Replacing ITunes

Before reading this post, there are few things you should know…

1. You can run a working ITunes installation under Wine; provided, it’s installed properly (i.e. Wine maps your IPod and CD drives correctly and you installed QuickTime before installing ITunes).
2. Apple will most likely not create a native version of ITunes for Linux.
3. Using P2P networks to exchange copyrighted material is not okay. You should pay for multimedia content, including books, films, and music.

Why I Don’t Like ITunes

ITunes is a wonderful concept for purchasing content. Unfortunately, it locks the users into Apple’s approved file formats and to Apple devices. Both of these are problematic. By forcing users to use a particular file format, Apple is supporting one technology over another. Because of their market share, this is an anti-competitive business practice. It means that file formats, such as ogg and flac, are less supported and less competitive with other formats such as mp3. Please note, some computer companies may have financial stakes in file formats. Supporting a particular format through their online retailer is one way of obtaining market dominance for their file format. (And yes, Apple appears to be one of the companies that uses this business model. They do have a vested financial interest in .aac, .mp4, and .m4a.) As a consumer, you should be concerned by this. This company is selling you music in formats that may or may not have a higher quality than other formats. You should control the quality of your music files. Not Apple!

My ITunes/IPod Solution

I do have an IPod, and I have made purchases from ITunes. (Most of those were made before Amazon.com began selling MP3s.) My IPod is a first generation nano. It runs Rockbox. Rockbox adds support for other file formats including .ogg and .flac. Unfortunately, Apple changed their firmware. The newer IPods, IPhones, and IPod Touches all use encrypted firmware. There are ways around it, but they aren’t for the faint hearted and rockbox doesn’t work on most newer models. Here’s the trick. ITunes writes all its music into a hidden file directories with meaningless file names. Rockbox turns my IPod into a generic mp3 player. The file directories are now human readable. Adding files is a simple drag and drop. Alternatively, I can sync my music using either Amarok or Banshee. To date, I’ve tried ten different music managers, including RhythmBox, gtkpod, and SongBird. Amarok and Banshee are the only two I’ve liked. All the others were either too difficult to use, didn’t recognize my IPod as a generic MP3 player, or were too immature.

About All That Music I Bought From ITunes

When I purchase music online, the first thing I do is burn it to a playable music CD. Then, I backup the files for good measure. I simply took my ITunes music CD collection and put them in my Ubuntu box’s cd player. Then, I used Audio CD Extractor to convert my CD collection into .ogg files. Unfortunately, my pretty little .ogg files are tagless, but not for long. Using Jaikoz, I tagged most of my files. I also created a master record of my ITunes song tags. Then, I listened to the songs without tags, found them on my master list, and typed the tags in. Note: Jaikoz had no problems finding tags for popular songs. My obscure classical collection was a different matter. Overall, I’m very happy with the transition away from ITunes dependency. So far, it hasn’t been as painful as I thought it would be. There are programs available that strip DRM from ITunes purchases. I’ve tested these. In my opinion, using real CDs instead of a virtual CD burner or recording music from the sound card produces a better quality file. Plus, using real CDs is more legit. If you like any of the open source software mentioned in this post, please consider contributing to the project. There are many ways to contribute including coding, testing, documenting, and sending money.

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