Sunday, June 26. 2005A biased demolitionBooting into windows to complete an assignment for university, I quickly found myself procrastinating as I usually do. Unable to do any programming, I decided to report into my findings regarding that application which is supposedly the epitomy of music playback on common everyday computers.
Indeed, iTunes is a blindingly different piece of software, at least in the windows world. It’s not bland, boring nor uninteresting. Apple is reknowned for their attention to making things flow. Integrated cd ripping, cd burning, iPod support, iTunes store, visualisations, mini player etc. Much like JuK, using and managing playlists is fairly ovious and well structured. To the point, I think that iTunes is a great application which targets a nieve user who just wants ‘things to work’. Unfortunately, I found that any user level which is above that of a luddite will be confuzzled and irritated by the quirks which iTunes brings with it. Let me explain.
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>>> iTunes didn’t pull in my ogg files, even though I am 100% certain that windows can play them.
And amaroK doesn't pull m4a and wma, at least not into the library. I know this taglib's fault and less excusable since ogg is opensource. But the result for the enduser is the same, "i can't find my favorite album." Or maybe it's worse, since wma and m4a are more prolific than ogg in my experience. >>> Took me a good 2 hours to discover I needed a strange plugin/extension/stand-alone application (i’m still not sure which it is) to play them. The solution is similar too. It can import WMAs with some weird taglib patch and by compiling yourself. A real pain in the butt. No offense meant.. I love amaroK. It's all i use. Never even tried itunes... it just seems this one is an unfair criticism for itunes considering where amaroK is at.
Sure, I can accept those - and I'm sure we would all love to allow m4a/wma into the collection but we are restricted by taglib's support.
Why can't we patch taglib and then embed it into amaroK, similar to the way sqlite is embedded. This would remove another very annoying source of crashing by making all amaroK users run the same version of taglib, and it would allow amaroK to have a patched taglib for wma/mp4 support, which is not going to find its way into taglib proper. Just trying to be practical.
Well, first of all patching taglib isn't trivial. If we had a reliable patch for adding support for another format, we might as well commit it to taglib itself. But we haven't.
Then, bundling libraries with the app has other disadvantages. The user cannot upgrade to a newer version, and it inflates the sourcecode.
Part of what frustrates me is that, by reading the taglib mailing list, i get the sense that there will never be support in the official taglib distro.
WMA for legal concerns, which i understand. M4A because no one has written an official spec, which i understand less. I understand any project not wanting to get into legal issues with the main program. But what if the tag importer was extensible. First run mp3/ogg/flac/etc through taglib, then have a series of scripts that are installed modularly, each defined to a certain filetype, that output in a way that is readable by amaroK. I set a script in amarok, "wma4amarok," to invoke a 3rdparty program called "wmatagread" and runs it against all WMAs the library path. Greps the right info and outputs to an XML in the amarok config dir. That way people can make their own extensions and the taglib people don't have to worry, nor do the amaroK people. Disclaimer: I am not a coder. So i don't know if this is feasible. =]
1. I was pretty sure consolidation only occurs if you manually request that it be done. I don't recall iTunes ever seeming to 'want' to do that for me.
2. The only plugin interface is via the Visualiser. That's how iScrobbler works. It is annoying and could definitely be implemented better, but it does exist. Try following the instructions on the iScrobbler page? 3. The close button should... minimise the program? WTF? I hate programs that do that! The close button is for CLOSING programs! If you want to MINIMISE the program, that's why there's a MINIMISE button!! Sure, iTunes has its quirks. I've yet to find an audio player that's perfect. Just gotta find the one that approximates what you need as best as is possible, because let's face it: everyone's needs are different. With that in mind, I take issue with this statement in particular: 'I found that any user level which is above that of a luddite will be confuzzled and irritated by the quirks which iTunes brings with it.' It would be a mistake to assume all users, even those with the same level of technical know-how as you, have the same needs and preferences as you.
"It would be a mistake to assume all users, even those with the same level of technical know-how as you, have the same needs and preferences as you."
Hehe, i was exaggerating a little bit  . It's difficult to express my sense of humour over the internet, but i try .I agree with you 100% that everybody has different needs - iTunes just doesn't fit mine
id3v2 tags truly suck for some reasons, but id3v1 is definitely not the holy grail. Your choices are pretty restricted. apev2 tags are somewhere in the middle, and are pretty useable and useful.
Indeed, minimise should minimize, close should close. Nevertheless, it would be okay either way, if all apps would work the same way... I guess there is some Souncheck feature in iTunes, am I right? (Never used tha app, just read about it). Leveling the volume is quite handy, and using Replaygain and apev2 tags in Amarok for that would be pretty pretty Try foobar2000 for the perfect Win audio player, that sets your expectations for anything else pretty high. Amarok is good, for Linux, though.
Hey seb,
I agree with you there - iTunes is not perfect but like many have mentioned, taglib is an amaroK limitation. However, I would say that iTunes may be the most popular but definitely not the best. Before I completed my switch to Linux, I very much liked MusicMatch Jukebox. Nowadays I think they have gone for the bloatware approach but in its day it was a fine jukebox. Having said that, there are still some minor niggles with Amarok, like normalization of tracks - I have to pump all my music through mp3gain (as I've mentioned to you on gaim/Kopete) to get it to reasonable levels, amaroK doesn't have a music recommendation system based on the listening habits of amaroK users. MusicMatch Jukebox did have that. Having said that, every jukebox has something that makes it unique - even MS Media Player (it has a unique shittiness guarantee) and amaroK cannot be all things to all people. Leo
Err Listening Habit's Have You seen audioscrobler??? I have recently been thinking of neat things to do with this from within amarok.
My bad - I completely didn't think, forgot about Scrobbler. So the only thing I really miss now is normalization....
There was actually a patch commited to the ML for retrieval of listening habits. I suppose we haven't worked with it only because there is no place for it at the moment.
I would like to see some sort of stats/information to do with the collection - after all, amaroK can't even tell you how many songs are in the collection without loading them all into the playlist. I think it would be awesome to have something like this in there. As for normalisation, its a touchy area. It is definitely on the TODO, but would require implementing this for each seperate engine, which is frustrating (same as the equaliser). In due time it will be implemented.
I bought an iPod last week, and it seems the only way I could get my artwork onto the iPod was through iTunes. Just transferring my music on to Windows was a huge hassle, but that's a rant for another time.
Anyway, this was the first time I really used iTunes and I thought it sucked. I'm actually an Apple fan, so this isn't just a Linux guy bashing everyone else. For starters, why on earth doesn't iTunes support fetching artwork from the web? I had to search around for a decent plug-in, and with the best one I found, it took me 4 days to fetch all the art work for about 1000 albums. Every little hiccup, iTunes would lock, and I'd have to restart the computer. I'd lose most of the artwork it had downloaded, so I'd have to search for the offending file, remove it, and try again. It takes, what, like an hour or two on amaroK? It's just absurd that Apple hasn't integrated this. I hate having everything in one giant list, and not having a file browser that lets me sort by Artist/Album, or Year/Artist/Album, and so on. I have to create a smart playlist to pull up everything from a particular year, but smart playlists don't seem to transfer to the iPod. I mostly listen to albums, not songs, and the file browser amaroK has is far, far more helpful if that's how you listen to music. It's stupid Ogg support isn't integrated--it would take Apple like two seconds, so it's a willful choice on their part. (Maybe because purportedly the iPod doesn't have the processing power to decode Ogg--at least that's what the Rio folks said
Well, I finally found the artist/album view, so scratch that one off the list. But still no year/album, and still remain completely unsuccessful at getting all my music onto the iPod. Artwork isn't worth it--I'm going back to Linux.
Wow, my chance to comment on both players and be on topic.
I use iTunes at work and amarok at home. There are things about both that I like and things about both that I dislike, so I'll make a list of iTunes' "pros and cons" and how they compare to amarok. Pros: - I like the "multiple list" approach for filtering artits/albums, I find it much better and easier to use than amarok's tree widget. They might not be super customizable as someone already complained, but they work for my needs. - Album shuffle. Couldn't find a way to do that in amarok (1.3b2). I don't generally listen to individual songs, unless I'm trying to play guitar along with the song. Othewise I just like to listen to whole albums. - Clean interface. My main interactions with the program are to pause/resume playing, and to change the current playing album sometimes. Other than that I like the program to stay in the background and not annoy me. iTunes' interface is very easy when I need to do these interactions. amarok's is kinda confusing, with a lot (and I mean A LOT) of text unrelated to the current playing song in the form of suggestions and etc and all sorts of other things. I wish there was a way to disable all the extra things and just keep the information about the playing song, the playlist, and the library in the window. Cons: - iTunes doesn't have "global keyboard shortcut" support (and I haven't found any win32 plugins to enable that either), so I have to focus the program and then pause. Kinda annoying. - I like amarok's tray popup thingy better. And the keyboard shortcut to show the OSD is a nice touch also.I might be weird, but I use the player to play songs. I like to keep things like albums covers with my collection, but I don't use any of the other functionality that amarok has. So it kinda gets in the way, since it's so in your face whenever you want to use the player window.A little GUI cleanup would do wonders for amarok.
about "global keyboard shortcut". If you have Multimedia keys on your keybord, then try Multiplugin, to get those to work. If you are talking about keybord shortcuts e.g. CTRL-S, then it won't work.
Multiplugin: http://www.aqua-soft.org/board/forumdisplay.php?s=90e569eec2c1b36262feae09ee68a35b&f=38
You said it was "a biased demolition" and I have to agree with you that it was thoroughly biased, which I find rather sad and blinkered. The best advice I can give Amarok's developers is to pay very careful attention to iTunes, to use it and understand it thoroughly before going any further with Amarok development. iTunes is far and away the most popular program of its type, and not without reason. Your comments about newbies vs experienced users smack of misplaced arrogance -- you are obviously not an experienced iTunes user, and conversely there are many experienced users who do choose to use iTunes.
Here are my top 2 complaints about Amarok: 1. Tune selection using the iTunes 'browser' (the three columns) is much better than Amarok's tree based method. Amarok should just copy this. gtkpod has done this very successfully. Think about it -- there is no tree structure implied by the database of tracks. 2. There's too much visual clutter in Amarok -- I really don't want Amarok to tell me what my favourite tunes are or what my newest or least played tracks are, or my favourite tracks by an artist. I actually know all that already better than my PC! Get rid of all that crap. Technically speaking Amarok has a lot going for it but I really think it needs to change direction in the design. Please stop putting in bells and whistles and work on making it easier to use and visually more elegant. Just imagine iTunes and Amarok were in direct competition on the same operating system -- iTunes would win by a mile.
"1. Tune selection using the iTunes 'browser' (the three columns) is much better than Amarok's tree based method. Amarok should just copy this. gtkpod has done this very successfully. Think about it -- there is no tree structure implied by the database of tracks."
It's definitely not going to happen. amaroK is amaroK and not iTunes. Plus, there is a patent hanging around regarding the browser view. "2. There's too much visual clutter in Amarok -- I really don't want Amarok to tell me what my favourite tunes are or what my newest or least played tracks are, or my favourite tracks by an artist. I actually know all that already better than my PC! Get rid of all that crap." If you don't like it, why are you even using amaroK? It is one of the defining features of the application, and it's not going to go away. Later I plan on detaching the Home tab, and creating a simple statistics tool. |
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