HOW CAN ANYONE USE ITUNES

Dominic 2008-12-15, 11:32 #31

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In reply to post ID 14689

Quote by straycat:
cons:

- doesn't recoginze jpgs in music folders for album art. you have to select all songs in an album and drag a jpg to the album art box. if you drag it with just one song selected it adds album art to just that song.

For me songbird does recognise my in folder album art. It is worth noting that I use the "cover.jpg" method of storing album art and not the "folder.jpg" that some others may use. I'm sticking with Songbird for now, despite it's lack of features,,,in hopes that future plugins will fit my needs.

On another note, have you tried vox? I'm not going to bother with it myself because I don't like the idea of all those panels and the fact that it doesn't have a music library option.

straycat 2008-12-15, 12:37 #32

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strangely, i use cover.jpg too and it still doesn't show up neither on 'now playing" or "now selected" headers in album art. are you sure you're not using last.fm album art?

either way, another glitch is that the "now selected" album art only shows up when clicking on a song, not when you click on an album name like it should.

now thanks a lot for vox! this is actually the new version of toolplayer which i mentioned on post
http://www.riovolution.org/post/14536 but with some improvements and a continued development.now, it now has album art but still keeping it a minimal audio player when you wanna listen to music while working on other stuff. it reminds me of the early version of quintessential player (qcd) for win.
the developer doesn't mention it but magically toolplayer's home page is no more.

like in tool player it doesn't have a library and those panels are just for eq and audio picth which you don't have to keep opened most of the time. for a small app, it features a 10 band eq while most of bigger apps don't even support eq at all.
despite i love this app a lot (already on my app collection), i think it's always useful. for photos, music and video, i like to keep a manager and a lighter alternative for file associations for when i double click a file in path finder just to preview media (even tho, path finder has a media preview pane).

This post was edited 2 times, last on 2008-12-16, 04:07 by straycat.

Dominic 2008-12-15, 12:50 #33

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Quote by straycat:
strangely, i use cover.jpg too and it still doesn't show up neither on 'now playing" or "now selected" headers in album art. are you sure you're not using last.fm album art?

Positive, I don't use last.fm and I do not embed albumart into my FLAC files.

If I click on any song the corresponding folder art appears in the little "now selected" album art box...very strange that it's not working for you?

straycat 2008-12-16, 03:56 #34

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maybe it's 'cause i didn't have any jpgs before i imported my library. this way, if i drag a pic to songbird's box it sticks and it shows next time, if i just copy a cover.jpg to a folder in finder, it doesn't show up.
tried to import library again (which just takes 2 seconds) and still no go. maybe it doesn't refresh the library.
i'll probably uninstall it and try it again in the future like i've been doing.

update:

amarok 2 is still slow, buggy and some features don't work for macosx. aslo, doesn't provide an uninstaller. had to delete a bunch of files by hand. more, i don't like it. still not the right thing for me. looking at some screenshots i liked amarok 1 better.

atunes, gave it another go, found how to correctly install mplayer command line for it but still errors on playback. it says can't find "mac_tools/mplayer". guess that "mac_tools" is the developer's path to mplayer which he forgot to remove. the interface is more sober than amarok's but still has features i don't want and can't remove like "recommended artists" or "podcasting".

there's also more 3 java apps for the curious:

jukes http://melloware.com/products/jukes/screenshots.html
jlgui http://www.javazoom.net/jlgui/jlgui.html
jajuk http://www.jajuk.info/index.php/Main_Page

jukes and jlgui didn't run on leopard but i think because they need an older java version. jajuk runs fine.
jukes looks good, jlgui looks oldschool and jajuk looks bad.

both atunes and jajuk use mplayer engine for playback which in jajuk, at least, didn't play gapless.

after all this testing, i ended up using the same apps i did, cog and toolplayer (replaced by new version, vox. thanks dom).

This post was edited on 2008-12-16, 03:58 by straycat.

krazykit (Administrator) 2008-12-17, 10:00 #35

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In reply to post ID 14674

Quote by flattop100 on 2008-12-12, 13:23:
Amarok 2.0 came out. They lost some features, but will be bringing them back in later versions.

http://amarok.kde.org/

Amarok is the only reason I really want to run Linux.

I used amarok for quite awhile now, but I won't be upgrading to 2.0. It's not worth installing half of KDE4 just to use it. Hello, something new (quod libet or decibel audio player... maybe even xmms2)

edit: and certainly not Songbird. I don't need my music player using 200 MB of memory.

edit2: decibel won't go out of my home dir, but quod libet looks like it could replace amarok for me.

edit3: trying herrie, an ncurses-based player. seems promising so far.

[Image: http://biomoose.com/pics/bug.gif]

This post was edited 2 times, last on 2008-12-17, 15:30 by krazykit.

Dominic 2008-12-17, 10:26 #36

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Straycat, just wondering, do you know any programme for OSX that can auto organise my music files/folders based on a predefined setup? as in like what media monkey does...

I use a simple setup of: <Artist>/<Album>/<track No.> <track title>
so: Lamb of God/Ashes of the Wake/04 The Faded Line

That's my usually setup, but sometimes I tweek it...auto organising files/folders is something I love about MM, pity it's windows only...

Haven't found anything that can do this yet so i've either been doing it manually or booting a copy of windows.

straycat 2008-12-17, 12:36 #37

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dom, first tell me what audio format you use and also your currently setup (folder structure).
i know a handfull of apps but all limited in some way.

edit: thanks, kk. i wish there was a mac native decibel music player. its interface is so clean and chewable.

This post was edited on 2008-12-17, 12:39 by straycat.

Dominic 2008-12-17, 12:56 #38

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I use FLAC and then what ever is best for my portable, so MP3/Vorbis/AAC. My current setup is as mentioned in my previous post "<Artist>/<Album>/<track No.> <track title>" (Artist = folder, Album = Folder, Track No. + Track Title = filename) but when I get new stuff I generally have to retag and re-sort....with MM it's very easy to achieve, I just load in my tracks, clean up any tags and then "auto-organise" using my predefined structure...it's really the only windows programme I want

straycat 2008-12-17, 13:46 #39

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sorry, didn't get it, my bad.
i used tag & rename for win which was the most complete and stable solution for me.
on osx, 2 of the most powerful apps are mediarage and jaikoz.

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html
MP3, AAC/MP4, FLAC, AIFF, WAVE, BWF, and Ogg Vorbis

http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
Mp4, M4a, M4p, Mp3, Flac and OggVorbis

they are powerful audio taggers and file renamers.
they're shareware, but

for a free simpler approach, which serves your needs and only supports MP3 you can try tritag.

http://www.feedface.com/software/tritag.html

let me know if they work for you.

p944 2009-01-08, 00:38 #40

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In reply to post #34
Subject: atunes

straycat said

atunes, gave it another go, found how to correctly install mplayer command line for it but still errors on playback. it says can't find "mac_tools/mplayer". guess that "mac_tools" is the developer's path to mplayer which he forgot to remove. the interface is more sober than amarok's but still has features i don't want and can't remove like "recommended artists" or "podcasting".

You can fix this by opening a terminal window, cd to the atunes install directory (where the atunes.command is) and typing:

mkdir mac_tools
cd mac_tools
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mplayer

aTunes will then be able to find the link you just made to your install of mplayer. Worked for me.
But atunes doesn't appear to be gapless at the moment (with flac anyhow) which is a bit of a dissappointment.

Have you tried Play (http://sbooth.org/Play/). That's what I am using at the moment...

straycat 2009-01-08, 06:56 #41

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thanks for the tip, p944. i'll try it and check for vorbis gapless.
play, which i link in post #22, was the first i tried on osx and it's great in an audiophile perspective. i just can't stand the "repeat artist and album for every song line" kind of library. i really need a tree view that's why i switched to cog long ago.
@dominic and who may be concerned, vox has a playlist editor and library tree view planned for the future http://www.voxapp.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5

edit:

http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html
MP3, AAC/MP4, FLAC, AIFF, WAVE, BWF, and Ogg Vorbis

http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/
Mp4, M4a, M4p, Mp3, Flac and OggVorbis

ironically enough, i ended up uninstalling both and went back to tag & rename on vmware fusion. it's still the best.

This post was edited on 2009-01-08, 07:03 by straycat.

p944 2009-01-08, 16:10 #42

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Subject: Play different browsing modes

straycat, not sure how simple would be for you to actually try this build (I have an old email with patch code against a specific build version, but you'd probably have to put quite a bit of effort in...) but check out thread at Play forum
http://forums.sbooth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1876
I tried adding a different kind of browser frontend, since when I want to look at my music collection I want a visual rather than text experience.

Since you seem to have tried many players, do any out there you have tried have this kind of interface available already, which support gapless flac ? The build I made has obviously falled behind the mainline of Plays codebase and there was little to no interest in integrating my changes, so... still looking really.

straycat 2009-01-14, 10:24 #43

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Quote by p944 on 2009-01-08, 16:10:
I tried adding a different kind of browser frontend, since when I want to look at my music collection I want a visual rather than text experience.

i've also been looking for this. unfortunately, "visual" audio players usually assume they can organize my collection better than me. things like ordering albums alphabetically, forget about year tag after album display or showing albums after genre (it should be artists after genre) are still features that make a difference for me.

i can't bother to install x-code or build anyhting for play, sorry. your build looks great but, like cog, its development is close to stopped.

nevertheless, what you're looking for may be something like album player (win) or silverjuke (win, mac).
silverjuke has been one that i've been testing each version since windows and never pleased me. yet i always hope that it gets better with each release. it has skinning, scripting, plugin and kioske abilities but didn't play gapless, playing an album stopped after the first song (never bother to find how to disable that in options) and some other of the forementioned issues.

gonna still try atunes with your tip.
on another note, on my free time i've been designing a photoshop mockup of a minimalist and inovative music player. of course it's just a way of keeping my dreams alive and hope to find a coder for hire.

flattop100 2009-03-11, 08:59 #44

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I might have to try Songbird. New with release 1.1:

The killer new feature is a single menu option, under "Tools," that scans your entire music collection and grabs the relevant album art from Last.fm's web site.

Reduced memory use with a large library by 40%

Cut CPU usage during playback by half

Fixed playback memory leaks

Made library caching configurable

Added batching to the media importer, reducing memory use by 60%

Reduced Mac download size 45%

Fewer Crashes: We've worked hard to identify and fix ten of the most common crashes in Songbird.

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straycat 2009-09-04, 10:28 #45

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my new choice on tagging on the mac:
http://peippo.eu/main/musorg