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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.
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
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.
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)
specially if the competition can't play Protected AAC?
As the most overused phrase of 2008 says, "Yes we can."
Two words and a hyphen love; in Linux world we call it
libxine-extracodecs
Face your daemons!
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
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php
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
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
I'm fairly sure that won't break DRM 6, but you can just grab requiem for that.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
what I really would like to know is why the fuck they thought it was a good idea to put a browser in the application by using mozilla code?!!
So they can someday build in a storefront/catalog browser? Like how iTunes appears to use some kind of hybrid Safari browser for the iTunes store? Or like how Steam uses Internet Explorer for its storefront and catalog browser? Just a thought.
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?
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...
They were the original guys who brought themeing to Macintosh music players. The player had the chance to become the base of iTunes, but fate is such a fickle thing. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
How is Amarok the undisputed champion when it reportedly it can't handle massive playlists? (I haven't tried it myself, but that's what I'm reading.)
I'm looking for a linux player that can handle thousands of songs, and ideally would allow me to rate each song as I hear it.
I tried Audacious, but it had so many bugs it was unusable (it kept loosing the playlist, or using 100% cpu, or deleting all the prefs). I tried juk but it's playlist was far too annoying to use - I want it to play all the songs, not stop at the end of an album just because I happen to be looking at the album playlist.
So, any suggestions? I'm using xmms right now, which works fine, but is discontinued (and doesn't have the rating feature, or an easy way to search for songs).
Anyway, I'd like to use amarok - it looks like it has all the features I want, except being able to handle thousands of songs.
-Ariel
Uh, you can browse the filesystem on any iPod (other than the Touch) by checking "Enable disk usage" in iTunes and then opening it up with your favorite file manager. Have fun.
Random access to all online media formats? Integration of podcasts from anywhere on the web? No need for a bucket of plugins and Add-ons for basic media integration?
Try it before you bash it.
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.
iTunes doesn't use Safari, it just looks web-like. It's custom rendering.
No, just a bunch of symlinks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So don't get a retarded proprietary music player*.
* It's not their fault you don't think before you buy.
So I guess most OSX users won't use it*.
*It's not their fault that developers don't think about why most of the people are using iTunes when they are trying to compete with iTunes.
I use itunes but I really wish they'd put in nested playlists; the more music you have the harder it is to browse.
...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.
It's just a custom XSLT wrapped around the iTunes Store's XML output, rendered by Webkit with an iTunes user-agent. I can't remember whether the XSLT is provided by iTunes or specified in the Store's XML (been a while since I've screwed around with that kind of stuff via spoofed user-agents, etc).
No, it's not technically Safari, but it's definitely using the same rendering engine. Just like every other html/xml-based window in OS X.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
No. The iTunes store uses a layout that is decidedly non-html. HBoxes and VBoxes, fixed position containers, and gridboxes.
You cannot translate that into html with xslt.
I think it depends on what the definition of "safari" is. It is webkit, the same thing Adobe uses for AIR. You can do the same thing in Qt, which also supports webit, and code Qt custom widgets and have your browser look-alike instantiate the widgets from HTML....
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Wow, that's surprising but you are right. The webkit team has a list of all apps that use webkit and, indeed, iTunes is not one of them.
I'd be willing to bet that they use *some* form of html/xml renderer, but the decision to not use Webkit is curious. I wonder if they are afraid falling in the same trap that IE did, where exploits discovered in the renderer could be leveraged in other applications that use it (most notably Outlook).
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
$ strings /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes | grep WebKit
[nothing]
$
It's not technically Safari, and it's not technically WebKit, and it's not technically WebCore. It's not HTML anything. It's just an unconnected rendering engine stringing up XML in some very un-HTML ways. It has links, came around a few months after Safari was revealed and perhaps evokes table layouts, but that's about it.
No, it's not WebKit. Dave Hyatt, the development lead on WebKit and Safari has said as much himself. http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2004_06.html#005666
The iTunes store uses Quicktime, not WebKit for rendering. Quicktime has supported interactive features in movies for ages, and for a static layout with lots of dynamic content this is easier for Apple to use than HTML - particularly since they make the authoring tools.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
They use Quicktime. When the iTunes store was launched, Quicktime was a lot more mature than WebKit. It's been able to display interactive content for over ten years, and it was already needed for music playback in iTunes so didn't add another dependency.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
I second your observation... Monitoring a folder is the job of the OS not the App. And mac OS has folder-actions that let you monitor a folder and add songs to any app, not just itunes.
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.
I was using Songbird as it was the only decent music player I could find for OSX. The browser add-on isn't that 'un-focused'. They are obviously using mozilla as a base, because you get the same kind of interface for adding plug-ins and auto updating plugins (I had an alarm clock plugin for example). The main panel is similar to a web browser, and can browse web pages, but is mostly used for displaying music. The web pages come in for online music searches and work quite well. Lyrics, buying music and other things are possible too obviously.
If you aren't interested just because it is based off mozilla, that's pretty silly IMO. I was interested in Songbird because I read it was started by some Winamp developers, and Winamp is my all time favourite media player just for the combination of built in customisation options for playing music, ripping music, listening to radio, dynamic playlists, media library if you want to use that, etc etc. I even registered it! But I no longer use Windows now and I'd prefer to use a native player than go through WINE.
Installed Ubuntu over OSX this week and now am using Exaile. It's almost perfect for my needs - I prefer to use the file system to organise my music (though Songbird's library was almost as good when I ordered it by path and filename). The only thing lacking in Songbird for me was a proper dynamic playlist. I had a plugin that approximated one, but it didn't support arbitrary reordering of music in the playlist. Exaile is great for creating dynamic playlists, and as a bonus it has a plugin for showing your currently playing song in Pidgin. Previously the only apps that supported that feature in Messenger were Windows Media Player and iTunes, and I don't like either of those.
which is totally what she said
I really need any or all of these apps to support hard links or symbolic links/aliases -- I have sometimes 4.. 5.. 6 different files of the same version of a song when it is included in collections, movie soundtracks, etc.
Being able to specify multiple album memberships for the same track is a killer need.
-- Gary Goldberg KA3ZYW 301/249-6501 AIM:OgGreeb Digital Marketing Inc., Bowie, MD
The browser is actually really cool. When you visit a site it parses the page for any audio files and puts links in a special window at the bottom. You can then start playing the music files (with only enough delay to buffer) while you browse the page. It's really neat if you visit sites for bands or mp3 blogs.
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 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?"
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 know some people actually like iTunes but I really have problems wrapping my brain around it. One thing they tend to have in common is limited experience with good media players like Winamp and Amarok. Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
It's really a matter of taste (or lack thereof). The one time I tried Windows Media Player it confused the hell out of me and I went back to iTunes. iTunes may not have all the advanced features, but to me the interface is more intuitive. All I want to do is play my music.
Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
Spoken like someone who has never used iTunes or Windows Media Player.
Or is it just that you don't know what usability means? iTunes is not the paragon of UI design, but it's far beyond the train wreck that is WMP.
Monitoring a folder is the job of the OS not the App.
I have 3 Macs sharing a music folder off the house fileserver. Your excuse for why I have to manually go to each Mac and add new music after ripping it onto the server is pretty awful, especially since Amarok has this feature working.
Let me put this another way: monitoring a folder is a perfectly reasonable service for the OS to provide to applications. If OS X can't do it, then it's the only Unix I use that doesn't.
Note that Amarok takes the more sane approach of actually looking at folder contents from time to time. That might offend your purist sensibilities, but it's pretty darned handy in practice.
And mac OS has folder-actions that let you monitor a folder and add songs to any app, not just itunes.
And that works on (increasingly common) shared folders, and it knows that more files have been added since the last time it connected? Give me a break.
I'll remember this the next time a Mac user teases me for manually performing some tasks that OS X does automatically. I still have to add printers by hand, but at least I only have to do that one time. With iTunes I'm working behind the scenes every time I get new music.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
And Apple, as far as I know, has the only OS that, if you add or delete or even rename sa single file in a directory, will rewrite the entire list of files to simply add or delete the actual focused target.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato