iTunes On OS X Finally Has Competition 668
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."
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.
Re:Force Apple?! (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:iPod (Score:1, Informative)
For the phone, you're out of luck. However, for the iPod (depending on how new it is) you might wanna check out rockbox.
Re:iPod (Score:3, Informative)
link (Score:5, Informative)
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/folderaction01.php [dougscripts.com]
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.
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
Re:iPod (Score:3, Informative)
Not to mention the Shuffle.
Re:Force Apple?! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm fairly sure that won't break DRM 6, but you can just grab requiem for that.
Re:iPod... (Score:2, Informative)
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.
No thanks. (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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.
Re:Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Uhh... what? (Score:1, Informative)
Not scanning for changes is something that I've struggled with for quite a while now. My situation is this:
I have several computers in the house for my several family members. Each has itunes installed and an individual library of songs. I would like to use a network-mounted audio directory and keep all the songs in there, so that any computer can edit playlists or update song information or even update the owner's ipod. It's been a real thorn in my side.
The fact that itunes can update my ipod and works with windows/osx are actually the ONLY things keeping me using it.
Re:Feature Creep is not a Feature (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Basic feature? (Score:3, Informative)
iTunes does not impose a directory structure or location on you, if you choose to have it not automatically structure things for you. So, it really doesn't matter what your music is or where you got it... indie or otherwise. :-)
Discounting folder actions, if adding a file to the iTunes library meant more than dragging file(s)/folder(s) on the iTunes window, I would sympathize more.
But, no. There are no non-visualization plugins that I'm aware of. It hasn't been a problem for me, but I can think of scenarios where they might be nice.
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).
Re:iPod (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Basic feature? (Score:1, Informative)
iTunes does not EVER automatically pick things up.
Applications can instruct iTunes to add something to the library, which is presumably what Amazon MP3 Downloader does.
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.
Re:Themes? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Banshee for OS X? (Score:3, Informative)
If I understand Aaron's post [abock.org], version 1.4 and on will be released for Mac OS X.
The OS X changes were merged into the main svn branch on Oct. 23: http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/banshee/trunk/banshee [gnome.org]
Re:Don't Even Think of the iPhone (Score:1, Informative)
Er, I wouldn't try and run it on my iPhone. Mostly because SongBird is a desktop music player and doesn't run on an iPhone in the first place.
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.
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:3, Informative)
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....
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).
Re:Themes? (Score:1, Informative)
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.
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]
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Truth (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is there a browser in the music player? (Score:5, Informative)
media format support (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Basic feature? (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
Re:iPod (Score:3, Informative)
So can Rhythmbox, Or gtkpod. Though I believe the iPod Touch requires a bit of messing around to get it to work...
Re:iPod (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Themes? (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit.
Themes are an excuse to create completely no-standard UI, round windows, that a branded with tiny low contrast controls and giant pictures of either latest movie, latest hot girl, or better yet, the latest hot girl in the latest movie.
UI is hard, and it's not for amateurs.
Re:Themes? (Score:3, Informative)
Really?
I always felt that iTunes was to OS/X as what Microsoft Office was to Windows. It looks close but has features/layouts that may show up in future OS releases.
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...
Re:Basic feature? (Score:3, Informative)
I think this statement perfectly illustrates what I hate about iTunes.
You might want to close your legs, your ignorance is showing.
Let's say you have an iPod and I have an iPod and you want to share some files off your iPod with me.
So is there a computer involved or not? Because you mention iTunes...
This is completely impossible in iTunes.
Until recently with the iPod touch, it wasn't impossible at all. iTunes is a jukebox, library, store, player, and importer. What you want to do is 100% doable, you just don't know how/why.
You have to sync against the library which means wiping out your collection.
So grab those files in iTunes (since you already have it up), drag it to the desktop or into the filesystem of the second iPod you want to own those files. We are talking files, right?
You can't just add a handful of files. Downloading non-iTunes music or filesharing is anathema to iTunes since you have to drag and drop downloaded files to the library, which immediately mangles the filenames and metadata to make interoperability (and filesharing) as hard as possible.
Nope, wrong answer. The mangling of filenames is actually a feature called a hash table [wikipedia.org] and was implemented with iPod 1.0, where all the files were stored into a fixed number of directories and subdirectories. It essentially mean you could search the iPod with no more than 2 directories accesses and 10 files searched.
And the metadata was stored INSIDE the MP3 file, so no metadata was mangled. It makes finding the files manually difficult, but made finding the files with iTunes or the iPod incredibly simple and fast, and since that was the normal use case (browsing the iPod, searching iTunes) it made sense. It also reduced disc spin/read and allowed for longer battery life.
Anyway, the point is that the iPod was not designed first and foremost as a song sharing device. The Zune was.