throw some bile at iTunes, iPhotos and frontrow.

n2k · 06-20-2006, 07:13 PM

I was so close to posting this in the "AMP v1.0 Worklog" thread but realized that it's probably a sore subject and it might steal the thread.

And if you read this aychamo, I just want to say KEEP UP THE GREAT JOB!

Am I the only mac owner that hates itunes, iphoto and every other application that apple makes that rely on there own meta data library instead of using the filesystem.

It works semi-ok if you have all you media conent on your local harddrive but if you have a storage server on the network it's just nasty crap! And OSX samba support is a feking joke

Frontrow must be coded by ten drunken monkeys, how can you make something so simple so insanly slow?

if you have more then 10 movies you'll end up waiting in the menu's more then watching the movies

I don't want to start a flame war here just want to see if there are anyone other then me that dislike the idea of itunes OWN you media files (or at least the ones it supports).

are there any good music/media players for mac that isn't itunes ?

aychamo · 06-20-2006, 07:38 PM

Hey there!

Yeah man, FrontRow seems really oddly slow sometimes. I think it has a lot of really nice, attractive flash, but a lot of it is just that, and isn't really functional.

Like, it's pretty cool how it will preview movies as you browse through them, but when I'm browsing through movies that are over a gig in size, I really don't need that. It seems almost wrong, to me, because you are giving the user information they didn't request. I didn't ask to see that movie. Why are you playing it? I didn't ask to see that photo album, I just want to browse past it, why are you showing me that photo?

Or even like if you have a folder in iPhoto of "sensitive" pictures, you can't even browse past it if your friends are there :-)

My app, AMP, currently imports from iPhoto & iTune's database. I may eventually drop the iTunes importing of the database and just get the metadata from the files. The problem is, that if there is no metadata in the files, I think that iTunes does a better job of helping me get what I need.

I couldn't do photo albums at all though, without iPhoto's database.

I've heard a lot of nightmares about keeping the database or your files or whatever on a non-local HD. Is your foreign server formatted with Mac's FS? Or is that even possible?

As for as non iTunes players, there is an "open source iTunes" out there called SongBird. It looks exactly like iTunes, but, it isn't iTunes. I don't know if it's any good or not though.

Thanks for the kind note

godraj · 06-21-2006, 03:07 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by n2k

I was so close to posting this in the "AMP v1.0 Worklog" thread but realized that it's probably a sore subject and it might steal the thread.

And if you read this aychamo, I just want to say KEEP UP THE GREAT JOB!

Am I the only mac owner that hates itunes, iphoto and every other application that apple makes that rely on there own meta data library instead of using the filesystem.

It works semi-ok if you have all you media conent on your local harddrive but if you have a storage server on the network it's just nasty crap! And OSX samba support is a feking joke

Frontrow must be coded by ten drunken monkeys, how can you make something so simple so insanly slow?

if you have more then 10 movies you'll end up waiting in the menu's more then watching the movies

I don't want to start a flame war here just want to see if there are anyone other then me that dislike the idea of itunes OWN you media files (or at least the ones it supports).

are there any good music/media players for mac that isn't itunes ?

No your not the only person that hate itunes and other ilife apps. I know lots of people that do, but I don't.

As far as Samba support, that has nothing to do with OS. It has purely to do with samba being a horrible protocol.

FrontRow is slow and is very annoying somtimes. That is something that def. should be looked at. But there are other meida centers out there for OS. Do a google search. Media central is one of them and I think Front Stage is another one.

Just out of curiousity are you PC guy or a Mac guy?

n2k · 06-21-2006, 03:46 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by aychamo

My app, AMP, currently imports from iPhoto & iTune's database. I may eventually drop the iTunes importing of the database and just get the metadata from the files. The problem is, that if there is no metadata in the files, I think that iTunes does a better job of helping me get what I need.

Thats one of the problem with the itunes monopoly.
users think the are keeping a nice organized media library. but they don't! it's just nice if you access it thru itunes.
thats why Frontrow needs to open itunes just to list some files. and if your not using itunes with you program users get annoyed because they have to reorganize there library in your progam.

One really cool thing would be a kernel driver that makes a virtual disk out of your organized library and you just change tags by moving the files betwen folders. then any program could use it without special code and the users could easy find there files if they want to use it for something else then playing in itunes.

Quote: Originally Posted by aychamo

As for as non iTunes players, there is an "open source iTunes" out there called SongBird. It looks exactly like iTunes, but, it isn't iTunes. I don't know if it's any good or not though.

at the moment it sucks. slow as a dead donkey and windows only.

Quote: Originally Posted by godraj

As far as Samba support, that has nothing to do with OS. It has purely to do with samba being a horrible protocol.

OSX own implemantation of Samba 3.0 is crap. they've left all lot of stuff out.
but there is a lot third pary apps that deal with this.

Quote: Originally Posted by godraj

FrontRow is slow and is very annoying somtimes. That is something that def. should be looked at. But there are other meida centers out there for OS. Do a google search. Media central is one of them and I think Front Stage is another one.

Tried them all, the all have there cons... Media central works best but lacks real subtitle support.

Quote: Originally Posted by godraj

Just out of curiousity are you PC guy or a Mac guy?

Linux/windows guy trying enormously hard to use my mac. You could probably guess that. If I'd been a true mactaliban I wouldn't have sad anything bad about the current version of OSX until apple released an update.

godraj · 06-21-2006, 04:45 PM

Quote: Originally Posted by n2k

Linux/windows guy trying enormously hard to use my mac. You could probably guess that. If I'd been a true mactaliban I wouldn't have sad anything bad about the current version of OSX until apple released an update.

LOL. If your trying hard to use a mac then your doing something wrong.

I wasn't a big fan of any of the media centers. They are all very slow. But I don't really use Front row in the car either. I just have itunes running in the background while GPS is the main window; so I never really had any complaints.

I used coverflow temporarily, which really just shows u album covers and you scroll through them until you get to what you want. But it's hard to use with touch screen.

aychamo · 06-21-2006, 04:58 PM

Hey what GPS combo are you using?

godraj · 06-21-2006, 05:34 PM

BU-353 with copilot on vpc. It works 100% when vpc is reliable, which is not so often. I just bought intel mini, I'm going to test it out when I get it with parallels. But so far parallels seems much more reliable than vpc.

Sharkbite86 · 06-22-2006, 12:28 PM

yeah im pretty much a devout mac user and i find front row very slow (and the loading of movies is very annoying). I think the concept is awesome but it needs a lot of work and apple needs to *shock!* learn from other people. One thing i have always thought was better on Windows was the fact that you can customize what apps and sub level OS stuff to load at startup. The Mac cannot do this at all, and i think it would be a great thing to have in the OS cuz the people could speed up thier system if only just slightly buy not loading so much crap.

videonerd · 06-23-2006, 01:04 AM

Like nLite for Windows? Maybe when someone comes out with something like recompile-Kernel-for-dummies to speed things up for your specific machine. But otherwise, Mac OS X still allows you to have startup applications, though Unix processes require a good knowledge of Unix to start killing 'em off.

Ultimately, you don't even need to boot up with the Mac GUI with OS X. You can even kill that at startup, so you get left with the Unix prompt.

Sharkbite86 · 06-23-2006, 01:08 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by videonerd

Ultimately, you don't even need to boot up with the Mac GUI with OS X. You can even kill that at startup, so you get left with the Unix prompt.

Whoa could i play games from there? does it load all the necessary stuff to play games and the like?

parksgm · 07-04-2006, 12:55 AM

Quote: Originally Posted by Sharkbite86

One thing i have always thought was better on Windows was the fact that you can customize what apps and sub level OS stuff to load at startup. The Mac cannot do this at all, and i think it would be a great thing to have in the OS cuz the people could speed up thier system if only just slightly buy not loading so much crap.

OS X can do it, you just have to work a bit harder at it, like videonerd said.