Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support

nbahi15 writes "Codeweavers has released v4 of its Wine implementation with the addition of support for iTunes. To quote their web site, 'iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable.' Finally I can use the single most important 'productivity' application on Linux."

Offline version okay with me.

[CyberThalamus]

I wouldn't want it to be able to access the store. I don't want bugs to end up charging my credit card. ITunes is already a killer (free) app with apple lossless (yes even on the windows version).

itunes is a monster!

[ilyanep]

I wonder if Apple knew that iTunes would become such a big hit when they released it.

From your perspective, I'm sure...

[lukewarmfusion]

"It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."

As a developer myself, I know very well that what I think is usable is not always end-user usable. As close as I get to a project, knowing the code inside and out, I tend to miss the big picture stuff. It may sound logical and intuitive in my mind, but it usually takes some testing from non-geeks before I let anyone - especially a client - start using it.

Usable or executable?

[TimmyDee]

"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod. It can't burn CDs right now, and it has some fairly serious warts (sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard), but we think it's usable."

So does it work or not? Here's my translation: "iTunes will now launch under WINE. Do not expect to listen to your music, burn CDs, sync with the iPod easily, or in short, do anything iTunes does."

Seriously though, I applaud their effort. It's just that saying iTunes works under WINE when it doesn't really work all that well is a bit of false advertising. If it gets more programmers on the bandwagon, good for them, but I'd hate to see people get turned off by (what sounds to be) a bad experience.

Wha?

[Have Blue]

"iTunes works, and can do everything we thought was important; play music, access the store, and sync with an iPod."

"sound is tricky, particularly with 2.6 kernels, and getting the iPod going is hard"

So... Which one is it? How was this ready for release again?

Re:I hate ITunes

[jared_hanson]

Where are all the hackers and geeks these days, anyways? I like using my own scripts to copy and file and sort all my data.

Probably working on more important things, since iTunes does its job really well and saves me untold hours of time, freeing me up to work on other projects besides maintaining a music collection.

Re:Yet more free advertising for Apple on Slashdot

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah, because announcing the functional version of a project to run Apple software is just like handing them free money. Except the software is free to start with. But it does allow people to buy things from Apple. Except, Apple is not really making any money off of the sales. All this does is encourage people to buy ipods from Apple, and discourage them from buying computers from Apple. I can't really see how this is advertising for Apple. Especially given the semi-functional nature of the release. If anything, this probably annoys Apple, since it gives Linux users the ability to run one of their flagship pieces of software in a broken and semi-functional sort of way.

Re:Where is Apple in all of this?

[LEgregius]

It was a pretty big undertaking to port it to windows. Porting it to linux will be no easier because the UI on itunes in written in carbon. Apple would also want it to look EXACTLY the same like the windows version does, with mac scrollbars and such. Aside from that, sound is still a bit of a headache in linux and burning audio cd's requires root privileges.
On that note, I don't think apple really likes writing ANYTHING for a platform other than mac, so they had to have a lot of incentive to write something for windows, which is mass marketshare and the possibility of having tons more music store and ipod sales. Neither of those incentives really exist on the Linux platform. Also, they would have to port Quicktime as well, I would guess.

Simuated iPod

[Nebulaeus]

Frankenwine apps are never a good replacement for the Real Thing(TM). I played the WineX game for a while and it sucked. Apple needs to get off their collective arses and port iTunes to Linux.

Apple talks about a new way of sharing music, appealing to our sense of "karma" to encourage us not to steal. Yet they leave Linux desktop users in the cold. This seems somewhat disingenuous to me.

I would be excited about the iTunes music store launching in Canada (finally), if it wasn't for the fact that it won't work in my operating system of choice.

Do Linux users have any legal recourse in listening to digital music at the moment?

Re:I hate ITunes

[Ignignot]

Oh we're not in love with it at all. In fact, us hackers and geeks have quietly been scripting automatic posts to slashdot. The reasons we are doing this are two:

reason the first: we are practicing to beat the turing test, and feel that slashdot is full conversations that come close to beating the turing test, so this is good practice.

reason the second: we are lazy.

The current problem is that any story regarding iPods or iTMS creates a flood of posts about how much we love apple. This is being corrected but it will take some time to figure out the love apple / hate apple logic. I really shouldn't be telling you this because it is funny watching the few people who actually try to have conversations on slashdot, but I decided to give someone a hint to see if everyone else catches on or not.

For an example of an all script-generated conversation, look here [slashdot.org]. As you can see we've gotten quite good at using markov chains to produce seemlying meaningful responses without actually contributing everything. We have some troubles with grammar and spelling but that's alright because so do the people we're imitating. Anyway I hope someday you join in the fun! Really me, -Ignignot

Only on slashdot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone who never used iTunes under Cxoffice 4 get modded up +5.

I have cxoffice 4 and you can listen to music, add stuff to the library (though it is mighty slow, took half an hour to add 4 gigs of mp3s), and you can go on the iTunes music store (Which works very well btw). I used the cxitunespreview which ran iTunes, and they have improved the performance greatly. You can actually listen to music through iTunes now, and performance is drastically improved over the cxitunespreview. Sure, it's not like running it in windows. But it's quite fast.

They're going to be releasing another version soon which should help the cpu usage go down for iTunes (currently some kind of garbage iTunes is spewing is causing cxoffice to use 100% cpu, they think it's some kind of timing hack used by apple... Hey, windows/x86 isn't apple's primary platform, so I wouldn't be surprised).

All in all a nice product. Also soon they will be adding firewire support to the cxipod (currently only usb is supported, and my 4G ipod doesn't like usb on linux). But then I use gtkpod and am perfectly happy with that (I can transfer all the mp4's I get off of iTunes).

Not ready for iTunes on my debian system yet

[m2bord]

I'm just not convinced that I need to buy digital music. I'll keep on buying cd's, ripping them and storing them on my media server.

I just don't see the advantage in downloading music.

When you download from any source, legit or not, you're not in control of how the file was extracted.

The bit rate may not be what you wanted, there is always the possibility of some digital artifacts during playback, and i'm just not comfortable with it.

Plus, I don't own an iPod. I don't think I want one. I'm quite happy with my CD based MP3 player which uses CDRW's.

I can put 10 hours worth of music on one disc and it works nicely.

Besides I like to be in control of my music and my gear and I don't like when I can't replace the battery like the way the iPod is setup.

Re:Why Bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen.

I just bought a G3 Mac that runs 10.3.5 surprisingly well.... for $150. After fighting with Linux for years at home, I finally decided my time was worth a hell of a lot more than the price of a Mac.

As an actual paying customer

[hab136]

let me say that Crossover lets me do the one thing I need to - run Microsoft crap. Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, and Solomon (an accounting/timecard application).

I'd use Evolution - but we're on Exchange 5.5 and I can't use the calendar (very important).

I do use OpenOffice also, but sometimes you actually do need the real deal, for crazy marked-up contracts with goofy checkboxes and whatnot. It's good to be able to open network diagrams in Visio. Also, I like to fill in my timecard so I get paid. :)

Obviously, the situation is not ideal, but it lets me run Linux at work, which is vastly helpful to actually doing my job. It's just that all the other junk associated with having a job - HR, Legal, etc kind of things - require me to have Microsoft products.

now it's in the official release

[timothy]

I saw initial iTunes support demonstrated [slashdot.org] several months ago at OSCON, too, but now it's in the released version.

timothy

Re:From your perspective, I'm sure...

[Tony Hoyle]

My first thought on reading the summary was...

Can't burn CD
Sound flaky is listed as a 'wart'.

Hmm... So on what sense does this 'work' then???

Re:Simuated iPod

[Durandal64]

If there actually was one, predominant Linux distro or window manager, I'm sure that there'd be a better chance of Apple porting iTunes to Linux. But as it stands, if Apple supports only KDE, the Gnome people will piss and whine, and if Apple supports only Gnome, the KDE people will piss and whine. If Apple supports them both, then Apple has to devote more resources to a project for a very small set of people who basically have an aversion to actually paying for anything, hate DRM, think the iPod is overpriced and would never buy it and would be unlikely to use the music store because its DRM doesn't work on whatever portable player they use.

So what does Apple get in exchange for porting iTunes to Linux again?

Finally something works!

[gsasha]

I've upgraded to version 4, installed IE6 and I finally can access my bank's homepage. WOW!!!

One more reason to get off Windows.

Though, seems like the upgrade borked the fonts in MSWord. Ouch.

This is a testament to how good iTunes is

[thedbp]

The fact that the Linux commumity is so bent on getting iTunes to run on Linux is a testament to how great of a program iTunes is.

Linux users are usually a lot more critical of their software. While a lot of Linux doesn't have the polish or fit 'n' finish of some Windows software, the quality of the code is taken more seriously, as is the functionality of the software. It may not always LOOK pretty, but it is usually very powerful and well written.

There are a lot of programs that try to emulate iTunes, both on Linux and Windows (LTunes anybody?). But it seems that the Linux community would rather see iTunes itself running on Linux than a knock-off. I see this as a 'kudos' to Apple from the Linux community, for producing software so good that linux devs bust their balls to get it working.

I applaud the efforts of Codeweavers and hope that they are able to get full functionality very soon. While I would like to see Apple write a version of iTunes for Linux (in a way legitimizing the platform as a desktop alternative), this is certainly welcome and very impressive.

To everyone involved with this: Awesome job. Keep up the good work. Now if we could just get Apple and linux devs working together on more projects (khtml, for instance) perhaps we'll see a day where Apple software could be run on both Linux and Mac OS X ... and maybe Windows later on if they feel like recoding it ;)

Re:Nice and all. But....

[diamondsw]

Since it's running the Windows version of iTunes then yeah, it probably has the same requirements as iTunes always does. They wrote libraries to allow it to run; they didn't redesign iTunes itself.

Meanwhile, you do understand that Quicktime is performing all of the AAC/MP3 decoding, right? iTunes is wholy dependent on Quicktime to actually play the media.

Still, a very impressive achievement. The relative stability of the Win32 API could eventually be Microsoft's undoing.

Re:seriously, this is great news

[AstroDrabb]

I actually don't like iTunes. It sucks up tons of memory to just play some stinking music under WinXP. The UI is very bloated. I will say that I like the way the playlist is presented. Other then that, I like Rhythmbox much better. It is faster and uses less resources under Linux then iTuens under WinXP. This is on a P4 3.06GHz HT system with 1GB memory and fast ATA 133 drives. The iTunes UI still feels sluggish.

Why couldn't Linux user buy music before? I use Linux and WinXP and I have been able to walk into tons of music stores and buy music. I was never thrown out because I like Linux. As for buying online music, I have been able to use AllOfMP3 [allofmp3.com] under Linux with no problems. Oh, and AllOfMP3 charges $0.02 - $0.25 per songs depending on qulity vs. $0.99 for iTunes. AllOfMP3 sounds like a much better option for my money.

Re:Where is Apple in all of this?

[michaeldot]

and they had already ported Carbon to Windows.

Your reply is excellent, but when I came to this... whoa! Unless you know something I think this is quite misleading.

By all accounts, modern iTunes is a mix of Carbon, Cocoa, and QuickTime. The QuickTime API has been ported to Windows, but historically speaking Carbon consists of about 70% of the original Macintosh APIs, which have then been extended for modern OS X capabilities.

Carbon is in effect the procedural, lower level API interface to Mac OS X. The API you use when you aren't using Cocoa.

But for porting it to Windows, to say Apple had ported Carbon is misleading. What they probably have done is ported part of Cocoa's WebKit to render the iTunes store pages, and are possibly using QuickTime's API calls for the sound playback. I'm pretty sure the rest would be calling native Win32 APIs.

However, since a lot of the Win32 APIs are eerily similar to the original Macintosh, it might be truer to say that Microsoft ported Carbon when they first ripped off the Mac!