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A rant about how I finally ditched iTunes... :D

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nontroppo:
Ralf: my phone ain't new (Nokia N70), but you can just drag music over to it and play stuff as you want.

Nokia do allow easier syncing from iTunes though, using nothing more than a playlist, but you don't require it at all.

iTunes: I was forced to use iTunes when I started using my Macbook. I *hated* it more than any other of the shocks of changing OS. I did use Foobar2000 before, so I am an extreme-tweak poweruser masochist. Music players are a pretty weak area of OS X. My hatred largely stemmed from the music I had in FLAC and OGG formats, which were unplayable without horrid conversions to MP3. You can get LAME in iTunes, but I opted on using an excellent converter and ripper, Max. Over time however, I've got more accustomed to it. But the killer feature is that Quicksilver allows a full interface to iTunes, so I can immediately get to artists, playlists, set ratings, music navigation while iTunes UI is closed. Quicksilver actually makes iTunes the best player I've used, and when I'm in windows with foobar2000, I now miss such control. This is really thanks to Quicksilver not iTunes...

justice:
don't remove the helper services, just disable them using services.msc. They won't run and problem is solved. and if this doesn't solve create a local group policy setting against running them via hash. that way until they update it it won't run them.

Lashiec:
nontroppo, so using Quicksilver in a Mac you can control iTunes without having it open? What are you controlling then? The backend which is powered by a running service or what?

On the foobar part, you can bug Ehtyar to expand the scope of his FARR plugin... or does it control the entire program now? I can't remember... :-[

BTW, Quicksilver is now OSS (Hint, hint ;D)

Plasma Man:
Interesting to see that good old Foobar 0.9.4.5 has an updated GUI, which looks rather familiar:

http://www.foobar2000.org/screenshots/index.html

It's a great alternative - light weight, no rubbish, offers a fast way to preview audio libraries, easy to hook up to pro sound cards etc. V.good basis for a DIY media centre.

For portable devices there are now lots of nifty Open Source options ... just hit Google / Quintura / Clusty ...

Andre

nontroppo:
Lashiec: OS X differentiates between documents/windows, and applications. So closing all my iTunes windows keeps iTunes running in the background (confuses the hell out of you when you first use a Mac!;)). iTunes uses well under half the CPU with its UI Window closed, but it is not technically a daemon (service in Winspeak). QS uses spotlight to generate a catalog of all my artists, tracks and albums, as well as playlists, and I can play now or queue them up for later playing. It even has a special mode where only music items will be searched for (faster results for single track searching).

I've yet to try the foobar plugin for FARR, I'll put it on my play(with)-list :)

And yes, QS is OSS, but it relies so heavily on Cocoa frameworks to do its magic I doubt it will be any more portable to other platforms. The iTunes magic uses universal Applescript dictionaries which probably aren't available elsewhere. Perhaps for KDE, who seem to have really nice cross-app interaction support.

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