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October 12, 2006
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A different drummer One of my co-workers came into the office fuming the other day. “Can you write a column on how much iTunes sucks?” she said. I offered a one-word column, reading “Royally,” but that doesn’t exactly fill up the space, now, does it? Honestly, I don’t use iTunes much. I probably could, but when I got my non-Apple MP3 player, I installed the software that came with it, called Creative MediaSource, and have been reasonably happy with it. It’s not perfect; it has problems ripping some CDs with enhanced content on them or things like asterisks or parentheses in the title. iTunes tends to act like your 11th grade history teacher, who figured that if your average student had eight hours of free time per day, it was only fair to give eight hours of history homework, never mind other classes, karate lessons, jobs and/or social lives. It hogs system resources, always running something or other in the background while you’re trying to work, surf, play games or whatever. So what would make a good replacement for iTunes? It should: • organize and play digital audio and, ideally, video A tall order? Maybe. Windows Media Player does all that except podcasts and links to more than 20 stores. Winamp does pretty much everything, but only in their Pro version, which is $20. Then there’s musikCube; a lot of folks swear by it as a no-frills music player, but once again, there’s no podcasting support. When even Yahoo.com lets you subscribe to podcasts and e-mails you when there’s a new one available, you really have to get with it. If you’re willing to have your podcasts downloaded in a separate application, try HappyFish (www.thirstycrow.net/happyfish) or Juice (juicereceiver.sourceforge.net). Neither gives you a complete media library, but they do sync podcasts with your iPod or other portable media player and are pretty user-friendly. Songbird (www.songbirdnest.com) looks promising. It’s pretty much an iTunes clone, but less resource-hungry. Not only can you download podcasts, but all your audio and video media are organized nicely. Problem is, Songbird is only up to version 0.2 right now. Judging from their Web site, the developers are spending far more time creating innumerable images of their farting bird logo and cutesy redundant words (like “test flight” for a downloadable beta version and “feathers” instead of customizable skins) than actually making a media player. On the other hand, Songbird is open-source and based on the Firefox browser, arguably the most successful open-source project among desktop users. Some of the same people who made Winamp are on the Songbird team. It’s supposed to work on Mac, Windows and Linux. Someday. Most of the music download services have their own software you can install as well, though they’ll probably let you download straight from their Web sites or other software. They often don’t support podcasting either, since if you can download free content all over the place, why buy music from them, right?. |
010/05/2006 Who needs TiVo?
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