Spoken Like a Geek
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
The technology blog of Neil Thompson
Replacing iTunes with Something that Works
It is no secret that I am not a fan of iTunes. It is simply too big and slow in day to day use for those of us with large music collections. I am not alone is this dislike, a quick search on Google will reveal many people looking for replacements, and my friend Dirk has written once or twice on the very same subject.
For me, since moving my media collection to a centrally located server on my home network, iTunes has become unusable – I simply cannot get it to work reliably with the media held on a network server. There are lots of internet posts with people trying to get this scenario to work with mixed results. In the end I simply ran out of patience and looked for a solution that worked.
My quest was two fold – one was to find a way that suited me better for managing my music on my iPhone and iPods and secondly a better way to play my music. Clearly I had hoped to find this in a single package but in the end I found two.
The first is a free Windows application called CopyTransManager which, as the name suggests, allows me to manage media on my iPod and, crucially, my iPhone. There are a number of media managers out there but few of them seem to cater for the iPod Touch and IPhone which are different to the rest of the iPod line up in that they don’t mount their disk as an additional drive.
CopyTransManager is simplicity itself – you plug in your device, the media contained on that device is displayed (see screenshot below), you manage that device. However, it is different to iTunes in that you do not get a view of your media collection, only what is on your device. When you want to add tracks you browse for them using the standard File Open dialog, select them and then add. If all you are looking to do is add and remove files from your device then this is perfect. The other thing to note is that in order for CopyTransManager to work you need some components of iTunes so you may need to have it installed.
The second tool I use for my iTunes replacement is the superb Subsonic music streamer, which is available for free for Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix. At it’s simplest Subsonic is a browser based music streamer which has a number of advantages: no client software to install (server side only) and it will work anywhere – and I mean anywhere. I have been in Australia been able to open up a browser go to my Subsonic page and play my music! Even better is that Subsonic can have multiple “players” which you can then select in the browser interface. This means that you can be listening to different music from different browser in different locations.
Subsonic lets you browse and search your collection in a number of different way and allows you to add tracks to your playlist without affecting what is currently playing. It also allows you to select a random number of tracks to add to the playlist based on a set of parameters. It is a great experience. Those not wanting to use a browser can use the Adobe Air application (see screenshot below) which is smaller and doesn’t take up a precious browser tab.
Subsonic is perfect for those of us that have centrally located music collections, as opposed to storing them on a client machine, as you simply install and point Subsonic to you media and off it goes.
So it is (almost) goodbye to iTunes thanks to two great pieces of free software – what are you waiting for?
[...] wrote in my previous post about the really rather wonderful Subsonic and how it was part of my armoury in the battle to rid [...]