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iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Nov 06, 2008 05:34 PM
from the file-managers-that-also-play-music dept.
from the file-managers-that-also-play-music dept.
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."
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Your Rights Online: Apple DMCAs iPodHash Project 453 comments
TRS-80 writes "Apple has sent a DMCA takedown notice to the IpodHash project, claiming it circumvents their FairPlay DRM scheme. Some background: Apple first added a hash to the iTunesDB file in 6th-gen iPods, but it was quickly reverse-engineered. They changed it with the release of iPhone 2.0 and a project was started to reverse the new hash, but wasn't successful yet. My guess is Apple used the same algorithm as FairPlay for the new hash, so Apple could use the DMCA to prevent competing apps like Songbird and Banshee from talking to iPods/iPhones. BTW, don't tell Apple, but the project uses a wiki, so the old page versions from before the takedown are still there."
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Lacking Support (Score:5, Insightful)
Where have we seen this before...? (Score:5, Interesting)
And you know, nearly three years later, my [slashdot.org] opinions [slashdot.org] 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.
Parent
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
iTunes doesn't use Safari, it just looks web-like. It's custom rendering.
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
$ 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.
Parent
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, that's surprising but you are right. The webkit team has a list of all apps that use webkit [webkit.org] 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).
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [mozillazine.org]
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Basic feature? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [apple.com] are even listed at Apple's website.
Themes are missing, I admit, but for many people this is not a "basic feature", either.
Re:Basic feature? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why have to "import" at all? Why does every music player have to manage a "library"? I've got a file system. I've learned to use it to manage files in ways I like. Just let me do that.
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Interesting)
In that case, you want to use the Quicktime player, not iTunes.
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a naming convention that identifies my work from the directory and filename. iTunes basically strips this info, making it pretty useless for me.
So you're NOT using file metadata? That would seem to be the easiest solution, and makes a whole variety of software and players like your mp3s better.
Additionally, iTunes..Preferences..uncheck "Keep iTunes Music folder organized" with a nice little description of everything that that means below it. That option has been around as long as I have been using itunes.
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Funny)
Listen, no one is forcing you to download a new music player. It sounds like what you really want is mpg321, or possibly sox's "play" command. There's probably a port to your operating system of choice.
Everyone else in the conversation assumes that you want something a that competes with ITunes and not the MP3 player that comes with Emacs.
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:4, Informative)
No, the problem is just that you're dumb.
If you use the Amazon MP3 Downloader (as I do) then simply include the top level folder.
As your download finishes, iTunes automatically picks it up and it shows up. Artwork included, coverflow shows up.
iTunes works very well at what it does. You are not the main stream audience, liking to think you're more technically advanced. I'm not sure how you can convince yourself and still miss such a basic feature that iTunes has had for ages, but hey, it's your label for yourself.
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Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Informative)
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iPod (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:iPod (Score:5, Informative)
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Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my awesome Barack Obama firefox theme.
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Re:Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:4, Insightful)
This is the age old Linux argument.. "but, but, but... you get CHOICE!" The truth is, people don't want choices, they just want something that works.
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Re:Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:4, Informative)
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The Truth (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Try mpd (music player daemon) (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikia.com]
QMPDClient: http://havtknut.tihlde.org/qmpdclient/ [tihlde.org]
Uhh... what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Folder actions (Score:5, Informative)
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.
link (Score:5, Informative)
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php [dougscripts.com]
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VLC (Score:5, Insightful)
Folder actions are your friend (Score:5, Informative)
Monitoring a folder is something you can script [dougscripts.com]. 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
Folder monitoring? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Allow me to break this down... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Allow me to break this down... (Score:4, Interesting)
You're kidding, right? Most of us have some sort of music or mp3 directories, potentially with any number of subdirectories under it for organization. Personally I have mp3/[Genre]/[Artist] and potentially /[Album] if I ripped the whole thing rather than downloaded particular songs. I'm going to put these files into this structure regardless of how it gets into my music player. To claim I should have just dropped it into iTunes itself is disengenuous fanboi rationalization. I don't want my music strewn all over my system, I want it in one place of my choosing. Of course having my player realize to look there periodically is better than it staring dumbly at me until I tell it to.
Have you ever looked at what itunes does when you tell it to organize your library for you? When you just keep your hands off?
songs/artist/album/song.mp3
if its part of a compilation its:
songs/compilations/album/song.mp3
hardly disorganized. Trivial to find anything if you ever need to do it manually. But you don't ever need to. It may not be what you would have chosen but so what? iTunes makes it trivial to sort by genre or artist or whatever you like... if I type 'card' into itunes quick search, it instantly pulls up the Cardigans track from the Romeo+Juliette sound track, along with its appearnace on a compilation disk I got free with some jeans. So the fact that they aren't together on the disk doesn't affect me. I can also browse by album, artist, genre, and trivially filter them.
I can define smart playlists that track how and when I've listened to track and sync it onto my ipod based on that. When I sync my ipod, it automatically rotates a chunk of music I like but have listened to recently with music I like but have not, while keeping my favorites on at all times. I can rerate tracks on the ipod itself, and it syncs back to itunes... etc, etc, etc.
Face it its an above average music player.
The truly sad part about your comment is that Apple could probably have this "advanced" feature added in two hours of work.
I agree they could. They could also add all sorts of pointless dangley bits and features to satisfy people like you, but then it wouldn't be the simple elegant app that it is. I'm not saying your feature idea is bad, but its pretty necessary. Especially since, on OSX at least, its relatively trivial to write an applescript to do what you want here.
You're right. Downloading or ripping the music directly into a destination folder is voodoo magic.
ripping music? itunes does this for you. why would you use 2 pieces of software for this?
downloading music? you mean using a torrent or something? Yeah, because dragging it to the itunes window is the hard part.
Congratulations. I'm happy you like people making your UI decisions for you, but not everybody agrees. To insult them by pretending that must mean they're 13-year-old goths or have "unhealthy fascination[s]" just makes you an asshat. Period.
I take it you haven't browsed the extensive library of Winamp themes?
http://www.winamp.com/skins/browse/2 [winamp.com]
Take a good hard look, find me one that's objectively better than itunes from an HCI perspective among their top rated? hell, find one anywhere on the site.
I think gimmick terminology is stupid too, but now could you possibly nitpick for no good reason any more than this? It has to be some sort of a record.
I'm sure I wouldn't have mentioned it if it hadn't been in the summary. That the submitter felt it important enough to mention is what made it important enough to rebut.
At the end of the day I think its great that amarok and songbird are available for OSX; I don't even think it shouldn't be on slashdot... I just don't agree with the submitter with respect to the relative merits of itunes vs the new comers.
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Amarok: The undisputed champion (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
iTunes HAD competition (Score:5, Informative)
...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).
Hard & Symbolic links. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
But, iTunes had Skins! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 Songbird: forget Mozilla as your app engine (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
Fighting fire with paper (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Themes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Themes? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm reminded of this comment sent to jwz [jwz.org]:
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Re:Themes? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Themes? (Score:5, Funny)
...then you're pretty fucking stupid for continuing to use OS X at all, because iTunes is just like every other damn OS X application!
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Re:Themes? (Score:4, Insightful)
What you're saying makes sense to me, but I've never seen it work out that an application being "themeable" was a particularly good thing. With a lot of programs, I feel like making the UI highly configurable really ends up being an excuse for the developer to not spend a lot of time making a good default UI. It's like, "Meh, I don't want to spend time making it usable or pretty, so I'll just make it so someone else can figure out how to make the UI good." And then no one else does.
Even if there's an active theming community, you usually end up with thousands of themes to sort through, 5 of which are moderately good, but none of them integrate well with the OS. And then, if you're slightly neurotic like I am, you end up constantly looking for a new, better theme, when all you really want is something that doesn't feel jarring when you switch to another application.
I admit that a lot of this is just my opinion, but all I'm trying to do here is voice my opinion. For me, the only time theming makes sense is when you can theme the entire OS thoroughly and consistently so that all applications match. I don't just want clean and simple, I also want consistent. The qualms I have had with the iTunes interface have been when they've chosen to give it nonstandard interface elements.
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You're making the Audion guys cry. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:media format support (Score:5, Informative)
You're trolling, right? iTunes plays anything Quicktime plays and you can get Quicktime plugins for all the formats you mentioned...
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