I never liked iTunes. I don’t like applications that think they know better than me how to organize my data, and I don’t like applications that sprawl out and take up ate least one full monitor with their screen-shit. Creating new playlists from tunes iTunes already knows about almost required 3 fucking screens. And I don’t like apps that by default really want to “organize” (move or delete) your music-file resources.
Audion (a nice Mac-native app) crashes too often and the equalizer is buried deep in the “Console”, an ugly sprawling thing that always annoys me. And it doesn’t play individual files, so to play a single .MP3 file yo have to create a playlist containing it.
X11 environment, and Fink, has introduced me to xmms.
xmms lets me play indiv tracks. It lets me create playlists. It’s minimalistic, doesn’t act like it’s smarter than I am, and except for an annoying glitch when saving playlists (don’t forget to designate a format or else put an extension on your playlist name), is solid.
xmms is attractive. It has skins but I’m fine with the default. It cascades, one tiny window for basic controls + track info + ID3 field editing, one for “playlist editor” (dynamically shows all tracks with current track highlighted, save playlist, load playlsit), and one for equalizer.
I’ve gone Audion since abandoning hope for SoundApp making an OS X appearance, but never fully satisfied with it (most of it consisted of “I can use it and at least it isn’t fucking iTiunes”), but on initial experimentation, Audion is in serious danger of replacement by xmms. This woud be my second X11 app that genuinely supplants existing Aqual alls, the first being iChat (great IRC client).
I like having some X11 apps that actually beat out the competition and rule as best in class!
And a Mac geek learns why Unix people roll their eyes when Mac geeks act like their platform has a lock on attractive, usable UIs.
Welcome to the Unix family.
For people who are confused, X11 is a way to refer to the 11th version of X, a protocol and API that allows programs to put pixels on a screen, any screen they can talk to. The program could be running on a mainframe in Boulder, Colorado and painting pixels on a screen hooked up to a PC in Tokyo, Japan. X11 has been implemented many times on many systems, but these days the dominant implementation is X.org.
There are a whole assload (that’s a technical term, yes ;)) of programs that have been written to the X11 API, just like there are a whole assload of programs that have been written to the various Windows APIs and the various MacOS APIs. xmms is a specific program that has been written to the X11 API, and it plays music. It also has a very low-profile UI and other attractive features, as AHunter3 has found out.
I used Audion for a long time and I don’t think it ever crashed on me. I also don’t remember having to create a playlist just to play a single file. IIRC, you can play anything by dragging it onto the player from the Finder.
I believe it was Steve Jobs who said 10-15 years ago that X-Windows was braindead and would be gone in ten years.
He was half-right.*
I do believe that the selection of free software for X-Windows far surpasses (in quality) that of any other graphical environment ever, although I loved the quirky little apps I used to find for OS/2. But I always thought it was an unstable and crufty GUI on its own.
Does xmms still fuck up when you try to minimise it (i.e. when you have a tiny bar clamped to the top of the screen)? That always used to drive me nuts, that and the absolutely hideous “Save playlist” dialogue box.
Not sure what you’re talking about re: problems with minimizing. My copy minimizes windowshade-style. Why would that drive you nuts, and how else would you want it to behave?
In the standard Apple X11, the “Save playlist” dialogue box looks like pretty much any other Macintosh “Save…” dialogue box. I happen to be running a Classic Platinum theme (yes, I"m a Mac user who hates Aqua) so mine looks like this.
I have XFree86 using WindowMaker on my other (10.2.8) partition, but I haven’t compiled xmmx there. But I’d think the dialog would take on the appearance of the standard dialog of whatever window manager you’re using, since it uses the standard one in Apple’s X11, yes?
The save dialog and its appearance are provided by GTK+. It has nothing to do with your “theme” (I thought OS X didn’t have themes?!), X, or your window manager, and the fact that it looks somewhat like Platinum is a coincidence (as far as I know). You can modify its appearance by changing your GTK+ theme. (Note that XMMS is written for GTK+ version 1.x, which is faster but uglier than version 2.x. For a version that uses GTK+ 2.x, see the fork known as Beep Media Player.)
Whenever I tried to maximise xmms from the “windowshade style” minised state it would leave its anchored position. Sometimes it would just move a bit, other times it would move off the edge of the desktop completely.
I used to use Suse Linux and KDE. The Save dialogue box used to look hideous (like someone with absolutely no notion of aesthetics had designed it). It looked nothing like the rest of KDE, so I have no idea where it came from.
I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Certainly the windows and widgets of Apple X11 draw directly upon the same resources that Aqua uses, and patching them for Aqua created a Platinum appearance for windows and widgets in X11 generically, so unless this one program is drawing its own stuff (a few apps do) rather than calling the standard “draw me one of those sorts of windows” routines, it’s very much a product of the Classic Platinum theme.
(Themes under OS X are 3rd-party, but they exist)
OK, you’ve got me sufficiently curious that I think I’ll crank up XFree86 and compile xmms just to see how it looks!
Not to be rude, but I’m pretty sure you have no idea what you are talking about. Rather than argue with you, here is a screenshot of that dialog on my computer running Debian Linux with the default GTK±1.x theme; you can judge for yourself whether your theming made any difference.
Still looks like a fairly normal and inoffensive dialog box to me, but no you’re right, it’s not Platinum, it is its own beast. (the scrollbars should’ve clued me in!).
No, they started out independent. AOL bought them, along with Winamp, around June 1999 (according to Wikipedia). For a period of time, AOL (the service), Netscape (also owned by AOL), and Winamp were all cross-promoting one another.
Do I remember wrong? I remember using Winamp in 2002 or, shit, 2004 without any mention of AOL. I came back to San Diego from my short military stint in late 2005 and was shocked by the AOL logos everywhere on the Winamp website. Were they just less obvious about it before?
