Comments on: A biased demolition

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 10:01:43 +0000

itunes is great
Alex (a umm yeah. pretty dang experienced computer user)

By: Seb

Seb — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 02:56:05 +0000

Kikov: amaroK can be run on macos with the fink project. there are some photos in action on http://blog.chris.de

lord rel: I have many songs with id3v1 hebrew tags which are encoded as unicode. I do agree that it is very irritating when mp3 players cant read them…

By: Bobby Bingham

Bobby Bingham — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 23:06:30 +0000

Having not used iTunes, I can’t comment on iTunes itself, but I disagree with one of your complaints. It really irks me when a program changes the behavior of the close button to minimize the program to the tray. There’s already a minimize button in the taskbar – if you’re going to override something, doesn’t it make more sense to override that, as it’s normal function is already similar to what you’re changing it to!?

It just really annoys me when I have to go through the menus of a program in order to quit because the programmer’s decided to give me two minimize buttons in the titlebar and no close button.

That said, I did try out amaroK for the first time a few days ago, and really like it so far.

By: lord rel

lord rel — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:06:04 +0000

i prefer id3v2 tags as they can hold larger tags as well as support unicode ( a must have if you want proper hebrew tags and no iso and ibm-1255 wont do )

the best tagging for me is having unicode hebrew id3v2 tags and id3v1 tags in latin chars for every file as it allows me to have hebrew tags in my desktop and english in my portable players ( as hebrew is rarely supported there )

By: KikoV

KikoV — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:37:23 +0000

When amaroK will be available for MacOsX?
I don’t have another option.

I hope amaroK to be ported to Qt4 ( and KDELibs ported to MacOsX ) soon ( at least for Alpha versions ).

I’m willing to see that

By: Seb

Seb — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 10:41:05 +0000

I’ll just stick to amaroK

By: Rik Hemsley

Rik Hemsley — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 10:36:50 +0000

I installed iTunes yesterday to see if it had come any further than when I last tried it, shortly after it was released. I was absolutely expecting Vorbis support, but it wasn’t there. This was a real surprise to me, as the reference Vorbis codec is easy to include and includes no license restriction to worry Apple. The code is stable, mature, has a brilliant API, no dependencies and no side effects. Vorbis has a flexible, Unicode-based tag format, which again is exposed nicely by the reference library.

So on scanning my music directory, iTunes appeared to be looking at all my .ogg files, but it was just looking and ignoring. I can’t really use a music player which won’t play 90% of my music.

There’s still a third party Vorbis decoder available for iTunes, but it doesn’t appear to have moved on from its initial release. I tried it back then, and it caused iTunes to eat CPU at times, for no good reason, but always when dealing with Vorbis files.

It looks like my options are either to stick with foobar2000 (which is brilliant) or fix the existing (/write my own) Vorbis decoder for iTunes. I’d rather not do that, though. If there’s a freely available ‘plugin’, Apple will never bother adding integrated support.

By: Jean-Marc Autexier

Jean-Marc Autexier — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 08:02:49 +0000

good post. You should add Windows Media Player to our comparison. amaroK rocks