[koyote]

Oh my god I completely forgot about RealPlayer.

Luckily there was an alternative, Real Alternative, that enabled you to play the content without having to install that ghastly RealPlayer. It seems like the community always finds a way around crappy software.

[mhb]

What's the community using instead of iTunes?

[munificent]

YouTube, Spotify, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, et. al.

[click170]

Those just aren't sufficient IMO.

I like being able to listen to music when I have no internet connection.

I like being able to listen to something when the original was taken down.

I like being able to listen to something that the vendor no longer offers.

I like having smart playlists in my library and on my devices that automatically update themselves based on meta data such as what I've played recently.

Unfortunately I like being able to use my music program on an operating system of my choosing as well, and am looking for an iTunes replacement. But then replacement can't be worse than the original. That's a deal breaker.

[tschuy]

Spotify premium, uploading anything they don't have, and using Offline Mode?

[daveid]

Buy CDs, rip them, and listen to it on any player you like. Or when an artist does not release CDs, they usually at least have a Bandcamp where they offer FLAC downloads, DRM-free.

[derekp7]

Isn't most of the music purchases on Amazon DRM-free? And downloadable in regular MP3's with a standard web browser? It's been a while since the last time I acquired any music.

[javert]

Yes. I purchase Amazon MP3s and play them on Linux. I like actually owning my music as good old-fashioned files. Highly recommended.

Amazon doesn't just provide a link to the files once you purchase them, there is a downloader client. I have never tried the official one, there is an open-source command line alternative called "clamz" that works perfectly.

[kissickas]

Have you tried Google Play Music? You can start by uploading 20,000 songs that you already own and just sync them to your phones/computers for offline listening.

[antihero]

Other than smart playlists, your requirements describe pretty much any media player released in god knows how long.

Personally I usually have an internet connection except on the train, so I use a Subsonic server, and my Android Subsonic client is set to aggressively precache my playlist (so it plays happily through tunnels, even if the tunnel lasts 10+ songs).

[AndyKelley]

Have you tried groove basin? It satisfies your requirements except for smart playlists. But that feature is planned :-)

[unicornporn]

Won't fit all of your criteria, but foobar2000 is wonderful. Works well under wine in OS X.

[munificent]

Maybe not for you, but the original question was what do other people use.

[Sami_Lehtinen]

GrooveShark Exellent HTML5 app. No installation required. I deeply hate Spotify and Itunes.

[hengheng]

foobar2000 and GoneMad Music Player? Dunno, I'm that propeller hat guy who carries his music around in Opus Format on his Android ...

[voltagex_]

What's Opus like for day-to-day use? Do you notice any battery hit on Android from it being decoded in software? (assuming AAC is done in hardware - could be wrong)

What kind of quality/filesize do you use? If I'm used to ~170kbit VBR AAC/MP3 for headphone use, what settings would I need for Opus?

[hengheng]

No significant battery hit, I really don't care. There is an ARM-optimized version of libopus that seems to use vector operations, I don't think it gets much better than that.

I'm using 72-96 kbit/s as bitrates, I've been playing around with that actually. 72 kbit is too little sometimes, 80 is fine, 96 is safe. Encoding is done in foobar2000, copy everything into a playlist, right click -> encode. My archive structure is this: At the top, there is one folder "Lossless", one folder "Lossy", each with subfolders for artist and album. foobar2000 and any other players syndicate their library from both folders.

I have separate versions of my music archive on my laptop and on my phone, each of which are complete. For the laptop, Lossless gets converted to Opus, Lossy remains the same, folders get merged. On the phone and tablet with tighter space constraints, I just re-encode everything to opus and merge. I won't notice the artefacts of re-encoding MP3 to Opus when there's a train humming in the background and people talking.

My best headphones for use with my phone are the 50€ Shure earphones. I also have some large open headphones from Thomann. Both are kinda good, but not studio quality good, so some details will escape me. I could maybe find some differences between Flac and Opus in some recordings if I tried very hard, but frankly I hate paying attention to audio quality. It's a very draining task that I restrict to comparing amplifiers/DACs and speaker setups, and I'll always use Flac for that anyways.

[voltagex_]

Just tried a few encodes: to my poor ears, 64kbit Opus is fine on headphones!

[jlarocco]

I use Clementine on Linux, and sometimes on my Mac.

It handles more formats than iTunes (FLAC and OGG, maybe others), and the interface is okay, but not as polished as iTunes.

I haven't used it to add or remove music from my iPhone on either platform, but the Linux version can play music from the phone, so maybe it works.

[zaroth]

> the interface is ok, but not as polished as iTunes

Is 'polished' some kind of euphemism in this context that I'm just missing? The last time I tried to simply copy an MP3 from my laptop to my wife's iPhone I wasted almost an hour wading through nonsense errors, online tutorials, and absurd UI before I decided it's actually impossible to copy/paste an MP3 through iTunes and downloaded a standalone free player so I could load the file to the phone through the browser.

I don't own a lot of music, I don't have a library of albums, just a folder of files I wanted to copy/paste.

[leo_santagada]

I think you were doing something wrong, it is supposed to take less than a minute.

[dandroid1]

Google Play Music

[maaku]

What's crappy about iTunes?

[JohnTHaller]

On Windows it's incredibly bloated and has really bad UI design. Apple always used to trick people into installing Safari and Quicktime bundleware-style during updates as well. (Source: Every computer I've maintained over the years and asked the owner 'why did you install Safari' and the answer is always 'I guess iTunes did it')

[yuhong]

I believe iTunes formerly required QuickTime.

[JohnTHaller]

It did years ago, but hasn't in a while. Since then, Apple Update would pre-select to install Quicktime and Safari when you updated iTunes unless you purposely unchecked them each time.

[lukifer]

Speaking from personal experience on Yosemite: slow UI, constant beachballs and stutters (despite lots of RAM and no platter drives), paint/refresh bugs while scrolling, 100% CPU usage to play tracks (without FX/EQ), years of mission-creep, and a general conceptual mess since version 12, with its multiplicity of modes and sub-modes.

As an iTunes apologist and power-user since 1.0 (my huge library admittedly is not helping), 12 has become the last straw on using iTunes as anything but a sync tool and database. As a media player, it's a disaster.

[username223]

> paint/refresh bugs while scrolling,

Good to know I'm not the only one. I've become used to scrubbing the pointer up and down over the list of podcasts until the part I'm looking at is legible, and plugging my iPod in twice to get it to show up. But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups. At least it doesn't have enormous memory leaks, like Safari and Keynote, which regularly beachball my poor laptop with "only" 4GB of RAM long enough to go make a cup of coffee.

[gurkendoktor]

> But IMO iTunes is actually one of the less-bad recent Apple software screw-ups

I would argue the peak in bug severity was 11.0, which randomly deleted podcasts: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5324634?tstart=0

For me that meant 30 GB of podcasts gone, most of which I can't download again (publisher went broke, original download required payments etc.) Sigh. I used to be a big fan of iTunes as well.

[username223]

Podcasts used to be simple: follow an RSS feed, download the audio files, listen to them, delete them when you're done. Now they're "cloud," so your computer is just a cache, and God only knows when you have those files, or when some program lets you use them.

[lukifer]

This one bit me too, and I was/am livid that an assumption would be made that user data is merely an expired cache to be deleted without warning.

[psychometry]

I don't think iTunes is bloated, per se. I'm actually on an older version because they're removed useful features in 11 and 12 and there's no way to extend the program.

The bloat is probably integration with the store. That should be split into a separate program and iTunes should just be a music library manager. Of course, that won't happen since not many people care about having a persistent music library any more.

[gurkendoktor]

You could also move iOS device sync out of iTunes. It doesn't even make sense that we use iTunes to sync content that comes from iPhoto.app, it might just as well be a core OS feature. After all, we have Handoff etc. built into OS X now...

[TaylorAlexander]

For me, no linux support is an issue. But then, I have plenty of options for open source media players so I don't particularly need iTunes.

[rttlesnke]

Mostly, no Linux support. I really want an open iTunes alternative which runs on Linux or any Unix, and can re-encode my entire music library with the codec/bitrate I want, while retaining music metadata. iTunes is good at that. Opus/Ogg support would be great. Anyone know of something like this?

[lozf]

You might like Clementine[1] it seems quite popular as an all-in-one music manager... though I usually use either `opusenc` or `fdkaac` via `ffmpeg` for transcoding with intact metadata.

[1] https://www.clementine-player.org/about

[72deluxe]

The UI ignores all the guidelines Apple sets and they redesign it every release from what I can tell? All the other applications on OSX have sensible close/minimise/zoom buttons on a titlebar but iTunes has long ignored that, with no obvious titlebar to move the window. Now that everything is bundled into the space where the titlebar should be, how do you move it without risk of clicking on something else?

Additionally, it is a LARGE application just for playing audio. I know that it does other things too but it seems to have outgrown its original purpose? There is now a crossover between iTunes and the App Store on Mac, from what I can tell? I wonder why they don't merge.

Having said that, I like the glaring red icon they now use (not sure why they changed from blue though!)

[deathanatos]

> What's crappy about iTunes?

In addition to what other have said:

  * no support for FLAC, OGG, WMA(?)
  * I don't _think_ there's support for ReplayGain.
  * Frankly, I just find the UI hard to manage.
  * _any_ marginally advanced feature.[1]

[1]: (I "DJ" for dancers) fade outs, volume changes in actual decibels (the volume bar is completely unlabeled), simple one time gain even if it results in clipping (quality matters none if you can't hear it), stop after current song, don't trust duration metadata or guesswork (I have MP3s that completely break the seek bar), start song from an index that isn't 0:00…

[username]

It's extremely bloated.

[GFK_of_xmaspast]

Not that I've ever noticed (my work computer runs linux, and I've found the music players there are, at best, barely useable in terms of what I want) (banshee's the best, but it's RNG is total garbage)

[iloveyouocean]

Enqueue (available on Apple App Store) - simple, powerful interface, automatically finds/adds music to your library, support for many formats including FLAC

[normloman]

Torrents

[debaserab2]

Spotify?

[Max_Mustermann]

I use winamp, ample customization and plenty of plug-ins with good performance on my largish (~8k items) library.

[r0s]

Private media collection.

[yitchelle]

Go old school and use the FM radio. I mean the physical item.

[logn]

Tomahawk on linux is the best I've found.

[aswanson]

VLC media player.

[stefantalpalaru]

http://deadbeef.sourceforge.net/

[krschultz]

Android?

[72deluxe]

What was the RealPlayer they introduced for Linux called again? Gold something or other? I have a vague memory about that, as I installed it (RedHat 7.0??) and then realised I didn't actually need it as I didn't watch any RM content.

[ccozan]

I think it was Helix Player? My memory is also not clear.

[72deluxe]

Ahh that's the one! Thanks! I really don't miss that, although it did feature curved edges to the window. Shaped windows were all the rage at one point but thankfully we've all gone back to Rectangle Land.