Comments on: iTunes Puts Me Off Buying a Mac

By: Claire K

Claire K — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 10:18:23 +0000

Solution: buy a Creative Zen - far more lovely than any iPod!

By: andy

andy — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 08:48:45 +0000

Joakim is you aren’t a troll what I mean by statistics tracking (which isn’t vague at all in the context of iPod+iTunes) is the feature where iTunes tells me how many times I have played each track and when I last played it - but you seem to know that as indicated by your second to last sentence. That doesn’t work when auto sync is off. Please feel free to challenge me - I like to be challenged.

By: joakim

joakim — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 05:16:34 +0000

Album Art!? Is that what differentiates mac and itunes to people now-adays?

Geez. most music library software i’ve used support album art. (that includes open source). The source for the album art is everywhere nowadays.

My favorite source: http://www.discogs.com/

Statistic tracking is a nice broad topic. Keep it vague, noone will challenge you. Well … even my ancient first gen NEOPlayer/MP3 HDD (Circa 1996) support’s # of plays by song / album / artist.

Welcome to 1990’s where your future awaits!

By: andy

andy — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:09:01 +0000

So Amarok supports Album art and it actually retrieves album art for all my albums which iTunes did not. For example iTunes has no album art for my Beatles albums or a number of my more obscure albums. Banshee also supports Album art… here is a video

http://linuxrevolution.blogspot.com/2006/12/3d-album-art-in-banshee.html

Amarok gets the album art from Amazon but I understand that is configurable.

Both support Album art much better than iTunes.

Both support automatic Podcast syncing with iPods and other media players.

However neither support statistics tracking.

You are right I should use an Open Source alternative and that is exactly what I will do because right now they are better than what the manufacturer provides.

I don’t think I should stop complaining, I like to think of it as constructive criticism and I only hope it has some positive effect on the software available both proprietary and FLOSS.

By: Jesse Wilson

Jesse Wilson — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:57:30 +0000

You should stop complaining and switch to an open source, non-proprietary alternative. Of course, by doing so, you’ll have nastier problems:
- No album art!
- No statistics tracking on devices or between machines!
- No automatic podcast syncing!

Fortunately, since it’s open source you can implement these features yourself! Although I’m not exactly sure where you’d get the album art from…