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Media (Apple) Media Operating Systems Software Windows Linux

Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support 271

Posted by timothy from the productive-of-sloth dept.
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."
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Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support More

Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support

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  • ...I really must say, Rhythmbox is junk. It does about a tenth of the things iTunes does. Besides, Linux users can now buy music. Awesome job, guys!
    • 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 t

    • but they're both iTunes clones if I understand right. Personally, what made juk so amazing for me was the ability to Sort, tag and move my collection all from one app. Dragging and dropping files to/from juk rocks. If iTunes under Linux can do that, I might be interested...

      Also, and I know this is kinda silly, but I like using less than perfect software sometimes because it's fun to watch it improve from version to version.

  • From your perspective, I'm sure... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lukewarmfusion ( 726141 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:05PM (#10846113) Homepage Journal
    "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.
  • Does it run as poorly as it does on Windows? Also, are you required to install the nagware called Quick Time? If not then how about a Windows port of Wine so I can run iTunes without QT or the performance problems?

  • Compatability? (Score:3, Funny)

    by physicsphairy ( 720718 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:07PM (#10846139)
    Will it run under cygwin? ;)

  • SyncPod (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrfibbi ( 695943 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:07PM (#10846147)
    get Syncpod (http://armin.emx.at/ipod/). Neat little perl script that syncs a directory of music and m3u playlists into the ipod. Works great for anyone who likes keeping music organized by directory and id3 tag and not by any particular program.
    • Good reference, I'm not sure why this is a big deal. There are so many GUI CD burning aplications on Linux (K3B, Arson, etc.), music players with library management (amaroK, RhythmBox, Zinf, Muine, etc.), and programs to sync with the iPod (as you mentioned). I suppose iTMS may be valued for some, but with the CD burning and audio not working well, it will be hard to listen to any tunes you buy from their outside of an iPod.
    • CrossOver Office Professional 4.0 - 2004/11/15

      New application support:

      Support for iTunes and iTMS. Limited iPod support; drivers for ripping
      are not supported.
      SyncPod + more burners than you can imagine + online music stores like besonic [besonic.de]


      Support for Adobe FrameMaker 7.1

      Support for QuickTime 6.5.2
      Reviewed plugin support: removed some, updated others

      Mplayer,xine,plugger, kmplayer etc....
      Application bug fixes:

      Office:

      Fixed a bug that was cau

  • Fantastic (Score:2, Funny)

    by spidereyes ( 599443 )
    although I'm a little concerned with how difficult this will be to get working how I'd like it. I have a Windows partition strictly for iTunes and I'd like to dump it and move on with life.

    Now if they just get Clippy support I'd be as happy as a pig in slop.

  • Usable or executable? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TimmyDee ( 713324 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:09PM (#10846165) Homepage Journal
    "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.
    • Wish I had mod points now. I was just going to reply and make the exact same comment.

      When some of the prime features of the software don't work, you can't exactly say the app is supported.

      But it is way cool that iTunes music store is working. Keep up the good work guys, but don't jump the gun on integration announcements.

    • Only on slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:34PM (#10846461)
      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).

  • Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:12PM (#10846199) Homepage
    "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?
  • i guess i will find out when i get home. it was neat to see itunes running in suse without the aid of vmware, but i could basically only get it to launch...beyond that it was either frozen or really slow...basically useless.

    but with their friendly upgrade policy i will be trying out 4.0 soon. they seem like a nice company. ahh, one day itunes will run flawlessly under linux, and that will be a GREAT day!

  • So let me get this straight... (Score:5, Funny)

    by mogrify ( 828588 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:14PM (#10846220) Homepage
    Hmmm... It plays music, and syncs with the iPod, but sound is tricky, and getting the iPod working is hard...

    Oh well, I guess you'd expect some problems with running an app designed for Mac on a Windows emulation layer on a Linux box -- come to think of it, it's amazing it works at all! Nice job guys.

  • Earlier news.com story... (Score:5, Informative)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:14PM (#10846231) Homepage Journal
    dated Aug 2 here [com.com]. Apparently the preview version has been available to CrossOver Office customers for a while.

  • Simuated iPod (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Nebulaeus ( 459722 )
    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'
    • Apple talks about a new way of sharing music, appealing to our sense of "karma" to encourage us not to steal. Yet they leave Plan9, FreeBSD, GEOS, and Amiga desktop users in the cold. This seems somewhat disingenuous to me.
    • I think Apple has been working hard to get people to move away from Linux and come [back] to the Mac.

    • Re:Simuated iPod (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Durandal64 ( 658649 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @05:06PM (#10846888)
      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?

  • Not ready for iTunes on my debian system yet (Score:4, Insightful)

    by m2bord ( 781676 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:35PM (#10846467) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Whole albums are cheaper than you can buy CD's for in stores or online (though not a huge amount cheaper in most cases).

      The real winning scenario is when you want just a few songs from an album. Then are you willing to pay 3-4x as much for a slightly better quality copy of the song? My answer has turned out to be "no way" - I now buy even whole albums just for the convienience and slight price advantage, while knowing the artists get a measurable amount of money from it (like 10 cents a song).
    • Well, gee. It sounds like MAYBE you might not be the target market for either: a) ITMS b) iTunes c) iPod d) Codeweaver's Crossover However, there are other people out here who: a) Like to listen to music using iTunes b) Want to use ITMS, and/or c) Own and iPod, and d) wish to use iTunes for at least one of the above items using Linux, with a minimum of further hassles. Sounds like this might be news for THEM, if not for YOU.

    • iPod Batteries (Score:3, Informative)

      by ZxCv ( 6138 )
      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.

      I think by now, anyone bitching that they "can't" replace an iPod battery is just looking for something to bitch about. Seems to me that there are more [ipodbattery.com] than one [apple.com] place to get replacement batteries [ipodresq.com] for the iPod, and it even only takes about 5 mins to do the replacement yourself.
  • Now how come iTunes can install and run Codeweavers Crossover 4.0, yet won't install on Win98SE/ME?

  • I say what??? (Score:3, Funny)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:39PM (#10846511)
    Finally I can use the single most important 'productivity' application on Linux.

    Someone's got their priorities seriously out of kilter here...

  • As an actual paying customer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by hab136 ( 30884 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:45PM (#10846582) Journal
    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.
    • OpenOffice 2 has better support for stuff like the text boxes and the wordart. Other than that I use oOO instead of Word/Excel.I use wine for Lotus Notes.

      Mind you OpenOffice 2 is still beta - but I haven't had any corruption or major issues yet.

  • Uh huh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Reality Master 101 ( 179095 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `101retsaMytilaeR'> on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @04:47PM (#10846611) Homepage Journal
    In other news, Linux is finally ready for the desktop!!

    Oh wait, it still doesn't run the apps that regular end-users want. Oh well.

    As an aside, I was reading a very funny Usenet discussion I had in *1996* (!!), where someone was saying that Linux was almost ready for the desktop, and I said (paraphrase), "I'll meet you back here in 10 years and I predict that we'll have an interesting Linux product, but it will lag behind the commercial market in critical ways."

    Only eight years later, but yup. An interesting product that still can't do what normal users want to do.

    (I'd post the real discussion -- it's pretty funny -- but it was under my real name, heh). You could cut and paste the discussion today and no one would know it was from 1996. It's hysterical.

    • Not all regular users use Itunes or have an Ipod. Just because an app that you use isn't on Linux doesn't mean it isn't ready for lots of other people.

      For me, Linux became a usable desktop the day KDE 1 became available.
  • Im STILL waiting to see some sort of support for sonys horrible NETMD minidisc protocol under linux. I know there has been some open source developments but it is still impossible to transfer files to the device under linux. I know that minidisc is nothing compared to ipod in terms of popularity - but Im still sure there are a lot of linux geeks using this portable audio medium.
    • Actually, I was about to buy a MD player instead of a Flash MP3 player until I found out Sony supports it under nothing but Windows. Shame, it's a really cool product (I think).

      I wrote Sony a comment letting them know they lost a potential buyer. The product did everything I needed, except not in OS X . . .
    • There were ongoing efforts [sourceforge.net] to create OSS support for NetMD players; of course, the protocol is ugly and convoluted, and Sony won't open it. Right now they support operations with tracks already available on the Minidisc, but no uploading, which kinda defeats the point.

      Anyway, i also wish Sony would get off their asses and give the MD a fair chance. The hardware is great, cheap, and the media is readily available.
  • 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thedbp ( 443047 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @05:24PM (#10847131)
    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 ;)
    • Has there been an attempt to get Apple to create an offical Linux version of iTunes? Any response from them?
  • Wine's cool and all, but I'm surprised no one's working on a "Wine" for Mac OSX applications.

    To me it would seem easier to port Mac software over to run on Linux thanks to OSX basically being Unix (yeah.. BSD, I know).

    Anyone heard of such a project yet?
  • "Codeweaver's Crossover 4.0 Adds iTunes Support", I'm very, very glad that I'm running Win4Lin [netraverse.com] instead as a Windows environment for Linux. (in my case, FC2)

    In Win4Lin, it's a surprise when applications don't run.

    I think I'll go download iTunes for Windows something soon.

    Anybody tried iTunes/Win on VMWare yet?

    • Wine, a ABI layer, and win4lin, a virtual machine, are 2 different animals..

      Its hard to farily compare them so caviler like you just did.

      • I agree completely. However, I was comparing functionality, not technology. By and large, Win4Lin Just Works. WINE/Codeweavers runs on the apps it's tuned for and that's about it. I understand WINE/Codeweavers work well on the apps they're tuned for... but the ones I need most don't run in it so when I looked for a Windows Linux environment, I decided to go on looking right after I found this out at the Codeweavers supported apps list.

        disclaimer: I am not an employee of Netraverse or any of its contractors

    • "[...]I'm running Win4Lin[...] think I'll go download iTunes for Windows something soon."

      Good luck getting a WinNT/XP program to run under Win4Lin. Last time I checked Win4Lin only supports Win9x/Me.

  • It works. (Score:3, Informative)

    by nbahi15 ( 163501 ) on Wednesday November 17, 2004 @07:17PM (#10848332) Homepage
    I have been using iTunes on Linux since the earliest betas. To be a little less cautious than Codeweavers it works well. It plays music, music shares work, iTMS works, iPod sync works. I would say that is is rock solid. What is annoying is the lack of CD support which is planned in an upcoming release. The only other hassle is they need to support the latest Windows Media Player so people that have WMA files can convert them to AAC or MP3.

    Please note the quote in the article from Codeweaver's is part of their REAL DIRT policy. They are cautious in making claims about the software working perfectly on every system, in every circumstance.
  • fairly serious warts...sound is tricky....

    ... but we think it is usable...

    I use iTunes for listening to music. Its all I use it for (syncing with my iPod is secondary - the end goal is still to listen to music). So if the sound is broken what is the point? I'm sure that technically it is a fine achievement but those statements say it all about the reasons widespread adoption of linux isn't taking place.

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