alternatives to iTunes on Mac?

more dumb moves:

• Lack of proper Shuffle function and an obvious way to turn it off!
• play list position isn't remembered in many views

PeterBreis0807 wrote:

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/38791/swinsian My first choice.

Thank you for that suggestion (Swinsian). It looks very promising. Vox seem to have gone the drain so skipping that and the other media players are not really complementing iTunes very well.

Swinsian is now on my drive. I'll let you now if I bought it ($19.95 seems very reasonable).

I've since bought Swinsian for $19.95 and I'm a satisfied customer. While it isn't perfect it's superior to iTunes for music consumption as well as library handling. I have a large library also with lossless files in various formats, both originating from my CD and Vinyl collections as well newly bought stuff, usually from outside of iTMS. My older library is on a separate disc and despite a 1TB drive I have yet to find space for it.

Swinsian allows me to mount the external drive, which I do via Newtech Voyager Q (Firewire), and I can use the external library side by side with my internal library. This is big! I still use iTunes for syncing to my devices (Swinsian only handle older devices, which is a feature if you have those) and so I add all new files to iTunes automatically with the help of Hazel (great app) and when I open Swinsian it reads both library files of iTunes so my library is in sync.

The only sad side is that because Apple doesn't open for easy input back, except for via tags, ratings I make in Swinsian doesn't make it back to iTunes. I'm contemplating an applescript for that. I'm also looking at translating my fav applescripts for tag handling, but I could of course use iTunes when I want to use those.

I feel now nothing is between me and music, just as iTunes supplied before version 11, and I'm a big fan of Swinsian. Check it out if you want something more than iTunes.

Aquilae75 wrote:

The inability to manually delete tracks from playlists

The inability to delete all references to previously played podcasts, although the physical file may be deleted, it still appears in the list.

You don't say what version of iTunes this is, but this hardly normal behavior. I don't see it in iTunes 11.4.

Aquilae75 wrote:

can you easily create playlists and manually add and delete music or podcast tracks from those playlists?

You can of course create, edit and delete playlists in Swinsian, though I only do podcasts in IOS-devices and never sync these. Furthermore the function to read not only iTunes playlists from the iTunes Libraries used — which is currently possible — but also smart playlists as new smart playlists in Swinsian is under development. Currently smart playlists are converted to regular ones, which is hardly desirable if you must keep using iTunes for syncing.

Tracy Reynolds wrote:

I'm still using OSX 10.6 with no problems!

I did too up until december 2013, when too many hardware makers stopped supporting 32bit kernel modes (Lion is the latest OS X that can do 32bit) and Oracle's new java versions required 64bit OS (I'm a musician and java developer).

PeterVL57 wrote:

Does Swinsian support the Apple Lossless-format ?

Of course, Swinsian "supports Flac, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, WAV, Opus, AC3, AIFF and APE" and in addition Apple Lossless. I'll ask the developer to put that in there.