Looks like I can finally ditch iTunes.

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Songbird has not paused during playback all night. I raised the output buffer to 10000ms and playback from my external HD has been flawless. FLAC test tomorrow. If all goes well.. iTunes is HISTORY. Yay.. I hate you iTunes ! Long history between iTunes and myself, will tell later.

Doug
 
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Congrats then! I myself have not even heard of Songbird, time for to try it out. Thanks!
 

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And after all that work with iTunes getting it sort of your way! :D Grin
 
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I'm happy with Songbird - make sure you get the 'now playing' add-on, no idea why this isn't built in to the basic player from the start.... plays FLAC just fine - and deleting iTunes from my Macbook has meant when i use the f8 (or f9, f7 etc) keys with VLC (or Songbird), iTunes doesn't now spontaneously start up (heinous).


Coops
 
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I'm only reason I keep iTunes is so I can update my iPhone and iPod. If it weren't for the updates, I'd go with Songbird.
 
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I 've had the most horrible experience with songbird I had ever on the mac, and I am afraid of it now as I can be, I installed it and then everything went awry, windows closed for no reason, safari most commonly, the cursor would have strange behaviour, apps would not open...man it was havoc, I got so scared, luckily I had a superduper image and restored....

Maybe it wasn't songbird...who knows...but it was so scary that I 've avoided it....well...
 
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So with this songbird can i import straight from my iTunes to it ?? Album artwork to??
Playlist, podcast ???
 
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Doug b
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Congrats then! I myself have not even heard of Songbird, time for to try it out. Thanks!

It's everything that iTunes SHOULD be. Out of the box it might appear a bit simplistic, but the power is in the extensions. Much like FireFox. The only thing that still needs work is its memory usage. But it hasn't gone over 130 MB for me, and that's while using its built in Mozilla browser.

And after all that work with iTunes getting it sort of your way! :D Grin

Crazy, I know. I'll explain why I tried it again, later. Have to jet.

I'm happy with Songbird - make sure you get the 'now playing' add-on, no idea why this isn't built in to the basic player from the start.... plays FLAC just fine - and deleting iTunes from my Macbook has meant when i use the f8 (or f9, f7 etc) keys with VLC (or Songbird), iTunes doesn't now spontaneously start up (heinous).

Yeah, was looking at that. Ok, will do.. thanks.

Coops

I'm only reason I keep iTunes is so I can update my iPhone and iPod. If it weren't for the updates, I'd go with Songbird.

I have to keep iTunes for the updates and to use it with the iPhone as well. But that's as far as I'll go with it.


I 've had the most horrible experience with songbird I had ever on the mac, and I am afraid of it now as I can be, I installed it and then everything went awry, windows closed for no reason, safari most commonly, the cursor would have strange behaviour, apps would not open...man it was havoc, I got so scared, luckily I had a superduper image and restored....

Maybe it wasn't songbird...who knows...but it was so scary that I 've avoided it....well...

Might have been a nightly built that wasn't good for you. It's great on my MBP, no glitches whatsoever.

So with this songbird can i import straight from my iTunes to it ?? Album artwork to??
Playlist, podcast ???

I believe so. But I have to go now so I can't check. If no one tries and lets you know, I'll tell you when I'm back.

Doug
 
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I believe so. But I have to go now so I can't check. If no one tries and lets you know, I'll tell you when I'm back.

Doug

Appreciated ...

Cheers
 
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I don't have any podcast's, so I couldn't test whether or not one would import, but I don't see why not. Here's what I've found thus far:

The first cap shows the import playlist function from the menu, which brings up the second cap to the right of it, and that's where I'd import podcast's from I suspect. The third cap bottom left, simply shows where my master music folder on my ext HD is and that Songbird is watching it for any changes so that it can add or subtract from its database.

The last cap is gathered from the "media importer" tab, in SB preferences. So you can see that yes, you can import tracks and playlists directly from iTunes. But SB does not act like iTunes unless you want it to, and that's why I love SB. I hate the way iTunes handles media files. Just direct SB to the directory where all of your media is, and it will automatically import everything accordingly.

Doug

Edit: Sorry, not sure about album art, but I suspect that either yes it will, or it doesn't matter because SB reads a files metadata and if there's album art included, it will show up. And if it doesn't, there's an add on called Amazon album art which will automatically add it upon request, either individually, or everything at once.

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Doug b
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I 've had the most horrible experience with songbird I had ever on the mac, and I am afraid of it now as I can be, I installed it and then everything went awry, windows closed for no reason, safari most commonly, the cursor would have strange behaviour, apps would not open...man it was havoc, I got so scared, luckily I had a superduper image and restored....

Maybe it wasn't songbird...who knows...but it was so scary that I 've avoided it....well...

I've never had that happen with any single iteration of Songbird. Something tells me it might have been an ironic coincidence. Doubt it would happen again. Just make sure you're downloading the latest stable version, and not some nightly test version.

Doug
 
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And after all that work with iTunes getting it sort of your way! :D Grin

So yeah.. I was really excited that iTunes was mostly cooperative with the Apple Scripts which I had installed. The scripts did two things for me:

1. One script was supposed to watch folders that I specified for it to watch as I added or removed new files to and from it. It would then "simply" add these files to the iTunes library/xml database.

2. The second script was made to have the files in my library mirror the way the actual files look outside of any sort of database or metadata view. So albums would be in the order they were made to go, and all files would be labeled with the numbers assigned in their id tags, which for SoME strange reason, iTunes NEVER got right. EVER.

I'd have been very happy to use iTunes and iTunes only, but these scripts are very far from fully functional. Problem with the first script:

You literally have to set each child folder to be watched, or else nothing will happen ! For example, I just added Jay Z's latest album to its parent folder which is of course "Jay Z". But unless I set the script to watch "Jay Z" it's useless. And there's NO WAY I'm going to manually add every root folder..craziness.

The second script is good, but for some reason doesn't work with all my files. I had three albums in particular which I really wanted in the order they were released, and I had even manually put a 1,2 and 3 before the album names so they'd be listed as such in the library. But every time I activated the script for those albums, after I hit play on any of the songs, they'd revert to their previous state.

I might have been able to fix it with a bit of looking into the metadata, but quite frankly, I could care less now. iTunes can go jump off a great big building. It's just such an overly complicated application, which should have been given the same options as every other media player in the world.

Songbird... easy as pie. Direct it to where my media is, and BAM. Imports nice and fast. No redundant files being copied, only to have to delete the originals, and then find the new ones strewn about in random folders even though they're from the same album... Just the same folder structure and hierarchy you started with.

I will say one thing about iTunes that I like though... I think the sound enhancer makes a difference when playing music through the laptop speakers as well as these cruddy $20 speakers I've been using for a couple of months now. The EQ for Songbird is good, and improves things a lot, but the sound enhancer for iTunes gives that nice illusion of separation.

Won't matter when I get new speakers though. Which hopefully will be in the next couple of weeks.

Doug
 
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Awesome! Glad you finally have a solution! I'll have to play with songbird once the holidays are over and I might actually have some down time.
 
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I was in the same boat. iTunes was horrible - always freezing, crashing, and just generally pissing me off.

I switched to Songbird, and it's SO much better. It's fast, doesn't freeze, and I love the way it manages my library. The only issue is that I can't sync my ipod with it, so I need to figure something out so I can do that. Everytime I open iTunes now (after installing Songbird) it flips out and starts trying to reorganize my library, which in turn forces Songbird to reorganize when I re-open that.
 
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I was in the same boat. iTunes was horrible - always freezing, crashing, and just generally pissing me off.

I switched to Songbird, and it's SO much better. It's fast, doesn't freeze, and I love the way it manages my library. The only issue is that I can't sync my ipod with it, so I need to figure something out so I can do that. Everytime I open iTunes now (after installing Songbird) it flips out and starts trying to reorganize my library, which in turn forces Songbird to reorganize when I re-open that.

That's odd. If there's anything I can say about iTunes is that it was rock solid for me. Never one hesitation, freeze or crash. Just hated every aspect of how it managed my music.

As far as iTunes flipping out and trying to re arrange things, that's also odd. The two methods should have nothing to do with one another. Please tell me how you have things arranged. To the letter, please. SB never tries to do ANYTHING with my library. I don't use the "Managed mode". Do you ? And if so, is there a particular reason why ?

The way I have always kept my music is as such: (look at screen caps)

The first is obviously the root music folder which is on my External HD (I don't keep any music, movies or photos on my main external HD)

The second shot shows bands in alphabetized order in 5 letter sub sections and the third shot shows what's in the A-F folder (well, a portion of it)

So all SB does is look this folder over and add each artist, album and song EXACTLY as I have it within those folders. No more, no less. And of course everything has id3 tags, so metadata is attached.

Songbird nor iTunes should be doing anything like what you're saying. Doesn't happen when I open iTunes. I bet if you turn off two options in iTunes this will stop. Go to preferences>advanced and un-check "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" as well as "Copy files to iTunes media folder". (see last screen shot)

I can have both running at the same time with no interference at all.

Doug

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I understand not wanting to use the tools bundled by Apple in some cases. I almost never use Safari because Firefox is just so much better. I also use Adium instead of iChat, but I have never had a single issue with iTunes on Mac or Windows...it has always been rock solid and more than powerful enough. I thought about checking out Songbird when I read this, but I use my iPhone and iPods so much that I can't see using two different tools. I'll be sure to keep it in my memory banks though for others looking for an alternative.
 
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I understand not wanting to use the tools bundled by Apple in some cases. I almost never use Safari because Firefox is just so much better. I also use Adium instead of iChat, but I have never had a single issue with iTunes on Mac or Windows...it has always been rock solid and more than powerful enough. I thought about checking out Songbird when I read this, but I use my iPhone and iPods so much that I can't see using two different tools. I'll be sure to keep it in my memory banks though for others looking for an alternative.

For reasons listed in my last post (how I have things organized) it seems that most other people do not keep their library in the same fashion as I do, so this of course would negate any reason for you or others like you to want to use anything other than iTunes. Perfectly understandable.

I simply don't understand (I guess) how people in general, manage their own folders and files. I'd love to see an example of how a hard core iTunes user keeps their folders (on an external or internal HD) managed. If it's anything like how I manage mine, I would then be totally confused by why that person would want to use iTunes.

That said, Songbird plays with iPhones and iPods via extensions: iPod Device Support - Songbird Add-ons

Doug

ipod-screenshot_large.jpg
 
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Thanks Doug for the info you provided...
It does look nice and from what you have described great for organising your music the way you want to.

Will delve into a little and have a gander but will stay with iTunes for the moment.

Cheers
 
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I'm not too keen on a music player arranging my files for me... and couldn't see how the basic idea of a 'now playing' list (as seen in every other music player i've seen/used - winAmp, musicmatch, mediamonkey, foobar...) isn't to be seen - the 'dj' mode is not good enough either - see the screenshot of Songbird (in 'YABS' skin) with the now playing list in the right hand pane.

Browse through your library and add any song you like as you go (just a double click or drag an album/song over) - my choice is to put any double-clicked song at th end of the list as default. You can drag any song in the list up/down or remove... all easy and on screen with all your music to browse through.

I keep my Music in 2 folders on my laptop - My MP3 and My VBR. The VBR's are converted from my own ripped to FLAC CD's (the FLAC's stay on a Time Capsule for use by Sonos music system.)
Music is then in folders by Album Artist - Album name.... easy to manage and find anything or delete or copy or backup etc.

Screen shot Music folders.jpg

Screenshot Songbird.jpg
 
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This thread convinced me to download Songbird. I really want to prefer it. Esp. being Mozilla related. But so far it just seems to be the same animal in a different color spandex. I'm going to keep tinkering with it though, I'd love to toss iTunes.
 

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