I read the title and thought "Apple". Everything about the company smells of evil, and I am reminded of this every morning when I need to download my news podcasts for the road; I have always copied and pasted audio files into every MP3 player I owned, but with the iPod, I need to launch the horrible iTunes and drag programs into my iPod. Should I plug my device into any other computer with iTunes, it would attempt to reset its memory and initialize it for this other iTunes :-/
Congratulations, you're one of the %0.1 of people that wants to manually copy files from your manually-organized arbitrary directory structure onto your music player's filesystem. To support that, the player has to index all the files itself when it boots up, which is why the old Nomad took minutes to be ready to hit play.
Everyone else uses a database-backed program that automatically organizes their collection (iTunes), and expects to synchronize from that database to their device. If you weren't so set on doing things the way you did them in 1998, you'd be fine with iTunes — it can automatically download the podcast files, and synchronize that playlist when you plug in the device to charge it.
I'd wager more than %0.1 of the people would like to be able to get stuff from the player to the computer rather than only the other way around, for example, and more than %0.1 just find iTunes a pretty lame and hard to use product, regardless of file/DB model.
BTW, maybe I'm missing something here but shouldn't it be possible to keep an index on the device and just update it when files are added/deleted?
You can blame the record companies for that particular problem. It's not like Apple hasn't been dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century for years now. Letting you copy stuff from an iPod to a computer would just "encourage piracy."
iTunes is fairly jacked if you want to use it in any way besides "syncing your iphone". Try using it to point to your remote library on a shared file system. Immediately it tries to copy that whole file system into your local computer ..
A number of programs do this. In iTunes on OSX open up preferences, go to the advanced tab and half way down is the option "[x] Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library"
Yeah, it's enabled by default but I'm pretty sure it's the correct behavior for most people.
0.1% of what population? Anyone who uses P2P music sharing is going to store their music in a manually-organized directory structure by necessity, and as a result, will have few problems dragging and dropping the root music directory into another one.
I don't even want to think how long it would take to tag 4,000 albums properly either. This fear alone keeps me away from database-backed music systems.
It will take the data from your MP3 Directory structure - lets say something like Artist/Album/song -- and automatically generate the correct tags for you.
Why does a manual directory structure require indexing? Directories ARE indexes. All the player needs to do is give you a file browser, which starts at the root of your music tree. My old Archos did that, and it was quickly ready to play after power-up.
No idea why you got downmodded there. Rockbox enables you to organize your music this way on lots of different devices now. You aren't required to rebuild the database, though if that's what you prefer you can push a couple of buttons and do that too.
Directories are, in a sense, high-maintenance indexes, but some of us find the existing tag system utterly inadequate and need to fall back to this solution.
No, I used tags. I just didn't use them on the player.
Given an outside-generated MP3 (as opposed to one I ripped from CD), I had scripts that would look at the tags to figure out where to put the file in my directory hierarchy.
Said directory hierarchy would then be synced to the Archos, where it would be accessed via the file browser.
To this day, I still miss this approach when I want to listen to classical music. I felt like listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony a couple days ago at work, and it took me about 5 minutes to find it on my iPhone. It would have taken me 5 seconds on my old Archos. The iPhone/iPod pretty much falls apart when faced with music that doesn't fit into the genre/artist/album classification.
It was broken when IPhone first came out, broken again with updates, required modifying your device, and will be broken again in future. So yes, GTKpod works, but not well.
The enemy of FLOSS is convienence and ease-of-use. I'm not trying to be snarky: I'm typing this on Firefox in Linux and I've almost excusively been on Linux since 2002. I've been elbow deep in this stuff for years, hacking and tweaking and experimenting, etc. I'm at the end of my rope, about to jump to Apple with all the lock-in and overpriced shit and inflexibility and patent abuse, etc. At least it is easy to use and maintain and has many powerful, flexible and even niche applications. And well-supported libraries.
I'm starting to see those free software ideals I've held so dear turn into tradeoffs. I'll trade in some 'freedoms' for more capable, abundant, and better supported software that allows me to get work done easier and more effectively.
If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users. To most people software freedom is too intangible to be counted as a benefit. Hell, 99.9% of people couldn't even explain it in very basic terms if you asked them. He's just created software for enthusiasts and hobbyists. Not a bad thing, but not his goal either.
Anyways, I've grown out of it.
I'm just talking about consumer-facing software, by the way. I know free software will always have value in education, commodity software that is not your primary business, etc. It is always going to be an abysmal failure on the desktop unless a free software Steve Jobs appears out of thin air, though.
"If RMS wanted GNU software to spread then he shouldn't have gone into politics and preaching. He should have made sure that GNU software was more useful to the software users"
Indeed, consider this alternate timeline whose RMS is more pragmatic and willing to give up a few short term small victories in order to win big in the end:
It's the late '70s. The microprocessor revolution is just getting started. RMS and his band of wily hackers jump onboard, realizing there is going to be a lot of money to be made, and that a person with a lot of money can do a lot more good than a person without a lot of money.
They make a decision: they will go commercial, amass a fortune, and then retire to promote their ideal free software world.
It's GNU BASIC that Altair picks up in this timeline, not MS BASIC. It's RMS that gets the IBM deal. It's RMS that becomes the world's richest man.
25 years later, RMS retires, and then sets up the FSF, endowed with about $50 billion dollars. With just the investment income, not touching the principle at all, the FSF is generating enough money to be able to give out 50000 grants a year that each pay a developer for one year's full time work on free software.
In 10 years, the FSF has produced GPL replacements for every important piece of non-free generally available software on the planet. The only non-GPL software left is internal things on corporate intranets.
Every day I am more convinced that the enemies of FOSS are the borderline morons that descend on articles like that one to "tell it like it is" with "M$ IS TEH DEVILZ LOLZ" prose that only makes everyone else shake their heads in disgust or shame.
Microsoft would do a far better job at discrediting FOSS if they simply flooded the internet with astroturfers that mimic the FOSS nutjobs.
I've heard the paranoid ascribe FOSS nutjobs to Microsoft Astroturfing efforts. This character emailed me claiming that the bellicose, "F*ck MSFT!" mouth-breathers were really Waggoner-Edstrom shills.
One thing I find a bit silly about this debate is how seriously we developers tend to take it. We toss around words like "enemy", "devil", and "evil", to describe a company that manufactures consumer electronics.
I realize that many of us care deeply about open source software, and hope that the field we work in does not become tightly controlled, but let's face it: it's not like Apple is producing weapons of mass destruction, or cheap guns intended for street gangs, or cigarettes.
If we showed an iPad to the average person, and said, "Look how EVIL this is!", they'd probably be more than a little confused.
He quotes from research derived from watching a group of neurotics that consistently defended itself against his [the researcher] attempts to make them do what they had ostensible gathered themselves together for. The second pattern of defensive behavior was identifying a common enemy. Clay writes:
"The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies."
So let's forget about Apple or Microsoft or any other so-called-enemy for awhile and get back to coding and "defeat" them the old-fashioned way.
Without the freedom to tinker, the internet wouldn't have happened. There wouldn't have been such an incredibly rapid evolution of technology. Open source ensures that this kind of freedom remains in place.
<sarcasm>
I am in total accordance with you. Apple is pure evil just imagine they had the core of their operating system(Darwin) open sourced even if they didn't need it to. They contribute to some high profile open source projects(WebKit, LLVM & SproutCore). Their web browser is standards compliant and their competitors can use the same rendering engine. And you can choose to buy an Apple product or not. We need to stop them now before they destroy our freedom forever.
</sarcasm>
I'm not sure that promoting an alternate development model really means "the enemy" of FOSS. If you'd ask RMS, he'd probably say so, but I don't see why Apple's closed model and FOSS' open one can't co-exist. Also, it's not like Apple is attacking OSS, it's playing nicely as well as sponsoring several large projects.
If Apple is the enemy of FOSS, we've got a rosy future.
You do realize that if Apple has its way, developers must not only pay an entrance fee to release software for a system, but also run the risk of being disapproved? If X% of the market is iPhone/iPad, that is X% of the market where big brother Apple gets to decide exactly what software is available. That's even worse than closed-source commercial Windows under Microsoft, let alone FOSS.
Apple is a greater enemy to FOSS than Microsoft because where the latter's attacks center around FUD and legal threats, Apple's is a competent attempt to undermine open computing platforms. The walled garden begins at the hardware level.
Yep, but also remember that this only applies to Apple systems. Apple isn't trying to push this on anyone else, it's part of what you accept by buying an Apple product.
There'll always be a non-Apple 100% free platform. The two models can coexist together just fine. I use Apple products where appropriate, and others where it's not.
Apple's lawsuit against HTC effectively asserts that Android is illegal. That's a rather big deal; there are three mobile computing platforms that matter, and Android is the only one that's open.
And they would have done that whether Android was open source or not. You could argue that if Android was not open source, it wouldn't be doing as well as it is, but the lawsuit is about Android's success not the open source nature
Maybe. Although I can see Apple being much happier to split the market with Microsoft and their equally closed Windows mobile devices than with Android. Open platforms lead to disruptive innovations, which are often bad for market leaders.
I'll admit that I'm not happy that they're doing that. The good thing that comes out of this is that the more software patents are abused, the more likely they'll be abolished.
