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Show HN: jmc – a new open-source macOS media organizer

32 points by jcm_ 10y ago

IMcD23 10y ago
Looks exactly like iTunes. Other than being "simpler" and only for music, how is it better than iTunes.
- jcm_ 10y ago
  If you've ever used iTunes to manage a large collection of music, then you've probably watched iTunes get progressively worse at managing that collection of music, while becoming progressively more bloated and full of cruft. I thought about starting this project way back when Apple got rid of the album artwork view while in the songs view of your library. To me, that change was such an obvious mistake that demonstrated that Apple didn't really understand how people used iTunes. The Artist and Album Views that Apple provided to supplant the songs view were half-functional and incredibly buggy with large libraries, and often just played tracks and albums completely out of order. Other examples include taking away the user's focus when skipping songs, not preserving selection when you leave and return to a playlist view, the track queue in general...I could go on. jmc tries to provide a smoother experience in all these areas. I would try it out! But basically, continued fundamental missteps in iTunes' application design and engineering spurred me to write my own application to fix some of these glaring problems with the UI. I also wanted to fix problems that occur when you migrate your library to a new hard drive and provide better location management for media stored externally in general. Even more broadly, I want to provide a fully featured hackable media manager along the lines of foobar2000, but for macOS, because macOS really doesn't have anything that's very good. jmc aims to do that, without the cruft and BS that iTunes is currently stuffed with. While it's not all the way there yet, it will be!
  - Esau 10y ago
    I hope you succeed because I really like Foobar2000.
- rosalinekarr 10y ago
  iTunes used to be the best music player/manager available, but over the years Apple has let it fall to feature creep and countless poor design choices. It's so bad now that the official fixes for some of its bugs now include things like "backup, reset and restore your entire iPhone" or "move these obscure system files from one folder to another then back." There's definitely a market out there for people that want to bring back the 'good old days' of early iTunes.
mrmondo 10y ago
I /really/ like Swinsain which looks quite similar, the only thing it's missing is Apple Music integration but I can't imagine any third party player will integrate with Apple Music properly. My music library is 1.3TB which is fine in iTunes until you enable Apple Music which loads a lot of metadata similar to genius etc...
- thirdsun 10y ago
  My first thought was that Swinsian already covers what jmc seems to be trying to do. Great audio player. However I'm quite surprised to see your iTunes handle such a library decently. Mine is struggling with 300 GB, however my iMac is aging so that may be the issue.
- jcm_ 10y ago
  Yeah, Apple Music integration is unlikely to ever happen here. If you're an Apple Music user, I would project that you're totally locked into iTunes for the foreseeable future. I did use Swinsian for awhile. While, in broad terms, it satisfied a lot of my requirements in terms of pure functionality, I still found myself frustrated by certain parts of the interface. My criticisms of Swinsian would mostly boil down to small aspects of the design, usability and polish, which, taken collectively, made the experience of using it frustrating and subpar, at least for me. I wanted something that worked just as elegantly and looked just as nice as iTunes does (or used to). The simple fact that Swinsian doesn't have an equalizer, for example, makes me really wonder whether the developer understands the needs and desires of the power users for whom Swinsian seems to be designed. Also, an open-source media organizer run by a communicative/responsive developer is much better in the long term than a closed-source, totally proprietary application, in my view. Postscript: If RAM and CPU use is of any concern, you might be pleased to find that jmc uses significantly less resources than iTunes, with generally superior performance. My personal library numbers around 30,000 tracks; memory use peaks around 200MB when scrolling through the entire library and generally hovers around 100MB.
  - mrmondo 10y ago
    Totally agree with all your points especially around the software being open source. I got round to trying it out at home last night and at work today, it wouldn't add my music and just sat there with a scrolling pinwheel on both machines, I'll log a bug this week.
anonfunction 10y ago
Looks nice, I only wish it was for photos and videos as well.
evolve2k 10y ago
Our usecase is wanting a shared workplace playlist that everyone can contribute to, from their computers, with the host computer wired up to the sound system. Is jmc good for this? I got a sense it could be but wasn't completely sure.

32 points by jcm_ 10y ago

IMcD23 10y ago

Looks exactly like iTunes. Other than being "simpler" and only for music, how is it better than iTunes.

jcm_ 10y ago
If you've ever used iTunes to manage a large collection of music, then you've probably watched iTunes get progressively worse at managing that collection of music, while becoming progressively more bloated and full of cruft. I thought about starting this project way back when Apple got rid of the album artwork view while in the songs view of your library. To me, that change was such an obvious mistake that demonstrated that Apple didn't really understand how people used iTunes. The Artist and Album Views that Apple provided to supplant the songs view were half-functional and incredibly buggy with large libraries, and often just played tracks and albums completely out of order. Other examples include taking away the user's focus when skipping songs, not preserving selection when you leave and return to a playlist view, the track queue in general...I could go on. jmc tries to provide a smoother experience in all these areas. I would try it out! But basically, continued fundamental missteps in iTunes' application design and engineering spurred me to write my own application to fix some of these glaring problems with the UI. I also wanted to fix problems that occur when you migrate your library to a new hard drive and provide better location management for media stored externally in general. Even more broadly, I want to provide a fully featured hackable media manager along the lines of foobar2000, but for macOS, because macOS really doesn't have anything that's very good. jmc aims to do that, without the cruft and BS that iTunes is currently stuffed with. While it's not all the way there yet, it will be!
- Esau 10y ago
  I hope you succeed because I really like Foobar2000.
rosalinekarr 10y ago
iTunes used to be the best music player/manager available, but over the years Apple has let it fall to feature creep and countless poor design choices. It's so bad now that the official fixes for some of its bugs now include things like "backup, reset and restore your entire iPhone" or "move these obscure system files from one folder to another then back." There's definitely a market out there for people that want to bring back the 'good old days' of early iTunes.

mrmondo 10y ago

I /really/ like Swinsain which looks quite similar, the only thing it's missing is Apple Music integration but I can't imagine any third party player will integrate with Apple Music properly. My music library is 1.3TB which is fine in iTunes until you enable Apple Music which loads a lot of metadata similar to genius etc...

thirdsun 10y ago
My first thought was that Swinsian already covers what jmc seems to be trying to do. Great audio player. However I'm quite surprised to see your iTunes handle such a library decently. Mine is struggling with 300 GB, however my iMac is aging so that may be the issue.
jcm_ 10y ago
Yeah, Apple Music integration is unlikely to ever happen here. If you're an Apple Music user, I would project that you're totally locked into iTunes for the foreseeable future. I did use Swinsian for awhile. While, in broad terms, it satisfied a lot of my requirements in terms of pure functionality, I still found myself frustrated by certain parts of the interface. My criticisms of Swinsian would mostly boil down to small aspects of the design, usability and polish, which, taken collectively, made the experience of using it frustrating and subpar, at least for me. I wanted something that worked just as elegantly and looked just as nice as iTunes does (or used to). The simple fact that Swinsian doesn't have an equalizer, for example, makes me really wonder whether the developer understands the needs and desires of the power users for whom Swinsian seems to be designed. Also, an open-source media organizer run by a communicative/responsive developer is much better in the long term than a closed-source, totally proprietary application, in my view. Postscript: If RAM and CPU use is of any concern, you might be pleased to find that jmc uses significantly less resources than iTunes, with generally superior performance. My personal library numbers around 30,000 tracks; memory use peaks around 200MB when scrolling through the entire library and generally hovers around 100MB.
- mrmondo 10y ago
  Totally agree with all your points especially around the software being open source. I got round to trying it out at home last night and at work today, it wouldn't add my music and just sat there with a scrolling pinwheel on both machines, I'll log a bug this week.

anonfunction 10y ago

Looks nice, I only wish it was for photos and videos as well.

evolve2k 10y ago

Our usecase is wanting a shared workplace playlist that everyone can contribute to, from their computers, with the host computer wired up to the sound system. Is jmc good for this? I got a sense it could be but wasn't completely sure.