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Songbird the Open Source iTunes?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Dec 25, 2005 03:16 PM
from the getting-what-you-want-how-you-want-it dept.
from the getting-what-you-want-how-you-want-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"
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It's not the client, it's the store (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the store, it's the licensing (Score:5, Interesting)
On to the article:So this is just a product announcement.Nothing to see here, move along....
Parent
Songsuck (Score:3, Insightful)
* - Well save for the oddball one that sells actual MP3s of some band that I've never heard of and doesn't sound that particularly good or a particular Russian one who gives no money to the artist at all.
Re:Songsuck (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't support FreeDOS, NeXT, QNX, WinCE, SkyOS, OS/2, OS/9, SGI, Sun, BeOS, AmigaDOS, or my old Commodore 64, either. What's your point? Apple went after two markets: It's own, and the largest one. When Linux becomes important to Apple and to consumers, iTunes will magically appear. Right now Linux is not a factor to either. It's the same chicken-and-egg situation that Linux people have been dealing with since its inception. If people suddenly started buying Amigas by the thousands, iTunes would become available. I hate to break it to you, but in spite of the Slashdot hype, Linux is still far from critical mass.
Parent
Amen (Score:5, Funny)
Praise the Lord!
It's official (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Judging by their screenshots... (Score:4, Insightful)
I know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but come on here. At least try to make your cut-and-paste jobs a bit less obvious.
No one really wants an iTunes copy. (Score:4, Insightful)
iTunes is not similar to Internet Explorer what so ever, unless you're on a Macintosh, you need to download it or install iTunes manually, it's a choice you make.
You don't have to buy an iPod or use the iTunes Music Store. In fact you can happily go by using your computer and never have to know neither Apple nor iTunes.
Internet Explorer was the at the centre of a monopoly, it came preinstalled, full of bugs and consumers were crying for alternatives for almost 10 years before the Firefox project came and provided a reasonable "answer".
There are very few people out there crying for an iTunes alternative, the iTunes popularity is rather justly earnt and is only used by people who are interested in listening to music on an iPod or purchasing music from iTMS. Consumers aren't demanding that iPods or iTunes work with other online music stores or other music programs. In fact the only people I actually hear complaining are Real and Creative.
The other online stores are -amazingly- bad, poorly laid out, with pricing models that reflect one theme "greed", the model of "download as many or as few songs as you like, but pay for them until the day that you die otherwise we take them back from you" is ridiculous.
But not as ridiculous as the excessively under-designed garbage pieces of electronics they want you to play them on, where they franchise that a 64kbps Windows media file as a decent alternative to 128kbps AAC audio.
So if those are my "choices", I'm pretty pleased to be giving my attention to iTunes and Apple, as they certainly seem to have a much better clue about what they're doing and are satisfying what I'm asking for in technology vs. music and willing to upgrade their product regardless of what the competition is up to.
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Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:4, Insightful)
You do know that Apple bought NeXT, don't you?
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Re:Judging by their screenshots... (Score:3, Insightful)
oh, please (Score:5, Informative)
NeXT combines the Smalltalk programming model, the Stepstone Objective-C language, the GNU compiler, the CMU Mach kernel, and the Adobe Postscript language (not much original there, but at least NeXT paid for some of it). Jobs did a great job at putting together NeXT out of existing technologies, but he didn't exactly contribute a lot of technology.
Let me repeat: there is nothing wrong for Apple copying from other people, but Apple should stop complaining (and sueing) when people copy from them.
Parent
News.Context (Score:5, Insightful)
MusicKube (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess that MusikCube [musikcube.com] fits better in the description of an "open source iTunes" counterpart.
Re:MusicKube (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
(song)Birds of a Feather, Flock together. (Score:5, Interesting)
Or not. It's essentially Firefox plus some random blog-editing tools and a "pretty" interface. Songbird, IMHO, will be much the same. So far the only feature that people like is the "URL Slurper"... which basically amounts to wget recursively. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for competition, especially when it's Open-Source vs. Closed-Source. That said, I can't see much worth getting hyped up about: the interface is nothing new (but more cluttered than iTunes), the "URL Slurper" isn't anything the world hasn't seen with wget and curl, and I think the project might be at risk legally.
The optimist in me will make sure I download and try it the first day that it's available. The pessimist reminds me that getting hyped up will make me less receptive to a good product.
Work with an existing excellent product. (Score:5, Interesting)
IMHO it is second to none when it come to managing your music collection. Imagine adding an optional Buy-Here tab with x+1 companies to buy your music from.
I have never bought music online, I never will. I would disable any tab that I saw like that in Amarok.
But my point is; Itunes is/was a good jukebox style player. iTunes has it's issues, alas it's not available natively for Linux.
Amarok excells as a music center, AND runs natively in Linux.
Take a hard look at those screenshots... (Score:5, Interesting)
The project is ambitious. But if it succeeds, it could change the face of the web, at least the music portion of it in a way that's really benificial to us all (musicians included).
Amarok is a great project, but its approach is a a single platform media player/manager. This is a media outlet/portal, with management thrown in for excellent measure.
Of course it may never happen, or it could flop. According to the website we'll all have at least a year to wait before we can declare it anything other then an interesting project. My hat's off to them.
Parent
Why This Can't Work (Score:5, Informative)
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
Re:The downside to amaroK (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Easy fix (Score:3, Informative)
Lipstick [kde-look.org] is also quite nice.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are a Windows or Linux application developer, please, if you don't have a Mac or haven't really spent time with OS X. Pick something like a button or text field AND STUDY IT. And I mean really look closely at it and nothing else. Note the timing, shading, feedback, action, EVERYTHING.
First, GUI != API.
API is the application programming interface; usually a collection of objects, which have propteries and methods you can use or extend or override. The API is the roadmap to these items.
As for the OS X button/text fields vs Linux & Windows button/text fields... are you serious? Study them? Timing, action? Let's get real here, it's a bitmap swap. The OS X versions have a pretty glass look to them, the Windows versions look like smooth beveled plastic, and Linux ones look however you want them to look.
I love my Mac, and I think it has the best looking operating system of the three mentioned, but I don't really see where the interface elements are better in any other regard than their outward appearance.
Parent
Skinnable baby.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The browser restricts (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a music shopping app where you can (for example) "audition" a track at a streamable (but ugly) 32kbps then click a "buy" button and have it (and the artwork) automatically download to the proper folder and be available in your playlist immediately would be much easier than just using Firefox or IE to browse generic web pages.
Parent
Re:Anyone else notice... (Score:3, Funny)
I think it's a masturbation reference.