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plasticparadox

macrumors 6502
Original poster
May 24, 2003
484
1
Looking for a Winamp clone that plays iTunes-encoded AAC files. Is there anything out there?
 
Why don't you just use iTunes? AFAIK, there are no programs out there that will play iTunes Music Store songs besides iTunes. If you're just talking about generic AAC files that you created with iTunes, I think Audion, which is free, will play them. There's also MacAMP Lite which is sort of a WinAMP clone. I'm not sure about either of them playing AAC files, but it is an open standard, so there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to other than the developers not adding that capability.
 
Nah, I don't have any DRM'd AAC files. Both the programs that you mentioned I've tried, and they're both out of development. They support MP3 fine, and I'd probably be happy enough using Audion if I had decided to stick with MP3. But AAC is a no-go.

As for iTunes, I like it a lot and I use it daily, but I just want a lightweight app that I can just dump files into quickly without having to go back and delete files from my library when I'm finished. And I want basic playlist support, so Quicktime is out. I have VLC, and I have used MPlayer in the past, but neither of them are really great solutions.
 
OK. It's too bad that Audion and MacAMP won't play AAC files. I actually downloaded Audion for exactly the same reason you're looking for something. As much as I like iTunes, I often want to open files without adding them to my library. However, most of my stuff is MP3, so Audion works fine. Sorry, I don't know of any other apps that will do what you want :(.
 
XMMS is pretty darn close to Win Amp. I've had it running in OS X using X11, but this may not be ideal if you don't want to venture into the X11 side of things. Should be easy to port though, in theory. Exercise left to the reader ;)
 
Gave it a try.. this unix stuff goes way over my head. Even with Fink Commander, I still couldn't install XMMS. I'm surprised that nobody's made a port of it yet, though. Seems like a good player.
 
plasticparadox said:
Gave it a try.. this unix stuff goes way over my head. Even with Fink Commander, I still couldn't install XMMS. I'm surprised that nobody's made a port of it yet, though. Seems like a good player.

I would KILL for an OSX port of XMMS. I really don't understand why it has not been ported yet. Maybe we need to make some noise on their messageboards?

I'm in the same boat as you. Been looking for over a year now for a good mp3/ogg OS X player thats equivalent to winamp, but i've found nothing close except for Mint Audio, which is also out of development. I would use iTunes, but it has this annoying habit of adding anything I tell it to play to its library. If it wasn't for that one little thing, I would be happily using iTunes all the time.
 
I'm trying Folder Player right now. It's not a perfect solution, but it does play AAC files and it's lightweight, simple, and free. If anyone's interested...

http://www.discosw.net/folderplayer.html

The screenshot on the page shows album art, but it unfortunately doesn't use iTunes album art. You can't turn it off, but you can drag the art window to a minimum. I managed to make my player look like this:
 
Jigglelicious said:
I would KILL for an OSX port of XMMS. I really don't understand why it has not been ported yet. Maybe we need to make some noise on their messageboards?

Agreed - I don't think it would be a huge undertaking. Probably everyone just assumes that iTunes is all we need.

plasticparadox - I can try to help you out if you want to give it another shot, but really it will probably never integrate the way you want it to. Its OK if you run gnome/kde along side OS X, but really parts of the two don't integrate that well - for example, I don't think you can drag and drop from the Finder into XMMS in X11. I run X11 in fullscreen mode and treat them like 2 separate systems running on the same computer, so it works out for me, but thats probably more fiddling than you are looking for. None the less, if you ever get interested in it, let me know.
 
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