iTunes Alternates?
A friend of mine recently asked me if I knew of any alternates to iTunes for playing/organizing music. I personally love iTunes but I’m aware that my friend isn’t the only person with a distaste for it.
So, got any suggestions for other apps that play/organize music well on OS X?
Edit: This is for iTunes Mac
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Mac or Windows? On the Mac, there’s Panic’s app Audion, which was discontinued (due to competition with iTunes), but in its heyday, it was pretty good.
On Windows, there’s Winamp. Many people like it, but I personally hate it.
Try out MusicIP Mixer, available at http://www.musicip.com. Though not as straight-forward as iTunes, it offers lots more feaures, and looks somewhat like iTunes, so it should be easy enough to use.
There’s music players / organizers other than iTunes? :p
if you dont mind a work in progress theres Songbird
well, a friend (Improv, Pastence) and I are actually going to begin on working on a music player. I am currently learning objective-c and he is going to be the UI designer. If you are or know of any developers that are interested just email me at Jon.Kantro@GMail.com
Ehy, I’d like to switch on Mac, but my hesitation is for a good music organizer too. On Windows we have foobar2000 – with a little work it’s sure the best music player – and I cannot live without it. In mac os? I’ve thousands mp3s and I need a serious software for “professionals” :), ITunes is too much newbie-oriented.
@Jon, look deeply at foobar2000 while planning your music player :)
Audion was pretty sweet but for me it has always had stability problems on Mac OS X. I actually use MacAmp Lite X most of the time. For organizing I just use the Finder.
Hey here is an idea: dig out your old Mac OS X Public Beta disc and see if that old music player app will work under Tiger.
Winamp is good on windows (the older 5.13 version with the mlPod addon, NOT the new 5.2 version). I have never even installed iTunes. I don’t like the serial stamping that iTunes does to the id3 tags or how it deletes files that are not in my iTunes catalog. DRM be damned, I will use my shuffle however the hell I want.
Giampaolo Bellavite brings up an interesting point that is inline with Apple’s product strategy. Why shouldn’t there be a pro version of iTunes? iPhoto->Aperature. iMovie->Final Cut. iDVD->DVD Studio. GarageBand->Soundtrack. What’s missing from this equasion?!
not sure how a pro version would work nor do i see any need for it. good point, though.
I use iTune too. But the best music player and organizer on earth is foobar. But sadly it’s only available on PC :(
have to give it to the foobar boys (& girls) – they sure know how to make a sleek interface. muhahaha!
I really need a OS X equivalent to foobar2000. Whamb is about the one out there that can handle oggs, and it’s really buggy. I didn’t care for audion. I don’t believe songbird has released any mac builds yet.
Check out Songbird which is a virtual clone of iTunes that uses Firefox’s browser engine. It’s powerful, multi-platform and free.
http://www.songbirdnest.com/
Songbird –> why would this be a good solution to replace iTunes if it’s a clone of iTunes. The point was that iTunes was doing it….why use another iTunes…
http://amarok.kde.org/ is the best one !!!
Remember folks, we’re talking about music players for OS X. The question is NOT “What is a good iTunes alternate for any system?” It’s “What is a good iTunes alternate for OS X?”
In that case, Audion will do the trick. Sure, no support anymore, but it’s still pretty cool. Purchased iTMS songs will have to be converted to MP3 files, however.
http://muine-player.org is a different, and interesting approach to music players
Probably not on Mac, but MediaMonkey handles music libraries of the 100GB size with ease. It uses the winamp player underneath it all, and it looks like an access backend. The interface is great, it has really advanced reporting and tag management capabilities, it can batch rename/organize your entire library, good auto-tagging capabilities, and it has (IMHO) better synching ability with the iPod than iTunes itself does.
The more I think about iTunes, the more disgusted I get with it. I’m not a Mac user, but for all the shit that gets thrown around between the two platforms, I would have expected a better product just in terms of scalability, let alone management. Granted to get the advanced management features in MediaMonkey, you have to pay like $20 for lifetime upgrades, but event their free version is using a better engine. I’m not trying to troll here, but this kinda reinforces my association of apple with the “mom & dad” demographic – abstract for ease of use, and geared towards those with low needs. I don’t mean that as insulting, it just seems like the products aren’t there like they were when apple was associated with media professionals. Or at least the bar isn’t set there anymore, right?
Can songbird play store videos?
my computer will not download itunes because of some vbcsript crap. is there anything i can do or is there an alternate to itunes?
Cog is a really good freeware iTunes alternate that reminds me of foobar2k.
http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/
bottom line.there is no bug free decent media player that can measure up to itunes yet.
I think what is needed is a player that DOES not have an ipod interface; after all, who wants an ipod anyway!!!
booya
> … who wants an ipod anyway!!!
About 14 million people so far, and counting.
Sweet: really promising lightweight player that’s kind of a hybrid between foobar2000 and winamp is at http://sbooth.org/Play/ . Plays most formats (Vorbis, FLAC, MPC), replaygain, library, last.fm, growl, DSPs…
I gotta mention MP3Toys… None Better…
It’s Classy & Shiny