As you may guess, I run a mac. On the Macintosh, there really is only one music player in town: iTunes. Granted, there’s plenty others that will play music, but none that will manage it. I have enough music to make this a real issue. On Windows, there’s WMP, WinAmp, Foobar2000, and others I’m sure I’m missing. On Mac, there’s… iTunes.

iTunes follows the traditional 90/10 rule of most things Apple: do 90% of everything perfectly, and utterly fail at the last 10%. In this case, it fails at complex library management. Perhaps I’m setting the bar too high here, but Apple’s software is unable to intelligently re-build its library, based on changes to the library directory. For instance: Chip finds some music licensed under Creative Commons, and uploads it to me, directly into my music directory. On just about all the other players I’ve seen, I’m able to either re-index the music directory automagically, or even cooler, the player detects a delta between the current library index and what it sees in the directory, and rebuilds (Hello, Amarok!). As far as I can tell, iTunes does not do this. To add to the mess, on trying to import my library into iTunes fresh, it actually makes iTunes seize up about halfway through. This is rather unacceptable.

Also, it appears that it doesn’t include music that it can play but lacks metadata on. The very excellent band Everybody Else’s CD is one that I ripped to FLAC. Now, when I want to listen to them, I have to load up VLC. It’s not that I mind VLC so much, but it leaves something to be desired when working through my media collection.

My solution: once I’ve the time, hopefully I can whip up something resembling a media player for MacOS. I might, if persuaded, make it work cross-platform, but I don’t care too much about Windows, and the perfect media player already exists under Linux.

Categories: Geeky Peawee