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New to OSX and have questions

E

Egosphere

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 21, 2006
69
0
Hi. I'm new to OSX, and overall I really like it, but there's a few things that irk me that I was wondering about:
1. If I start iTunes playing some album and then use the artist-album browser thing to go to another artist or album, once the current track is over iTunes will stop and not continue to play the album. Is there a way to tell iTunes to keep playing the background whatever it's playing unless I explicitly change the track so that I can browse through my music, others' music, or playlists while it keeps playing the album or playlist or whatever I told it to play?
2. I'm a Firefox user, but I figured I should give Safari a go. I like it. It's fast, but I despise its tab bar. Is there a way to replace the tear-away system of too many tabs (where when there are too many tabs, it puts any new ones in a menu that pops up from a button at the end of the tab bar) with a scrollable tab bar? If not, I'll just stick with Firefox. Then, if I do stay with Firefox, is there a way to make widgets look OSX-y instead of Windows-esque gray pseudo 3D rectangles.

Thanks for the help.
 
You can keep listening to the same music if you're browsing others' libraries or playlists, but if you change the view in your library, that becomes your current view. In order to keep playing a specific album, you either need to leave your view on that album or make a playlist—since iTunes is playing from the Browse view, if you change that view, it doesn't know what to play. In a similar fashion, a playlist will continue to play if you browse your library or others' libraries. (Did that make sense? It's kind of hard to explain.)

If you like Firefox but don't need many extensions and want a more OS X integrated feel, try Camino. It uses the same rendering engine as Firefox but has a fully native Cocoa interface (instead of Firefox's XUL interface). As for Safari's tab bar... there might be a Safari add-on that addresses this like Saft or something, but I don't use Saft myself, so I'm not entirely sure.
 
I tried Camino, and I liked it, but it had the same problem as Safari in the way its tabbar worked. Can anyone confirm or deny that there exists an extension/plug-in to either Camino or Safari that makes the tabbar scrollalbe?

As for iTunes, adding music to a playlist is extra clicks that shouldn't be needed. But, if it must be done so, then how can I add music to a playlist quickly? Is there a click-and-key combination that I can use (something akin to the iPod's long click to add to playlist)?
 
Sorry about the Camino thing, I guess I never have enough tabs open that I run into that too often. Check out Saft, see if any tab-bar modification is listed as one of its features.

Why not play stuff directly from Browse mode? Using Browse you can drill down to whatever album you want and then just play there. You can make a new playlist from your current selected tracks by hitting Cmd+Shift+N, but there's no just "add to playlist" key—after all, how would iTunes know which playlist you wanted the tracks in?
 
camino's build-in ablock is kinda weak, not flexible and you can't customize it.
never tried safari's PithHelmet, just as saft, I just never be able to convince myself to pay for the stuff I can get for free,
LOL, anyway, ablock is only an example, firefox has thousand of extensions, I can't be sure which one OP like, well, he might not use any of them, in which case, he can use safari or camino just fine.
 
Another solution for your iTunes problem is to create another playlist solely for playing. For example I have a playlist that I play albums from that contains all my songs without podcasts, videos, etc. (Just a smart playlist basically)

Now when I want to browse my library I can do exactly that. Browse my library without changing what is playing.
 
I think the easiest way to make a playlist of an album is from browse mode, just drag the name of the album to the playlist pane and it will create the playlist automatically and name it "Artist-Album Name".

Hope that makes sense.
 
Thanks all for helping.

Clevin: Mostly, the only extension I care about is TabMix Plus (and adblock, but that's a given). Since using it, I can't use any other browser as I just have to make tabs work exactly like I want them to and TabMix Plus lets me do that. I really wanted to use Safari because it seems everything on OSX is built to integrate with and be used with Safari, but I have to have it my way with tabs. So, I may have to stick with Firefox. But, thanks for the links to the optimized builds.

As for iTunes, I think this is a design flaw because it adds a lot of unnecessary clicks when all you wanna do is listen to something and then look around to find the next thing to play. But, alas, iTunes is not opensource so I can't make my own version with that behavior.
 
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