6 ms·
Someone has to say it: why do people keep using it? If it's not doing the job it's supposed too, or worse, actively deleting your music it's time to scrap it!
by Cozumel 10y ago
Someone has to say it: why do people keep using it? If it's not doing the job it's supposed too, or worse, actively deleting your music it's time to scrap it!
- UVB-76 10y agoThere's still nothing better than iTunes, at least on OS X. It's the best of a bad bunch.
- kitschpatrol 10y agoI've found Swinsian to be a viable alternative: http://swinsian.com http://swinsian.com
- zyxley 10y agoNo file organization? Having the files automatically organized when the metadata is updated is literally the entire reason I've stuck with iTunes so far.
- Bartweiss 10y agoMy experience is that iTunes can't handle anything but perfectly neat metadata about album versions of songs. Every time I've fed it live music, or alternate takes, or anything else weird, it's choked so badly that I ended up wishing for no organization.
- sethhochberg 10y agoAgreed, for a lot of people "no organization" is a feature unto itself. iTunes is famous for mangling already cleanly-organized collections of folders on disk, etc.
- scarface74 10y agoThere has been an option since 2003 for iTunes not to copy songs into its own hierarchy and just leave files where they are.
- yoasif_ 10y agoHN is populated by enough "geeks" to make this recommendation relevant: use beets. http://beets.io http://beets.io It's more powerful than iTunes and can sync with databases like Discogs and Musicbrainz to keep data up to date.
- fernandotakai 10y ago+1 for beets. works like a charm, integrates quite well with mpd, does exactly what it's supposed to. oh and it's written in python, which means it's quite easy to hack upon it.
- BostonEnginerd 10y agoAgreed! It has made quick work of organizing my library.
- hbosch 10y agohttp://coppertino.com/vox/mac http://coppertino.com/vox/mac is a good alternative.
- droopybuns 10y agoI'm very happy with Amazon Music. Combine it with an amazon cloud storage account and you can sync your library across numerous devices without being locked into any particular platform. It's pretty nice.
- fuzzywalrus 10y agoIts pretty apparent that iTunes does too many things at this point in time: Music (Store / Streaming / Radio / Cloud / subscription ), Movies, Apps, phone management, media player management, and encoder. Problem is no other applications have access many of these core features Swinsian is nice but I use iTunes Match so I can access my music on phone and I still use an iPod for my car as I find myself in the back country on weekends where cell services is edge at best or simply non-existent.
- mayneack 10y agoIn the "don't delete my music" category - google music is pretty good. You can upload your files without deleting them and then stream from web or mobile app. I haven't tried playing offline from the browser, but caching on my phone is fine.
- ktRolster 10y agoIn the "don't delete my music" category - google music is pretty good. It makes me sad that's even a category for consideration. wtf
- mulletbum 10y agoI wish Plex would finish what they started.
- nix0n 10y agoClementine [0] is cross-platform and the Linux version is excellent (not flawless, but never destructive). But if your music collection is already sorted into filesystem folders, all you need is VLC! [0] https://www.clementine-player.org/downloads https://www.clementine-player.org/downloads
- kristofferR 10y agoGoogle Play Music is great, as long as you have below 50 000 songs in your library. Having your whole library accessible everywhere (for free!) is awesome, but downloading stuff for offline access is also easy.
- wiredfool 10y agoThe remote app on ios, and the ability to stream to multiple airport expresses, in sync.
- bsder 10y agoBecause iTunes is the only way to get stuff onto your iPod/iPhone.
- jjuel 10y agoNot entirely true. I have been using Winamp to load my iPod for a few years now. Yes Winamp is still around and it still whips the llamas a.
- mud_dauber 10y agoClementine on Ubuntu Linux. I use it to sync my iPod classic.
- rexf 10y agoI use desktop iTunes primarily to backup my phone to my computer. Even backing up has been unreliable recently https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7111898 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7111898
- Esau 10y agoPersonally, I wish Foobar2000 was available for the Mac. It is my favorite GUI player (I personally love mpc/mpd).
- emodendroket 10y agoI remember liking amaroK but of course that was like ten years ago so who knows if it's anything like the program I used to use.
- kristofferR 10y agoDeaDBeeF is basically Foobar2000 for OS X/Linux. It's still very alpha though, especially on OS X. http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/ http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/
- ascagnel_ 10y agoMost Linux apps on OS X kinda... suck. There's a cross-platform toolkit (usually GTK+) that outputs some vaguely native-looking widgets, but the program itself usually doesn't adapt to it's host OS conventions very well (for example, using control instead of the system standard command key for keyboard shortcuts).
- kristofferR 10y agoDeaDBeeF on OS X is in Cocoa actually - and that's why it so unfinished - the Cocoa interface simply hasn't has been developed as much as the GTK one yet.
- ascagnel_ 10y agoThat's good to hear. Too many Linux -> OS X ports don't have the care or thought given to them to make them good. For example, Inkscape not only commits all the violations I described above, it has an excruciatingly long startup time and requires opening a separate XQuartz instance (an X11 equivalent) to run.