Yay... some iTunes alike prog would be very cool... AFAIK and IIRC someone is already working on something or at least has planned to do so... but can't remember who and where and when.. sorry..

OTOH i started a sound player on my own a while ago, which has such a modular design so it could be extended to some iTunes thingy.. unfortunately with my day-job and my girlfriend there isn't that much time left (actually zero ATM) to code at home.. heck, i even haven't engaged my A1 during this week yet

But, after reading this thread and its suggestions and ideas, i'll have a look at my sources again and do some research ASAP.. (but don't hold your breath)

_________________
Regards, Cyborg.
AmigaOS4 development team member

"In the beginning was CAOS.."
-- Andy Finkel, 1988 (ViewPort article, Oct. 1993)

Its taking a rather l-o-n--g time:


Amiga to develop games consoles, digital music players
Published Thursday 12th August 1999 11:17 GMT
Quote:

Amiga's information appliance strategy appears to have become much more broad-based than the company's focus on its multimedia convergence computer has suggested. According to Amiga president Jim Collas, cited in today's Wall Street Journal, the company plans to develop a whole line of devices, including digital music players

_________________
-vortexau, who's A1 XE-G4 remains at half-RAM !
A2000HD (from 1991) 060 64Mb PicassoII with OS3.5 . . . still working.

@Maczilla
>I was just addressing the statement "I don't have a Mac yet".
>I just figured that since Mac hardware has finally crossed the $500
>threshold, this might be a good time to take the plunge (no reason to
>throw away your A1, however)

Ah, OK. Actually I'm saving for an iBook, as I'd like a laptop of some sort, and for my laptop needs the platform is irrelevant so no need for yet another PC... :)

And about the visualizations, I've never actually seen them in iTunes. I must not be very adventurous or something with it, didn't know it was in there. I've seen visualizations in MythTV's music section though. The Goom one is pretty cool.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@Troll

Quote:
"OK how about porting Itunes to Amiga os 4?"

no! its horrible overbloat! On my home PC i installed it and it munched my 200 gig mp3 collection into a bizarre folder format and renamed them all just to confuse me!

I think what AOS4 needs is a mp3 datatype (PPC AHI) and then a version of foobar2000 or an opensource alternative like Xaudio. This way the file format is native and the id tags can be identified via datatypes, as can the play length and filevariations -> this information can then be read via any program and parsed (even an shell script). A nice new gui could easily be written with MUI or Ambient or Reaction with fully draggable controls and it would be nice to see jpg support for album art.

iTunes depends on Quicktime which is a shocking overabuse of the system (very unAmiga like) and one which the amiga does not need. A clean simple 4 panelled window interface á la 'iTunes' with low system overheads and iconifying wins my vote hands down.

amipal has the right idea - use all the existing libraries to integrate all the functions that WE want in a player. cddb integration / id tagging / multi-format...

as for iStore integration!!! who here wants to pay $1 for a DRm locked song in an obscure format where only 11 cents goes to the artist?!!!? lets get ogg datatypes whilst we are here!

@ikir

Quote:
"How about porting Microsoft Word?"

uh? madness! how about porting Abiword (already available on multiple platforms : windoze, linux, qnx.. even freeBSD and Solaris!). Whereas word takes up 32 mb on my system whilst running, Abiword with the same document opens it in 7 mb. Admittedly this solution is closed source, but i guarantee that it is the best word processor on any platform for the occassional book and invoice. Oh and its free. Of course there is Open Office which is open sourced, but I'm sure that I've heard Ami Office rumours before. From what I have seen, the source code is spaghetti and a myriad of difficult to follow mystical pointers - quite a task to port.


I think AOS should definitely get its status as mutlimedia king back, but we have to embrace all fileformats as quickly as possible for people to jump aboard. if the datatypes system is tuned enough, we have a clear head start over other OS' and a system small enough to be embedded. a generic media player aint such a bad idea though (like multiview but a bit more erm, hi-tec) with decent handling of files - by that i mean that double clicking an mp3 without an icon file doesn't just clear my playlist and start a lonely song alone!

@xe54

Thanks for your support!

@all

Please note that I'm in no way advocating the **porting** of iTunes. My idea would be to make something similar to the Apple program. All this talk of downloading from iStore, vizualisations and Quicktime is something that IMHO is not required for AmiTunes.

All AmiTunes needs to do is organise your songs/playlists, play and encode MP3s, and possibly burn them to disc if required. The latter could be added to a later version.

_________________
After a decade away from the scene, I am back!

@xe54
>as for iStore integration!!! who here wants to pay $1 for a DRm locked song in an obscure
>format where only 11 cents goes to the artist?!!!? lets get ogg datatypes whilst we are here!

I do. $1 per song isn't a bad price compared to buying the CD at a store. The iTunes store lets you sample any song before you buy. That lets me check out new artists to find out if I lke them or not. It lets me avoid paying for particular songs I don't like from artists that in general I do like. If you pay for a song by any means, very few of those artists will get much of anything from it. The independants who don't "depend on" RIAA companies for income at all may not be in iTunes or other web stores anyway.

If not the iTunes store, then perhaps some other similar store that I "purchase" the songs rather than the new Napster's "rent" the songs method and isn't more expensive than iTunes store.

Ogg is cool, and should of course be a feature available. But for playing, converting and burning songs, we already have software that does all that. This project to bring them together into a single "pretty" app (or at least a single user interface) is a small step for what I myself would like, but is indeed a step toward something that in the future might have more than just those things.

But turning your back completely on the iTunes store concept is turning your back on the future, when CDs become obsolete and portable media players like iPod and such have replaced CD players as CD players did to tape decks. In developing this "AmiTunes" project, please at least do so with future things in mind to lessen the burden of adding such features when the time comes to stop ignoring them.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@billt

Also agreed. Naturally this project would have to walk before it can run, bu future compatability & paths would need to be kept in mind, yes.

FuZion.

@billt

iTunes locks the user into using iStore - now don't misunderstand me, I am a designer myself, apple have mastered the integration to a tee. The whole concept, style, versatility and close knitting to the iPod is perfect for those who couldn't care less about the state of online music. By removing the choice of a user to browse and integrate multiple download stores such as the fantastic

allmp3

as for,
"The iTunes store lets you sample any song before you buy. That lets me check out new artists to find out if I lke them or not."

I think you will certainly appreciate these sites :
allmusicguide
vitaminC
weed
for researching and previewing music.

and for finding out about music you would like,

gnod

even
amazon
will allow you to browse, preview and even download music.

i hate to say it, but apple with iTunes have crippled the devlopment of mp3 usage as much as they have encouraged it. The whole point of online music (from the POV of the artist) is that there is limited advertising overheads, no replication costs, free distribution... this should all lead to a higher percentage of money to the artists! 10% of $1 means 90 cents to the piggy bank to fund site promotion, hosting costs, site maintenance and what exactly? for more information about the monopoly that iStore has on the artists, the public (ie. YOU!) and the internet music business check,

iTunes iSbogus

besides, iPod integration is already possible surely. it is just a bit stream through firewire or usb, we just have to decode it (yes, there are open sourced decoders) and then parse the xml database into the player. jeez, make AOS4 an arexx script that reads a dir and converts the music files into the iPod xml format and i could program it myself!

for web buying, we need better browsers first, so we are already jumping the gun! a few mp3 tag reading/writing libraries should be written (if they don't already exist) so that we can encourage the future of our ultimate music player!

so in summary, i think "Turning your back completely on the iTunes store concept" is bad, but restricting the player with such tight integration should be avoided in case these small steps turn into big footsteps such as those of the big shoes of monopoly mad microsoft! Oh and NO TO DRM!!!

Last edited by xe54 on 16-Feb-2005 at 08:16 PM.

iTunes is, as has been said before, a really well designed front end to everything Apple does with music. Apple won't help in any way with a port to AOS, because Apple want to protect their Mac hardware and they only ported it to Windows because of Windows' crushing marketshare offering the potential for huge profits.

If you are after a player to port I strongly suggest foobar2000, it is extremely customisable, easily extensible and very flexible, if you've got Windows and a few thousand music files do give it a try. Perhaps it isn't suitable for porting, but the design ideology behind it is worth emulating, to some degree at least.

@FuZion

I think I'll start by concentrating on getting MPlayer-GUI nice and more integrated with MPlayer. I plan on making it slimline in play mode with some nice gfx for the buttons, if I can get hold of some.

And as someone said: The point with iTunes is its connection to the iPod and the music store. And this will never happen with a clone as Apple owns the right to the interface to the store and all that...

Personally I'll stick to AmigaAmp for playing MP3s, TheMPegEncGUI for encoding and tagging MP3s, and MPlayer(-GUI) for playing movies until anything remarkable happens

_________________
- Don't get fooled by my avatar, I'm not like that (anymore, mostly... maybe only sometimes)
> Amiga Classic and OS4 developer for OnyxSoft.

@xe54

Quote:

no! its horrible overbloat! On my home PC i installed it and it munched my 200 gig mp3 collection into a bizarre folder format and renamed them all just to confuse me!

So you blame iTunes for you not reading what it asks you on screen?
It *very clearly* asks the user if he/she wants iTunes to manage the mp3s or not. And would you call artist/album/track a bizarre folder format? If files are tagged as compilations they're even put into compilations/album/track so they're not all over the place.

Quote:

I think what AOS4 needs is a mp3 datatype (PPC AHI)

What's wrong with mpega.library?

Quote:

iTunes depends on Quicktime which is a shocking overabuse of the system

I'm afraid there's something you don't quite understand here. Quicktime on its native platform is an excellent media player. On Windows it sucks up more juice because it has a so large implementation of MacOS itself in it, that iTunes is ported on top of it. In other words it has a large portion of the MacOS API inside.

As for overabuse of the system. Well, I've run it on a 300MHz machine and it performed flawlessly. No skipping in the music or anything. The only thing it couldn't do was run the visuals at full framerate. So I call BS on that.

Quote:

as for iStore integration!!! who here wants to pay $1 for a DRm locked song in an obscure format where only 11 cents goes to the artist?!!!?

Well, first of all it's called iTunes Music Store and not iStore. And yes, it's DRM-locked, but it also has very reasonable conditions. If you really want to you can make a cd out of it and play it anywhere. You can even re-rip it in mp3 format if you so desire.

Your complaints about an obscure format are totally incomprehensible. It's based on MPEG4. What could possibly be more standards-oriented? Only FairPlay is proprietary (which is the DRM part) and it's only in place to let Apple offer music from the labels in the first place. Oh, and it's far, far more flexible than the only real competition out there (which would be WMA-based stores). Yes, there are places such as EMusic.com and a new store will open soon with DRM-free MP3s, but there are no words yet as to what the content will be. I'm sure they won't be able to compete with iTMS or the others in any case.

Besides it's not Apple who decides how much the artist gets - it's the labels. Buy music from one of the decent labels like Epitaph or CDBaby and the artist gets a much bigger share. It's the Big Five that are fscking their artists over - not iTMS.

Quote:

By removing the choice of a user to browse and integrate multiple download stores such as the fantastic allmp3

You know you just linked to a usenet search site with warez, right? I suppose you meant to link to allofmp3.com. Well, a moment ago you were going on about 11 cents to the artist. Allofmp3 pays only streaming fees (in Russia they have decided music distribution over the net is the same as having your song played on the radio) and they pay money to ROMS which in turn pay to the international associations. So how can you possibly recommend that if you want the artist to get more than 11 cents per track?

As for using Amazon to preview music: you were complaining about obscure file formats. These are absolutely closed, proprietary formats - namely Real and WMA.

Quote:

The whole point of online music (from the POV of the artist) is that there is limited advertising overheads, no replication costs, free distribution... this should all lead to a higher percentage of money to the artists! 10% of $1 means 90 cents to the piggy bank to fund site promotion, hosting costs, site maintenance and what exactly?

You *do* know that Apple aren't actually making money from online sales right? The place where Apple make money is sales of the iPod. Like HMK mentioned previously it's the combination that works. Yes, there is a tiny, tiny profit - but then again it would be dumb not to, since they also have to provide a service and keep customers happy and you need a little flexibility to do that.

Quote:

for more information about the monopoly that iStore has on the artists, the public (ie. YOU!) and the internet music business

Again I call BS. There is no monopoly. They have the largest legal market share but that does not equal a monopoly. You can choose to buy from other vendors if you prefer their inferior products. If not you can just choose NOT to buy from them. Where's the monopoly? Where?

Like you I prefer having no DRM, since I like to believe that people aren't criminals per default. However, facing reality we can see that it is indeed necessary in order to deal the the Big Five.

Last edited by Trezzer on 17-Feb-2005 at 08:02 AM.
Last edited by Trezzer on 17-Feb-2005 at 08:01 AM.

I don't suppose anyone else out there would consider 'teaming up' on building some sort of media holding GUI system thing? In my early stages of this idea, the actual playing isn't overly necessary to start. Just a bloody good way of listing, sorting & locating the said files to begin.

FuZion.

@FuZion

I feel that some form of XML-based database back-end would be necessary. If this thing is to be built, then this is possibly the most important part of the project!

_________________
After a decade away from the scene, I am back!

@amipal

Yes... I fully agree again...

U know, there's some good ideas coming through this thread.

FuZion.

@FuZion

Ideas for integration: iTunes on OSX (not the Windows version) does a lot to integrate into the system. This way it's possible to notify the system and other applications of which song is playing and extract information from the playlist, such as artist, song name and album art and also allows itself to be controlled externally.
This way you can build other interfaces and methods of controlling iTunes, such as through
Salling Clicker (amazingly cool if you ask me. )

It also extends its database into various OSX search engines such as QuickSilver and LaunchBar, so you can search your song list without actually having iTunes launched.

Some applications also allow you to add songs to iTunes completely automatically if you download an mp3 from it.

@HMK

Right, so you're saying an Amiga version would need an AREXX port then :)

_________________

@HMK

As mentioned above, AREXX could be used for such automation. As for this bit:
Quote:

Some applications also allow you to add songs to iTunes completely automatically if you download an mp3 from it.

If AmiTunes was set to read MP3s from your Music: partition, then surely setting your download path in your browser to this partition would sort this out??

_________________
After a decade away from the scene, I am back!

@amipal
Quote:

If AmiTunes was set to read MP3s from your Music: partition, then surely setting your download path in your browser to this partition would sort this out??

It could, but do you want all your .lha archives and other stuff mixed up in that directory along with your mp3 library?

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!

@amipal

Quote:

If AmiTunes was set to read MP3s from your Music: partition, then surely setting your download path in your browser to this partition would sort this out??

You could do that, but it's not very clever. I know Rhythmbox works that way (which is why it takes ages to start up when there are many songs). iTunes works with a separate datafile. It doesn't work with the files directly, because iTunes holds more data about the songs than will fit into the mp3 tags or the file directories themselves. There are playlists, smart playlists, ratings, party shuffle settings, radio stations and other settings. That datafile is way faster to fetch from that file than reading the tags in each file.

XFactor (a gnutella client) lets you add mp3's to a specific playlist of your choice or to the party shuffle function and you can select to play them or not. It requires a little more than just monitoring a directory for new files to do that.

BTW: Isn't there a problem with FFS and thousands of files? I was thinking YAM, which had a problem like that on my old A4000.

Ratings is one of the best features of iTunes, because it lets you massage your music collection one song at a time, improving over time so you only end up playing the very best songs or albums. You can edit mp3 tags inline, select a few songs and give them equal rating or put them in a group or make them part of a specific album and quickly clean them up.

You can play them in order, random, by genre, album, artist, play count, least or most played, even by beats per minute, so you can setup a range of dance tracks for your exercise, if you want. This kind of juggling with your music is really what makes iTunes stand out over time.

That's what I meant with proper music management. Get a ratings system in there that works. Even better: Make it read iTunes playlists and make it compatible. Rhythmbox can't do that yet, I believe.

@HMK
Quote:

BTW: Isn't there a problem with FFS and thousands of files? I was thinking YAM, which had a problem like that on my old A4000.

I haven't had any problems, and a couple of my YAM folders are over 10,000 emails EACH. Need to clean them out someday as it does slow things down, but it works.

_________________
All glory to the Hypnotoad!