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There has to be something better. |
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you could try |
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didn't try Songbird cause it looks fugly, but maybe it's good? what is it that annoys you about itunes? if it' just the sluggishness, its slow awkward way to browse music... there are music browsers like Coversutra, Sizzlingkeys, .. and some other i forgot the name of... dunno i've tried them but something was lacking with them too. now i'm using Launchbar for most computer tasks... including browsing music. with all these solutions itunes is still running as a player, you just control it with a better interface. personally i think itunes is good for archiving music, putting cover art etc... just the browsing sucks a lot... |
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I just want something non shitty that gives me a tree view of the filesystem so I can play things from where they are easily. On Windows I like Mediamonkey, but there's no OSX version. |
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so you want to move around files on your drive manually? why? i'd try LaunchBar, or Quicksilver of course but it's buggy, hard to set up and it's questionable if it will ever be fixed properly. LaunchBar costs a few bucks but is excellent. CoverSutra also costs a few bucks and looks shiny but is not as great as LaunchBar. when i want to listen to, say, shitWebVer4bHosbn32.fuckbench by AphexPusher from the album Cockwrenchaccelerator, i press cmd+space from anywhere, type "apshi32" or another abbreviation of the above and press enter. if i want to browse that album, i type "cwrea" then browse with cursor keys etc.. you basically have a global shortcut for all sorts of things, it's much faster and more convenient then mousing.... |
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Jesus Christ the Mac solution is either "throw money at it" or "do it our way". I want to right click on a folder and choose "play in winamp" but it looks like I'm going to have to install XP on this big aluminum frying pan to do that. |
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haha Google QuickSearchBox does it for free |
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oh dear lord use songbird. it kicks ass! for one, if you find it ugly, thats because it's like foobar in that you need to customize it to your liking. there are hundreds of skins online. on top of that are extensions as well (im pretty sure it's actually built on the mozilla engine) - alarm clock, now playing list, details window pane, quicktime support, deleting duplicate files (!!!), ipod support, and yes, explore your music from within the file structure and not the library, pretty much anything you want songbird to do, it can, thanks to open architecture. also it syncs automatically with your itunes library if you like, can manage your music into an organized file system (or leave it alone it if you like) just like itunes. it uses less memory than itunes as well. plus my favorite feature is that you can set it to watch a folder on your computer and automatically add new mp3s. mine is set to my torrent download folder, and it easily adds all my files without any problem (i also don't use any kind of file structure) and when i want to go through all my new music i just organize my library by date added. |
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i don't see what's so bad about using the itunes library to browse/serach, just don't let it organise or copy stuff and you can keep whatever underlying file structure you like. you can easily create a folder action to let you right click > import into itunes, too |
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sorry, i mean automator script for finder context menu, not folder action |
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itunes isn't that bad, you can browse and play your music just fine. Installing a new operating system just to play music that software already does is just stupid. |
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Welcome to the Apple Macintosh. you'd be COMPLETELY fucked if you were trying to use a Macintosh before OS X - at least you have a lot more open source options at your disposal. back in the OS 9 days, you either paid through the nose for your software or you didn't have software. come to think of it, back in those days you also paid for the hardware with an arm and a leg. nowadays you just pay an arm. |
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and your foot |
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your need for a treeview tells me you've been indoctrinated and brainwashed by windows for way too long. now that you have an aluminum frying pan, perhaps it's time another, dare i say more productive way of using a computer. |
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you could also select all tracks from the directory and press space. (long live quickview!) |
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I'm checking out songbird. It's nice. I like the extensibility and the tree view. Itunes wants to think every track in 5 years of hyperdub is a separate album and I can't convince it otherwise. Maybe I can write my script to make it learn to know that this is an album. My first week using a mac has taught me that it's a very powerful machine and OS but the apple stores, the bundled software and the entire experience are designed to turn you into Steve's cows and milk you as often and as deeply as possible. I'm probably losing them money by just buying the computer and no extra warranty, software, or lessons on how the mouse is not a thing to put in your mouth. The thing I like about a tree is it's universal. I can take an external drive with a bunch of folders, attach it to a Windows machine, a Mac or a Linux box and my library is organized the same way no matter which media player I'm using. Well, except iTunes. |
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yeah, mac is certainly now about taking advantage of all the free/open source options. currently the programs i use most often are adium, firefox, utorrent, songbird, audacity, vlc, unrarx... all available for free. i don't think i actually use any of the branded apple apps beyond spotlight. |
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hmm i feel it's more like... you can turn a mac into your cow and customize the interface to your liking *without* the fear of destroying your OS installation and/or needing to be some 733t linux haxx0r. Apple software is incredibly easy to steal and they don't bother protecting it... sure they try to milk you but... google serialbox. fix the HyperDub issue: select all tracks in itunes, press cmd+i, click options, check "part of a compilation". you can also edit "album artist" under the "info" and "sorting" tabs if you want it to well... sort it differently... trees were good in DOS times, when you had folders with like 10 files in it and used to happily browse floppy disks imo. nowadays it's tags, dude. Does it really feel that good to browse a folder with like 500 artists, sorted alphabetically? imo, really try something like LaunchBar or Quicksilver, it might blow your computer usage mind. |
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are third party launchers really necessary now that spotlight is fully fleshed out? |
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these launchers are so much more than launchers... spotlight compared to launchbar is like MS Paint compared to After Effects. Changes your way of using a computer significantly... you basically think of what you want to do beforehand, and a couple keystrokes later you're at it. open xltronic? cmd+space, x, enter. browse threads you've visited? cmd+space, x, right arrow, choose thread with up/down arrow. search isohunt, google, imdb, any site you want from where ever you're at, with the browser not even open? cmd+space, [abbreviation of site name, i.e. g for google, gi for google images etc.], space, [search term], enter. (there are ~50 sites predefined, but it's easy to add new ones) want to open TextMate and you want to edit a file you've been working on last night? cmd+space, t, m, right arrow key (for recent files), choose file with arrow up/down, enter. make a zip file from a folder containing horsey porn inside your documents folder, then send it as mail to Richard D James? cmd+space, d, o, c, space, h, o, r, space, z, enter, tab, rdj, enter. mail opens, with a new mail addressed to Richard, the zip as an attachment, cursor is at subject field. it all works without ever touching the mouse, and becomes second nature very fast... |
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wow, ive never used either of those, sounds pretty powerful. i may give it a shot, but a lot of the features, like keyword based web browsing, i already have worked into other apps. i have pretty much every search site i use programmed into firefox, so with a keystroke or two i can search google (g s%), youtube (y s%), waffles (wf s%), what (wc s%), imdb (i s%), google image (i s%), etc. also, having a macbook (as opposed to imac), switching from trackpad to keyboard is hardly an issue and flying around with all my hot corners and tap clicking enabled is just as second nature to me. heh, open architecture is great. you can find so many ways to do similar things. |
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totally. well the advantage of these launchers is, you don't need to have a special application running to do stuff, instead opening the right application or bringing it to focus (or not if it's not needed) is part of the action. i.e. you don't need mail running for the Mail stuff, or Firefox for the searches in your case... so for example while you're reading a pdf in Preview, or watching error code in your console, or have a file selected in Finder, and want to google for something you see, just select part of the text (or the file name), press *and hold* cmd+space, the text will be in LaunchBar... release, then *hold* g a little -> it's a google search. so no matter what you're doing, a web search or most other actions is 2 seconds away. etc. etc. bla |
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I'm don't mean to come across as zealous but u r blaming itunes for badly tagged files here :( |
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terence - launchbar sounds awesome. I use launchy in Windows which is like quicksilver but that sounds much fuller featured. Thanks for the retagging itunees advice. Have you ever looked at the OSX filesystem? I think you'd be surprised at the forest of trees there. Why doesn't Apple throw them all into one directory and let the OS find them by tag? ;-) hed - yeah I love the openness. Between the programs I own that already have mac versions and the free stuff, I haven't had to steal anything and I want to keep it that way. hors - I honestly never paid a lick of attention to tags before now. It's a different way of thinking that I'm not used to. Also I am an deliberately being an asshole. ^_^ |
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I'm going to resist the urge to bash apple. Tags are not a good way of doing things. Doing a filename or directory name search is considerably faster and more universal than the tag version, which is: look in directory look at every mp3 read tag is it what we want? yes = stop no = carry on if you have directories for artists it becomes much easier. find directory called "afx" done personally I think Itunes and the like are awful. We should try to do things the unix way, plain text files, directory structures, etc not fruity file formats and tags. I find I enjoyed mp3s more when I used to use winamp 2.x on win98 than now using Ryhthmbox (itunes clone) on linux. If you want a winamp style program, I think there is/was macamp? and xmms. To be honest, I've given up a bit on computer software. I feel like everything is aimed at some fucking moron or ipod person and not me. |
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Doing a filename or directory name search is considerably faster and more universal than the tag version, which is: huh? a directory search faster? in what world do you live? a search on tags in itunes is instantaneous. while you type instantaneous, that is. can't see how it can be faster. by predicting what you're going to type in the search box? or do you still think mouse clicking through a tree is faster than a system search through an indexed dataset? |
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Indexed dataset has everything cached up in RAM, which makes itunes into bloated hogzilla the RAM whore. Here's a test I run on my computer to find wabby legs: david@t60:~$ time locate wabby /home/david/Music/afx_-_hangable_auto_bulb_-_06_wabby_legs. mp3 real 0m0.638s user 0m0.620s sys 0m0.016s so just over half a second, which from a human point of view is "instant". Also doesn't use up gobs or RAM. So as you can see, searching directories is VERY fast as it had just wizzed through my ENTIRE almost full 120GB disc. |
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*rolling eyes* |
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yes indeed. and let's finally get rid of graphical user interfaces too, except they work like . she also seems to find the right file incredibly fast :D |
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I'm not saying get rid of a GUI, but I'm not aware of a GUI tool that will easily tell me how long it takes to locate a file on my disc. The command line is good for generating useful metrics. Essentially, I'm just pointing out that doing a disc search is very fast. |
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Locate works in the same way as tags in itunes or foobar or winamp, all the tags are read and stored in a cache file, which is then searchable instantaneously. Locate does the same, it doesn't actually search the file system directly. |
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oh and btw they are not stored in ram |
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even if, i thought we're past the "omg ram is full" age of personal computing... how much space will some index database allocate? 100MB? it's nothing. |
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I've bought an ipod touch recently and I'm kinda forced to go to itunes. And I too feel the lack of a tree view is a pain in the ass. I used to have a sandisk sansa and I put rockbox on it. that gave me a treeview of all the mp3's I had. very nice to use. but now listening to music is somewhat less straightforward. why can't the ipod display my albums like: artist name - trackname. no right now it has the trackname in big and below in small letters you've got the trackname - artist and there is no way to change that. totally not logical. are there music player apps I can install for the ipod? |
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The unix locate command does indeed use a database file, which is why it is necessary to do an updatedb periodically as it is not a realtime disc sweep. If Itunes uses the same method then why does my anecdotal evidence suggest it is a bloated RAM hog? Just because you have gazillions of bytes of RAM, it doesn't mean a program should use as much as possible. Winamp 2.x series was lean. Perhaps it doesn't matter to you, but some people use older hardware, run RAM hungry jobs in the background or perhaps think that software shouldn't use masses of memory just because it can. Anyway, I think you might be able to run winamp on osx if you use crossover mac, however that does cost monies. I've used the linux version as they did a free download a while back as USA budget had dropped or something.... anyway, it's quite good. It's not an emulator, so runs fast (sometimes faster than windows) as it re-maps windows API calls to the host system APIs. e.g. program says "windows create menu item blah." this gets remapped via crossover to be "osx menu create: blah". |
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srsly, why the crap would you want to do this? it's like ripping out the driver's seat of a Porsche, replacing it with the old seat from your broken down '84 Vauxhall Cadette because you love its farty smell so much. i'm not saying iTunes isn't crap. But i understand your logic goes like: itunes is slow, conclusion -> tag based search in general is shit. (While there are clearly other reasons why itunes is slow and eating memory, the main one being album artwork imo. Then there are really awful flaws in the UI which make it very awkward to browse music, simple things like using frigging shuffle mode is one thing i haven't figured out to do how i want it. Apple need to rewrite itunes from scratch to fix it imo, and they're hopefully doing that with version 10. so let's agree that itunes is shit okay?) but think of it in this way: if you haven't manually put your files (and i mean files in general - why would you want to handle different kinds of file types in different ways?) neatly in your stupid (and it is stupid) tree structure, you're basically fucked. jeez, you'll have to manually move files around to their right branch of a non-existant tree on a disk... shriek! even if they're neatly sorted - you're missing out on cool stuff, brought to you by thedigitalâ„¢. now it's getting philosophical: digital and trees don't go together very well. trees are metaphors from an analog world, think drawers and folders and all that jazz, where you physically put stuff into things, so you can take it out again later. now if you've ever thought about what makes the internet so special, it's hyperlinks (in the old fashioned internet we know at least). you can make a wormhole from anywhere to anywhere else, and it's neat! not a tree, but a rhizome, or a mycelium, a neural network if you will, where any synapse can be connected with any other. now in art, back in the classic days, artists tried to capture the "cosmic godliness" by trying to directly depict esoteric fantasies (Sistine Chapel. |
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..), while nowadays it's more about inner structure of things... we've found out about molecules, and what they're made of etc, and that bigger structures are the emergent result of properties of smaller things, blah blah.. so now we're using our knowledge about structures, and build artificial eco-systems around them (modern video games, facebook, it's often found in architecture, generative music, ...). the tree metaphor for files though defies natural structural growth. it's like making a structure without really "getting it", from the outside. it would be much more effective to forget what a stem is, and what a branch is, and work with the cells inside instead, the dna... the point i want to make with this lengthy post is: it's really good to see data on your computer not as stacks of files, but as contextually linkable, fluid information. it can take the form of audio, text, images, etc... so if you do a search for David Bowie, why not show everything that is related to this search, and why even limit it to your hard drive? btw yes, os x has tree structures and i think it's a pain to move files around in finder... think that's easier in explorer... but hey after all desktop operating systems are facing a new generation of computing: now listen to this :D mobile computing hasn't really even started yet. But it will soon become absolutely irrelevant what information is locally saved on a device you hold in your hands... we're going online, and thanks to that the combined knowledge of mankind will be able to fit into a nothing. |
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dang wrong link... this: |
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Terence, the future you're pointing to is one in which end users are disempowered and infantilized. They have no knowledge of the technology they're using and they're dependent on whatever the technology providers give them, for whatever price they're charging. The wet dream of tech companies is to get users back to being dumb consumers who use the systems like glorified cable boxes, where you can charge them per use or per view, and the user has no knowledge or control of where their data is or how to copy it. The user will be charged for use, charged for storage, told how to use the system or else, and held hostage or cut off. We're seeing this in the xbox, for example (it's not just apple who dreams this dream). I've read that developers of alternative media players have a hard time dealing with Apple and get no cooperation. I wonder why? |
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Seeing as you use OSX, you should be able to run bash scripts. Sounds like your music is organised like mine, you might like a script to recursively work through your directory removing nasty characters, making spaces underscores, etc. If so, copy the lines below the snips to a file, call it something like rename.sh and put in in your "music" directory. make it executable: chmod +x rename.sh now when you double click your rename program it makes all the mp3s have nice names :-) It also does this for the directories and works through all sub directories too. ----8<-------SNIP SNIP----8<-------SNIP SNIP----8<------- #!/bin/bash function unixifyname { # space to underscore, # removes { [ } ] , ! etc # CAPS to lower case ls | while read -r FILE do mv -v "$FILE" `echo $FILE | tr ' ' '_' | tr -d '[{}(),\!]' | tr -d "\'" | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]'` done } function recurse { # recursively navigate a directory structure # ignore symlinks ( -h ) as these screw it up for a in `ls` do echo "found:" $a if [ -d $a ]; then if [ ! -h $a ]; then echo $a "is a dir" cd "$a" # Do the recursive command here: unixifyname; #Run the function again (aka recursion) recurse cd .. fi fi done } ########################## # SCRIPT STARTS HERE # ########################## # clear up start directory to stop it choking on spaces then fire up recursion... unixifyname; recurse; |
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and if you'd use tags *sigh* you could search on anything you'd want: artist, album, year, bpm, rating, length, genre, .... when are you boys going to learn |
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hmm dunno... i'm trying to see it optimistic and i think it's more a problem of generation conflicts.... your first paragraph could be used for the automobile just as well. there always was and always will be the not so bright majority of zombie people used as drones for whatever shady cause, no?... killing witches, killing Jews... bread and circuses etc... well fuck em. there's also the aspect of companies aggressively competing for customers... a good thing! it drives innovation and prevents prices from going up. also it's not like there's one huge company controlling everything. nobody forces you to use google, apple, nokia or microsoft products either. there's a large variety of great open source software (hardware not so much, sadly) for the overly cautious person to use. |
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fooba-- fol ol de rol ol |
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If there's something that's difficult or impossible to do on a mac, apple bum boys say there's something wrong with doing it. |
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is cos the apple they got |
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is there an alternative player application you can install on the ipod for playing music? |
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yeah that I know of, but I'm more talking about and app I can install on the ipod,without deleting the rest. |
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I have decided to pronounce OS X as "osks". Also, you need to give Apple a credit card number to turn on "genius" thingy? hahahahahaha this itunes was made for people who wear helmets and type with their face. Big ups to lupus and hedphukker for recommending songburd. It's not winamp but it'll do. |
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