and uses a trivial amount of power. This is what all you minimalists should be using! It's a tiny download give it a shot.
First step: Jailbreak your iPhone and install an ssh server on it. I'm not willing to void my warranty while playing catchup with each firmware update, so I think I'll wait.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
I have an iPod and I use iTunes. There are features it lacks, but there is no other software that reliably syncs over songs with artwork, podcasts, audiobooks, and keeps them sorted properly, so that when I shuffle songs, it excludes the podcasts and audiobooks.
At this point in it's development, iTunes is designed to work with the iPod before desktop features are considered.
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes.
Why on earth would I need to add such an esoteric feature to a music player, instead of having a smart folder that does the same thing using Applescript or Automator?
There are no plugins or themes.
Application level theming is evil, a nasty horrible idea. Themed applications invariably interact poorly with the OS and fail to provide all the features of the native user interface... this even happens on UNIX where there isn't a native look and feel! If anything, iTunes is already too "themed", though Apple has been toning that down over time.
And iTunes certainly DOES have plugins... I'm using iScrobbler right now... as well as a rich Applescript library that makes it possible to interact with iTunes in ways that make plugins unnecessary.
Has the author of this abstract ever used iTunes?
Or even a Mac?
I use iTunes most of the time but sometimes I want to do things it can't do or doesn't do the best. I am really not crazy about having a music library. As others have said some of us have a pretty good folder layout for finding music. I still use XMMS (even though I have to run X11 and esd) quite a bit. Also I occasionally use MPlayer as well. What I like about XMMS is that you can sort currently playing music. In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that. At least not without making a playlist, and then you won't play that list seamlessly. You have to stop listening to the song you just clicked on in the library to start playing the playlist. Its just kind of annoying. I would be greatly happy to see XMMS made to run nativity on OS X, and have support added for protected / unprotected ACC files so I don't have to convert them first.
Just my 2 cents, take it how you will.
~Petaris "The world is open. Are you?"
Those shots of Amarok are beyond ugly. I don't think iTunes is all that great-looking - I mostly keep it hidden and control it via Quicksilver - but damn, Amarok looks like ass.
Songbird looks a little better but that's mostly because it's a half-assed knock-off of iTunes, visually.
I used to use Audion, but I switched to iTunes because everything supports talking to it. And now I've fallen in love with the way it completely insulates me from the file structure my music happens to be in.
egypt urnash minimal art.
Songbird doesn't run on PowerPC Macs.
What thoroughly pisses me off is Mac software that doesn't ship as a universal binary, but is compiled only for Intel Macs. UNIX-targeting Open Source software should be CPU architecture independent, or have a damn good reason not to be. I can't fathom why would an Open Source music player software targeting (among others) Linux be bound to Intel CPU architecture.
I have a mixture of PowerPC and Intel Macs in my household. The iMac G5 my wife uses is less than 3 years old and has plenty of horsepower. I just hate it when software publishers artificially obsolete this CPU platform because they're lazy to add that single additional gcc command line flag to emit both ppc and x86 code in a single executable.
Yes, you might actually end up having to update your code in few places because it was not architecture independent, but if you're proud enough of your work on the code, that actually benefits you, and you should do it.
If you're an open source provider wanting to compete for users on Mac OS X, you'll need every user. Cutting off everyone who bought their last Mac more than two and a half years ago doesn't strike me as wise.
Sig erased via substitution of an identical one.
On OS X, if you have Fink (unstable) installed, you can install Amarok 1.x stable right now. It does a damn good job too.
Links:
http://pdb.finkproject.org/pdb/browse.php?summary=amarok
Only thing is, you will run it through X11. As Leopard's X11 issues are over with the recent updates, it is not a issue. No issues on Tiger too.
Of course, Amarok.app and the rest of KDE 4 running natively is a big deal.
In iTunes you can't just click on a song and play it and then decide that you want to listen to this other song next and have it move to that.
"Play next in Party Shuffle"
If you don't use Party Shuffle you're missing a good deal.
As for XMMS, I used to use XMMS when my desktop was free UNIX, and I hated its user interface. Horrible crippled thing that used this amazingly broken theming engine - no regular UI for the main window at all. If I couldn't hide it most of the time and drive it from a dock app in Windowmaker I'd have gone stark raving batshit crazy.
Moving to iTunes was painless. My library structure was already pretty much identical to iTunes, so it took me no time at all to decide to let iTunes manage it. I was able to use an Applescript to use the library I had to fix the missing ID3 tags, and Bob's your uncle...
This is because mp3s don't always come perfectly tagged and people like to organize them in folders.
I bet there's an Applescript in one of the Applescript archives on the web that will take your folders, use the folder structure to add any missing tags, and pass them on to iTunes.
It's what I did when I started using iTunes. Don't ask me for the script: that was years ago and I can't be arsed seeing if I can dig out my undocumented Applescript that you'd only have to modify for your folder layout. Get a nice polished on from the web.
The music player that I really love, which doesn't do any of the fancy stuff that players seem to have to do today (some even burn CDs - wtf?), is muine. It's probably not available for OS X, but it does what the title 'music player' implies - it plays music. Without harassing me with stupid views of my music library, but by offering excellent, quick and simple search functionality. It also doesn't bother me with web music stores, or dozends of podcast sources or whatever - it just displays my albums like the real thing (the shelf in my office) does, an alphabetical list of album covers, where I can quickly recognize and chose whatever I feel like, in case I feel more like browsing that searching for something specific. It also doesn't manage iPods, or whatever other music playing device - I don't own any besides my M600i anyways, and I'm well able to copy the stuff I want over on notebooks or USB devices by myself. Basically, I love muine because it only plays music... (It's been broken in Ubuntu for a long time, but started to work again out of the box with 8.10)
intoxicated, adj.: When you feel sophisticated without being able to pronounce it.
I love what Songbird has become, there are some things that it still lacks like being able to minimize to a try on my Ubuntu system, or giving out what song it is playing with a bubble window, but other than that it is awesome! Finally after years Songbird is ready to fly! P.S. Sorry for the corny title!
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
I don't know where the hell the original author got 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. because iTunes has always supported plugins. Some of them are actual plugins, going in the iTunes plugins folder in your preferences folder, and some are external apps that use Applescript to control iTunes.
Solving some of them using AppleScripts is _not_ a solution for the average user.
Solving them by writing plugins is not a solution for the average user either. The average user no more cares whether the plugin they're using uses Applescript, Automator, or the existing native plugin API.
Another issue is that iTunes only supports iPods + iPhone.
I must have been dreaming that I was using my cheap generic off-brand USB-memory-stick-MP3-player from iTunes for three years before it broke and I got an iPod Shuffle. And it worked better with iTunes, in my opinion, than my shuffle does. Drag a playlist out of iTunes into the player. One step. Done. None of this waiting on iTunes when I sync.
Updating tags takes ages and blocks the application.
Gee, and I'm doing that every day. No, wait, I'm not, I use iTunes to play music instead.
But then I'm more interested in listening to music than obsessively collecting mistagged torrents, or whatever it is that all you people who seem to spend all their time using obscure features of other players that I never used even when I was using mPlayer and XMMS under Windowmaker and X11 on free UNIX are doing.
I personally don't see the point in porting to a architecture that is incapable of attaining new users and dying quickly.
Used PPC Macs are still selling well. In fact a used G5 or G4 is pretty much the only entry-level Mac option.
No themes and no "hot" folder?
/.*, and to nudge Apple into opening up iTunes, which will never happen.
/.?
This is blindingly obvious to be nothing more than a sad attempt to get "face" time for a few applications for: *enter any reason for it to NOT be on
How did this get on
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Just look at the UIs, especially Amarok. It is a dog's breakfast. The screens are way too cluttered. iTunes performs well on OS X, it supports the iPhone/iPod,iPod Touch and now comes with some pretty cool visualizers. What exactly is lacking that the "average" users would want or even need? IMHO, nothing. What it does not have can be added by plugins and third-party apps like Synergy.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Ahh, I see what you're saying. I actually agree--an "only full albums" option would be nice, though I doubt I would use it often if ever.
How many times has an attractive woman looked at the customized UI for your software and thought "Wow. There's a guy I'd like to get it on with". (Answer: Zero)
What relevance does this have to anything in the summary or anything else you said? (Answer: Nothing, but let's distract attention from the preceding weak argument with a veiled insult to anyone who disagrees with it!)
I'll grant that some competition might drive additional features into iTunes, but please please please can we stop acting like altering the UI of a program does anything even remotely useful?
Yes, we can do that, right after someone designs a UI liked by every single living human being and every single human being that will ever be born. Perhaps we can dig up and clone a copy of Michelangelo to design it?
Until then, since I am the one using these programs and not their developers, I will continue to switch my applications to skins that look better than default.
I'm not sure what you're referring to. iTunes auto-adds cover art and the like, both with purchased and non-purchased music (assuming the ID3 tags are accurate).
-Daniel
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
The truth is, iTunes is an average music player
Yes, and that is EXACTLY how Apple design the majority of their products and software, and that is also why it is so popular. 95% of users don't want all that extra crap thrown in. When will people like you understand this?
A feature as basic as monitoring a folder and adding the latest music files to the library is unavailable in iTunes
Utter rubbish, this is not a basic feature. The more crud like this you pile on the harder it is to maintain the product, the more support you have to do, and besides hardly anyone will ever use it.
Apple know when to stop, that's one of their strengths. A large amount of open source developers have no idea when to stop, that is one of the reasons it never becomes main stream. Instead of coding nonsense like this, how about making the thing stable and functional? This is one of the reasons why Ubuntu is doing so well, concentrate on the basics and stop shoveling on irrelevant features.
Orlando..
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
No preferences, ignores proxy settings, tries to call home, when you close the main window the currently playing song stops (no background operation)... forget it.
You can nest smart playlists. I have a series like:
two star = rating is 2 stars and last played is more than 28 days ago ... ...
three star = rating is 3 stars and last played is more than 14 days ago
four star = rating is 4 stars and last played is more than 3 days ago
five star = rating is 5 stars and last played is more than 24 hours ago
combined = playlist is two star or playlist is three star
noise = genre is opera or genre is hip hop
unambient = a regular playlist for music I like but don't want coming up in party shuffle
good no repeats = playlist is combined and playlist is not noise and playlist is not unambient
Feeding that into party shuffle gets a much better "mix" than letting apple's magic 'play higher rated songs more often' fail to work for me...
I have SongBird installed, but it's just too slow !
iTunes runs pretty slowly on this MBP - it's a July 2006 model - but for the moment it seems better than the competition.
--
http://friendfeed.com/wstewart
iTunes has some feature deficiencies that are solved by user plugins in other competitors.
And they're solved by user plugin in iTunes too!
Right now I have SRS iWow and Volume Logic loaded as DSP plugins, Lathe, Jelly and Stix loaded as third-party visualizers and sometimes I load up iScrobbler to scrobble songs I'm listening to in iTunes.
All of this is running on an Intel iMac running 10.5.5 with iTunes 8.0.1.
I don't know what they were smoking but I'm sure it is illegal in most countries.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That is fine except now you have to learn applescript.
If you have never done that before, prepare for several
hours of confusion and frustration just to modify existing scripts.