Mac music
 

Does anyone know of a good music alternative to iTunes? I keep running into problems. Napster and morpheus are incompatible, rhapsody never ran properly, etc... Thanks in advance for any help.

The only thing I've seen that's in active development is Songbird. It's almost a direct clone of iTunes, but with a larger choice of music stores in the left pane. It's also slow.

Panic software had a good MP3 player a while back, it almost ended up being iTunes. They have a good story posted at their website about that.

There are a few good MP3 players for OS X, but I haven't found any combination music player/music library applications other than Songbird.

"Problems"? iTunes is pretty much the standard. If you explain what your problems are, we might be able to fix them for you.

This may be more suited to Tilted Computers. All the same.

I checked with one of my Mac guys, because I wanted to be sure of this before I posted it, but the new Mac OS versions (OSX) are all based off of a hybrid of BSD and Gentoo. I knew that without double-checking; what I wasn't sure of was the capabilities of OSX. Basically any media player and/or download software for Linux ought to work fine under OSX, although it may require a little more setup than the Mac native stuff. If you're looking for downloads and don't care about the legality of it, there are about eight thousand different bittorrent clients to be had out there; if it's playback that you need, you can grab something like XMMS. He suggested sourceforge.net as a good place to start.

Just on the topic of Linux stuff on a Mac - it depends on whether you've got a PPC or Intel mac, and what the software in question is compiled for. You can run _unix_ programs with no problems. What's causing you grief with Apple's offering?

Hence what I said about a bit more setup being necessary. If one has to download a couple libraries off sourceforge, start with the source and compile oneself, that would be a bit more difficult than what I assume the typical Mac installation is. I don't actually know; Mac's really aren't my thing.

Even so, make isn't really all that tough to master.

EDIT - Down, techie, down! The technical discussion, of course, needs to take a back seat to the issue at hand. See hulk's question. What's the issue?

I've been using Mediamonkey ( http://www.mediamonkey.com/ ). It has a similar interface to itunes, but infinitely better file management. Frankly, I was disgusted with how badly itunes handled my music library. Mediamonkey has a slew of other options and features that put itunes to shame.

Then again, I'm on a windows machine; I'm not sure if there is a version for mac available