iTunes For Linux, Thanks To CodeWeavers 352
pizen writes "The folks over at CNet have the scoop that a new version of CrossOver Office (3.1) now supports Apple's iTunes. The preview version of the software is being tested and is currently only available to current CodeWeavers customers. They expect a final version to be available later this year." Reader snowtigger contributes a link to this screenshot. White demonstrated iTunes on a Linux machine at OSCON as well; a rendering glitch marred that demo, but he was still able to demonstrate playing back a song which he'd purchased from iTMS using iTunes on Linux.
Re:Well, it saves Apple some work! (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because there might be BSD stuff underneath everything on MacOS X doesn't mean everything directly uses the BSD APIs...
Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
Wooohoo.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
just use it for a couple of days...see if you don't love it
try out the tag editing also
Re:Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I use Winamp 5, which I think has a much better interface than iTunes, but its the same concept with its media library. I used to have all my music in folders and run them from there. But then I started using Winamp 5 and really liked the media library once I started using it. Being able to search your entire library for a song or artist and have the entire search result be your playlist is just one possibility. Bookmarks, rating songs, recently played songs, most played songs, being able to scroll through your entire library are other nice features. When you have a music collection that has become disorganized and fragmented like mine has, it helps a lot, too.
Though iTunes is lacking in comparison to Winamp 5, it is slowly catching up. But screw iTunes, I want to see Winamp 5 running on Linux!
Re:It's still all unix (Score:5, Insightful)
iTunes doesn't, so you're wrong here. It uses Carbon, a completely different and very large API ported to Mach from MacOS. I doubt highly it touches the BSD server much.
and OSX's fancy graphics are still X11 based
Wrong. Quartz is essentially a display PDF renderer, written from scratch and having nothing to do with X11.
and music devices and disks are still
Wrong. 0 for 3. Thanks for playing "Slashdot pundit who doesn't know what he's talking about".
Re:Yuck... (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh, no. I'm not sure how you reached that conclusion. The point is that MacOS isn't FreeBSD with an Apple window manager slapped on top, as Slashbot dimwits all seem to believe.
Well.. maybe not.. but how hard can it be for Apple to do a carbon copy for Linux, like they've done for Windows.
Probably just about as hard to make, although a lot harder to support. But for 1% of the desktop market instead of 97%, "no harder to make" isn't necessarily a winner.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:1, Insightful)
There are times when you want to listen to music, without giving it much attention. This means you don't want to navigate a filesystem every three minutes to select the next tune, which would amount to interrupt what you are doing. Playlists don't work well with me, because this means selecting stuff in advance. You can do the analogy to how you listen to music in your car, playlists are like burning your own compilation on a CD, selecting files is like inserting a new tape after each tune. The first one implies work and to be organised (I'm not), the second would not be very safe. Of course, you listen to whole albums sequentially, but this is often not what I feel like.
I used to have a Sun station with XMMS, but not listening a lot to music because of this. With iTunes, I usually browse either by genre or artist or even use the search facility and play the set of songs that come out. The party mode is also, I think, quite a good idea, although I have to figure out how to prevent certain tunes from ending up in there.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Finally!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't spend days rating and organizing my songs for nothing. Until some free (as in speech) app comes along that can import *all* my iTunes ratings and organization I wont be switching from my Mac or Windows PCs.
Re:This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why the gulf between Linux and Mac OS is so wide. "It's so easy, just do this and this and this. Oh, you mean you want it to just work?"
Whether it's because iTunes tagged the files unconventionally, or because the XMMS is broken /inferior, the simplicity of iTunes didn't translate to the original poster's Linux environment.
iTunes has plenty of room for improvement, but it's a solid app., both on Windows and OS X.
I don't blame the OP for missing it.
Re:really (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you like and will listen to every single song on that hypothetical CD. If you'd rather pick and choose every track to make sure there's no dead weight that you'll always skip over, then $1 is a perfectly good price point.
Come to think of it, $1 per song is a complete rip off. If they were ogg encoded, I might give it some consideration at
With how pervasive MP3 is these days, it's going to take a hell of a lot of catching up before anyone will give a damn that a relatively miniscule group of people won't listen to music that isn't ogg encoded.
Re:really (Score:3, Insightful)
If $1 a song is too expensive, it should come down, unless online operators start colluding. Still, it is cheap, in Europe we pay a lot more.
Remember also Apple are only making a small profit at the moment. At $.50 they would lose money. If you have no interest, don't buy. I don't. Just accept you aren't part of their target market. I'm puzzled why people need to keep saying they wouldn't buy something, just don't buy it.
Re:Why would I use it? (Score:3, Insightful)
People generally want to use the best if they can, right? Now you (and other Linux-folk) can.
The real question is... Why wouldn't you use it? It's free, it's powerful, it's easy, it's simple!
Re:What's so good about iTunes? Not a troll. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why iTunes? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's more mature.
It's more convenient.
It's *still* free
It gives you more capabilities with downloaded music:
Burn on 7 CDs before needing to alter your track order
Stream to 5 computers
Did I mention burning to CD was free?
You are right, Linux programmers *should* try to write a better iTunes. They haven't yet. Taking a look at Juk features... you do realize that 90% of the features they tout on their website was first implemented by iTunes? Inline search, tree view mode (though implemented as column browse mode), tag editor, vfolders, online tag lookup, as well as the file renamer
So the real question is... What does Juk do that's better than iTunes that would suggest anyone use Juk?
Re:Futurama Quote applicable (Score:2, Insightful)
If Apple can sue because some talented hackers managed to get iTunes to run under Linux, then MS can sue because they've gotten Office to work.
One day you'll realise the lawsuit isn't the answer to every problem.
Re:Linux is about open standards (Score:2, Insightful)
"
Because Apple is making a significant amount of money out of it?
That is so silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, it claims that Apple basically does nothing to reap its one-third cut of the price of a song on iTunes. What about the front-end costs of bulding the iTMS backend, developing the client application (for multiple platforms) and the ongoing costs of the bandwidth? I guess that's "basically doing nothing"?
Secondly, if a recording artist is making 11 cents per song on iTunes, isn't that 11 cents that the artist would never otherwise receive? I mean, an artists' overhead for selling on iTMS ought to consist of: (a) rehearsal and studio time, (b) mixing services, (c) hiring session musicians and maybe a famous producer or something, and (d) marketing. The label gives them an advance for all that stuff, and takes it back (and then some) in their 53 cents per song cut of sales on iTMS.
So, once the artist has paid back the label for any advance money, every 11 cent per song sale on iTMS is pure profit, right? The artist has no ongoing expenses for selling on iTMS, right?
And Apple has lots of really expensive ongoing overhead, right? And Apple says they're barely breaking even on iTMS today, right?
So how is Apple screwing artists?
Re:really (Score:2, Insightful)
I've always considered $1 for a good song to be a great deal when thrift store record shopping. If the album contains 1 good song (good being a relative term) then I've done pretty well. Even better if I average that ratio over the course of a day's finds.
Now with iTMS, I am pretty much guaranteed that ratio. I know what song I'm getting and its usually one I've been wanting for a while. To me it is worth it. Also you don't have to buy a whole album or buy from RIAA members. It really is that easy. But if you don't want to do either, fine, but I get tired of those who pronounce judgment against those of us who do find it useful.
Re:Linux is about open standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Theoretically one could explain that it is easier to bypass DRM on Linux than on Windows, but as we now have things like a commercially licensed PowerDVD for Linux [slashdot.org] and Hymn [hymn-project.org] for Windows, I think that argument won't really hold any water.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
So... have you hit the Codeweaver's Store and purchased it?
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Most artists have up-front contracts with their labels, paying them millions in advance. Musicians don't make their profits from album commissions.
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Re:Everybody doing Apple's work for them (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re:Heh I have been saying this for a long time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Winamp playlist (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Hidden Significance (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes it does. Maybe the RIAA isn't aware of it yet, or just hasn't reacted because it doesn't consider the threat either immient or solvable. But it IS breaking the DRM. It's a way you can get a perfect digital copy with no analog degradation, which is exactly what the RIAA moans about.
DRM today is in an embryonic state- there are many ways to break or avoid it, and this is just one of them. But the foot is in the door. We can expect DRM to increase in power on proprietary OSes, so that Windows and MacOS will refuse to play DRMed music if your audio-driver and soundcard don't match a pre-approved list of Trusted players.
When that happens, the RIAA (or the computer/audio hardware companies that work with them) will try to make iTunes, and every other DRM-trusted player, incompatible with emulated environments. There will be technical steps, and legal steps (DMCA).
In a future with strong-DRM or Trusted Computing, it will not be possible to simply pay for a commercially produced Trusted media player to run on a Free OS (unless code signing was used to guarrantee that although you have the OS's source code, you didn't edit & recompile)
Re:Winamp playlist (Score:2, Insightful)
Set a Smart Playlist with, say, Random 25 songs from library, Live Updating, and (for grins) Only include checked songs. When you want to refresh, clear the contents and the playlist will regenerate to fill the criteria. As long as Live Updating is turned on, this works for ALL Smart Playlists, the only caveat being if you use one of the "Not played in..." criteria, in which case it works no differently than the Party Shuffle.
Re:That is so silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right, Apple is not screwing artists. To all you downhillbattle trolls, see if you can grasp this concept: iTunes makes their deal with the entity that holds the rights to the song. If the artist signed their life and rights away to the label, then they have no choice as to how the music is distributed and what cut they take. It's a terrible shame that the music labels do proudly and routinely screw over their artists, but it's not Apple's responsibility to take a stand and start the revolution, no more than it's Tower Records' or Amazon.com's.
Now, there are artists on iTunes who aren't on a major label and take a bigger cut for themselves. If you support them-- or similar DIY business models-- then maybe, just maybe more and more will realize that they don't have to be a part of the RIAA machine.