Slashdot Mirror
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.
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/
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.
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php
I think very few themes actually contribute to the usability of a program. Most of the time I look at an archive of themes for a program it's flooded with various nearly-unusable pictures-of-bikini-girls-made-into-interfaces type themes.
On the rare chance I find a theme I genuinely like, it's for a slightly older version of the program and half of the elements are broken.
When are developers going to admit that they should just stick to the OS's GUI toolkit? The user can then theme their entire window manager, instead of each individual program.
Blog
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
Because people disagree on what "clean simple" means. If the UI is not themeable and you don't like it, you have to switch to a different player altogether. If it is themeable, you just need to switch to a different theme.
I don't buy that. Does skinning really achieve that? I don't think I've ever seen a skin that really improved usability. Or really changed it much.
And most people, especially average users, go with the default skin anyway. IMHO, skinning just slows things down, and it often breaks with the UI standards.
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...
I'm reminded of this comment sent to jwz:
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
$ 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.
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...