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Mac OS X Media Player

A

Avidan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 21, 2008
28
0
USA
Like all Mac users, I have iTunes on my system. Well, I just transferred all of my music files from my old PC's hard drive and they're sitting in my music folder. The problem? They're WMA. Now, I've heard several suggestions about getting .switch or playing them in Quicktime. The problem is the sheer volume of songs I have. If I use .switch, it will take 6 days running non stop to convert all of my WMAs to MP3s. Media players like Quicktime, VLC, Real Player 11 and Media Player 9 for OS X can play, but they don't have the interface of iTunes.

By that, I mean there's no library view. To play a song I have to open file, find the song and play it. To play another song I have to repeat that process. It gets annoying if I just want to listen to music while I surf the web or write papers. So is there an alternative to iTunes (preferably free) that has the same general setup as iTunes?


J.
 
I thought Flip4Mac played WMA files? If they're protected WMA then you're hosed no matter what.

There's also Mozilla Songbird.

songbird.jpg
 
TwinCities Dan said:
I'd just bite the bullet and convert them... ;)
Click to expand...

It looks like that's what I'm going to have to do.
Who knew there were so few alternatives to iTunes that had a similar feature set?

QuarterSwede said:
I thought Flip4Mac played WMA files? If they're protected WMA then you're hosed no matter what.

There's also Mozilla Songbird.

songbird.jpg
Click to expand...

Songbird started off great, installed everything and it looked a lot like iTunes with libraries and album art, visual album selection, etc., but then it kept crashing every time I tried to play any of my songs, saying there was a stream error. Every other media player played the songs just fine, even if I did have to file>open them individually.

Thank you for the suggestion, though.

J.
 
Avidan said:
It looks like that's what I'm going to have to do.
Who knew there were so few alternatives to iTunes that had a similar feature set?



Songbird started off great, installed everything and it looked a lot like iTunes with libraries and album art, visual album selection, etc., but then it kept crashing every time I tried to play any of my songs, saying there was a stream error. Every other media player played the songs just fine, even if I did have to file>open them individually.

Thank you for the suggestion, though.

J.
Click to expand...
Ahh, sorry about that. There are several others that use a similar interface. Search the forums for alternatives (Mroogle works great). I simply can't remember their names at the moment.
 
QuarterSwede said:
Ahh, sorry about that. There are several others that use a similar interface. Search the forums for alternatives (Mroogle works great). I simply can't remember their names at the moment.
Click to expand...

Thanks again. I searched through MRoogle, but nothing that came up had what I was looking for. I did a "quick" conversion of a WMA to MP3 with switch and played the song and it did play in iTunes, so I at least know iTunes is functioning. Another downside it seems, is that even with the conversion, there's no information beyond name of the song. No album art, no album ID, no artist info, nothing. So that's another hurdle. I remember, while searching MRoogle, reading a forum post that was written in 2003 where a guy says that iTunes should support OGG and WMA since so many people use those formats. Another poster ends up telling him that Apple shouldn't support WMA because WMA will be it's own undoing. Well, 6 years later, WMA's as strong as ever, so maybe the people who work with iTunes should consider it?

I love iTunes, and would much rather use that, but if I'm going to go through 6 days of non-stop wma to mp3 conversion only to find that my music won't even be grouped by album, well what's the point?


J.
 
Avidan said:
Like all Mac users, I have iTunes on my system. Well, I just transferred all of my music files from my old PC's hard drive and they're sitting in my music folder. The problem? They're WMA. Now, I've heard several suggestions about getting .switch or playing them in Quicktime. The problem is the sheer volume of songs I have. If I use .switch, it will take 6 days running non stop to convert all of my WMAs to MP3s. Media players like Quicktime, VLC, Real Player 11 and Media Player 9 for OS X can play, but they don't have the interface of iTunes.

By that, I mean there's no library view. To play a song I have to open file, find the song and play it. To play another song I have to repeat that process. It gets annoying if I just want to listen to music while I surf the web or write papers. So is there an alternative to iTunes (preferably free) that has the same general setup as iTunes?


J.
Click to expand...

J Allen? S'at you?
 
Avidan said:
Surprisingly, yes!
And who may I ask am I addressing? :D


J.
Click to expand...

On TrekBBS and WF, I go by Apophis. I recognized your "J." and system specs from your switching posts. I was going to tell you about this place; best site if you need assistance with Macs.
 
Nero Wolfe said:
On TrekBBS and WF, I go by Apophis. I recognized your "J." and system specs from your switching posts. I was going to tell you about this place; best site if you need assistance with Macs.
Click to expand...

Well, good eye! :lol:

Yeah, this is the first headache I'm having with my Mac, and it's focused on iTunes.
I joined MacRumors shortly before my Mac arrived, and their guides helped a lot!

J.
 
As far as your OP goes, I'd bite the bullet and convert the files. I spent I don't know how long on Amazon putting in album info and getting album artwork for my music when I moved to iTunes. But in the end it was worth it. Especially if you get an iPod later.

How many songs are you dealing with?
 
Nero Wolfe said:
As far as your OP goes, I'd bite the bullet and convert the files. I spent I don't know how long on Amazon putting in album info and getting album artwork for my music when I moved to iTunes. But in the end it was worth it. Especially if you get an iPod later.

How many songs are you dealing with?
Click to expand...

Approximately 9,250 songs, with .switch taking about one minute each on average.


J.
 
Avidan said:
Yep. However, I'm just going to go ahead and do it. That's six days of constant activity. That shouldn't cause any damage should it?


J.
Click to expand...

I just did a test; QuickTime can convert them in like 1/5th the time that Switch did.But it doesn't do batch conversions. I wish I was better at Applescript/Automator.
 
Nero Wolfe said:
I just did a test; QuickTime can convert them in like 1/5th the time that Switch did.But it doesn't do batch conversions. I wish I was better at Applescript/Automator.
Click to expand...

That's alright, we're already under way here. Once these are done though, I'm doing a Time Machine backup. As God as my witness I will never do this again! :lol:


J.
 
Avidan said:
That's alright, we're already under way here. Once these are done though, I'm doing a Time Machine backup. As God as my witness I will never do this again! :lol:


J.
Click to expand...

Check this out real quick. It just converted 9 WMAs to MP3s in like 10 seconds.

http://www.easywma.com/

It also has an option in Pref's to add the music to iTunes directly.

It's a demo but if it works like it seems it does, it'd be worth it.
 
Might I suggest that you re-rip your CDs instead. Rip them to a lossless format, and then convert them to whichever lossy format takes your fancy.

So if have your entire music library converted to lossless, in the future that would allow you to easily convert to a different lossy format.

Before owning a Mac, I had all my music stored in OGG format, obviously that doesn't play well with iTunes on an iPod so I had to convert everything to MP4. Since I really don't want to ever have to rip 200+ CDs again, I ripped everything to lossless.
 
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