All you want is a small player for AAC format music? Use Quicktime. You can associate the aac extension with QT so that when you double clic the file QT starts. The player is very small when it is started with an audio file.
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Alternative to iTunes
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All you want is a small player for AAC format music? Use Quicktime. You can associate the aac extension with QT so that when you double clic the file QT starts. The player is very small when it is started with an audio file.
Uh, why would you assume AAC? Where did he say that? MP3 remains far more common. Particularly if you're coming from Winamp.
Anyway, I'm not particularly fond of iTunes. If you've been organizing your own music in the filesystem for a long time as I have, these "library"-based programs really chafe with their own, hard to configure ways of doing things. I just want a small, simple player with one, single playlist that you can add to or sort at will, with no learning curve -- Winamp is that player on Windows; what's the Mac alternative?
Just to add a bit of fuel to the fire, I have downgraded all my installations to iTunes 6, since I find iTunes 7 so awful. The "gapless playback" thing is a complete pain, and you can't disable it.
I sort of wish Apple would just stick to one UI for stuff. Out of curiosity, what don't you like about gapless playback though? Doesn't it just analyze a song file for audio-less ends, and ignore them?
It's a great feature, which a lot of people missed from the old days. Pink Floyd and The wizard of Oz...aah, heaven.
Gapless playback is the best thing ever. You don't know how annoying it was to listen to albums that are supposed to flow continuously with those annoying little bits of silence between the tracks. Now everything is seamless and wonderful and perfect.
If you're feeling geeky enough, you could try compiling Amarok, the popular media player for Linux. As far as feature and stability wise its the only thing out there which is even comparable to iTunes. I also don't like how you can't set a folder just to "watch" in iTunes and I like some of the plugins you can get with Amarok.
It's not that difficult to compile but its got a bit of a learning curve. I find iTunes easier for most things but it's nice to use something else from time to time.
It's not that difficult to compile but its got a bit of a learning curve. I find iTunes easier for most things but it's nice to use something else from time to time.
You simply can't intoduce a gap in any way: in my playlists I sometimes have some Maria Callas followed by Captain Beefheart, for example. There is no way to stop the dying whispers of Callas being blasted to hell by the opening chord of the next song. And you just don't get a break. I like the gaps.
Huh, what?
Gapless playback fixes a huge bug where previously iTunes never played back albums exactly like they would sound directly from the CD. Now it does. How can this possibly be undesirable? You actually want to insert extra silence between tracks? No CD player does that, and neither should iTunes. The mind boggles.
Ok, I see your message above mine. For mix-and-match playlists, they could add an option for a gap. Unfortunately Apple hates to clutter their preferences with advanced options, so power users usually don't get the flexibility they desire. I doubt they'd do this. Too bad.
If you don't play consecutive CD tracks, this is worthless. I'd like to be able to set a variable gap, actually, say from 0-5 seconds. Being able to play the odd pair of CD tracks gaplessly would be nice, but only when they're in sequence - if that's how they were recorded, which, let's face it, doesn't apply to many studio albums - but to have every collection treated like this is inappropriate. Most tracks are recorded as separate entities.Huh, what?
Gapless playback fixes a huge bug where previously iTunes never played back albums exactly like they would sound directly from the CD. Now it does. How can this possibly be undesirable?
I don't think you understand gapless playback. The extra gap between changing tracks in iTunes 6 was less than a second—not long enough to give pause between a quiet end and loud beginning, but long enough between seamless album tracks to be annoying. So I don't see how a non-gapless player addresses that concern. In that situation, you'd want MORE gap than existed on the ORIGINAL CD, and there's NEVER been an option to do that.
All gapless playback does is eliminate additional digital-zero silence of less than a frame's length. A frame is ~0.0612 seconds at 16-bit/44kHz sampling, so at MAXIMUM, iTunes is removing just under one sixteenth of a second of digital-zero silence, and using buffering to put the start of the next track directly after that to correct for silence added during encoding. It does not eliminate intentional song gaps from albums, it merely corrects for abnormalities introduced in encoding (and starts playing the next track directly after the end of the previous one, the same as how a CD works).
Much as he was talking utter nonsense, I don't agree that weird anti-Quicktime guy's posts should have been deleted. Everybody has a right to express their opinion, no matter how obscure. I was enjoying it.
it had gotten really off topic and had dipped into personal insults several times. It was either delete the posts or close the thread and I felt the thread was probably of interest to people so I decided to keep it open.
Also not just his comments were deleted. All parties involved in the flame war had their posts deleted.
For my Old computers that just can't use iTunes (Trust me, Ive tried to hack it onto Windows 98) I use Jet Audio. Interface sucks, but SO much better then win amp or Audion.
2000/xp structure is quite different from win 9x series. Today, many software can not run under win9x.
I use iTunes alot but I still prefer winamp. I like how I can customize it to do many things and the fact that it supports a lot of formats. I have never had an issues with gaps with it either. Then again itunes seems to use less ram, and looks better when full screened.
I had the same exact problem! I just got my mac a couple days ago, and the one program I really really missed was WinAMP. However, even though I found alternatives to iTunes (audion, macamp, etc) I found that none of them really were what I really wanted. I just ended up using iTunes. Honestly, I would just say suck it up and use it, because most of the competing software isn't better. As far as missing features from WinAMP, if you hunt around you can replace most of the functionality: for example, global hotkeys, you can use iMote or Sizzling Keys.
Alternatives...
It's always good to have alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no alternatives to iTunes...
Competition is good for companies to improve their products...
It's always good to have alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no alternatives to iTunes...
Competition is good for companies to improve their products...
Alternatives...
It's always good to have alternatives. Unfortunately, there is no alternatives to iTunes...
Competition is good for companies to improve their products...
It looks like there may be a good alternative to iTunes sometime this year. Apparently the linux music manager Amarok will be released as a mac binary when version 2.0 gets released this year.
It will look slightly out of place on the mac desktop kind of like openoffice, but the way apple has been changing skins on every apple app lately it won't be too different
Since it will be native no x11 to run it Since i'm interested in a music manager with some better features for OS X I've decided that i'd check out the current version of Amarok (1.44) and see how it compares to iTunes.
It's compiling right now so i'll let you all know what it's like in a few days after i have a chance to play with it, only about 20 hours to go till it's done compiling....
Wow, so far I'm loving Cog. It's simple, clean, small. Playlist management is simple: open the playlist you want save the playlist you want. Acts more like Winamp than iTunes. I love it.
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