For OSX VLC is a surprisingly good player for music and it supports FLAC.
However I'm quite interested in building a dedicated OSS music player node/electron for OSX (and windows eventually).
iTunes will never work well
41–50 of 379 posts
Re: iTunes will never work well
#42I've switched to using Plex now, I find iTunes and the Music app way to complicated to use and constantly throwing up dialog boxes when all I want to do is listen to some music. I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different.
> I've never truly understood how the people who gave us Safari and OS X gave us iTunes - they couldn't be more different. They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently. But regardless of the details the end result is very often as you describe, and it's odd…
> They're almost certainly from completely separate teams, I've always heard that Apple operates like a bunch of disconnected groups that rarely ever interact with each other, perhaps that has changed recently.
Every company of non-trivial size operates like that.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#43iTunes circa 2008 was amazing. Like so many things, once they unified the bIOs and desktop OS code bases and technologies everything went to shit.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#44Wait, you can star-rating AND heart songs? Why? Why both?
I think the heart is new while the star-ratings have always been there.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#45People always bash iTunes, but I actually use it quite often and I like it. Maybe it's just me though? The only thing that bugs me, is on iOS, when I load the music app (that's basically iTunes for iOS, right?) it shows a blank page until it can connect to the their servers to grab some data. It doesn't have a problem if I'm on wifi or a fast connection, but I'm often in places where my service is shit, and I get a w…
That must-connect-to-server-before-I-show-you-your-LOCAL!-files has really pushed me over the edge. Infuriating! I've been trying out some replacment music apps, but haven't really found any great alternatives at this point. I guess the whole thing will sort itself out when I switch to android in the next few months.
Someone around here put it best a few wks ago in an iPhone7 discussion: Steve Jobs is dead.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#46i don't understand how apple have a reputation for good ui... all of their stuff is terrible. the main problem: zero discoverablity - i need to google how to do things, then get some snotty fanboy answer about how easy and obvious it is, but there is literally no way to infer the functionality from the design. they do love to steal context too... and interrupt your flow... ... i could go on and on, but having zero-di…
> all of their stuff is terrible.
As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.
One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.
That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)
Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.
Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)
I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#47Unfortunately iTunes is still better than the competition. I also know that isn't saying much.
RIP Rdio, Lala, and countless others. Hell even Beats was better!
Re: iTunes will never work well
#48"Spotify" just switch now and never look back
Re: iTunes will never work well
#49"Spotify" just switch now and never look back
Absolutely agree. It just doesn't work well for music I own that isn't on Spotify.
Re: iTunes will never work well
#50I've grown very fond of a CLI media player named cmus. It's lightning fast and does everything I need with a simple interface http://matthieukeller.com/media/2015.01/2015.01.cmus.png I also keep aliases in my .bash_profile for streams like this: alias bbc='/Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC --quiet -Idummy http://bbcwssc.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcwssc_mp1_ws-eieuk 2> /dev/null'
That's awesome. Do you have any others??