Re: [PLUG] FOSS Alternative to ITunes

Yeah, I can and do just use the file browser to play music. I guess the features that I use Itunes for are pretty limited - browse by artist, browse by album (even this doesn't really work well on itunes), see the album art and song names, player controls, build playlists.

I also use itunes to browse my phone but this is a separate concern - I'll probably continue to use it for this. I just make sure that my outbound firewall doesn't let itunes send my selfies to apple or whatever.

On Wed, Sep 14, 2016 at 10:32 AM, George Zipperlen <George.Zipperlen@mail.com> wrote:

Which aspect of iTunes do you need? It is one of those unfortunate
monoliths with many overlapping not really compatible functions. In a
manner quite opposite to the Unix software tools philosophy it has
evolved from an mp3 player + file manager for external device (iPod,
are they still around?) into bloatware dealing with smart phones,
tablets, and the cloud, while also handling Digital Rights Management
and an online marketplace.

Media player: VLC Media Player with huge codec library. Open source,
multi-platform. Highly recommended.

Device browser: iPodDisk is the only open source tool I could find in
a quick search. Haven’t tried it. I’ve played with i-FunBox (free, but
not open source). Using it in sandboxed mode resulted in duplicated
music tracks. I haven’t used it with ssh access to the iPhone.

The flow that works best for me is to use command line or file browser
to manage media files from other sources and players; import them into
iTunes, and use iTunes to push to (i)devices.

George Zipperlen
Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 13, 2016, at 6:35 PM, Paul Walker <pjwalker76@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Anyone know a good FOSS alternative to ITunes. It is honestly one of my least favorite pieces of software of all time. Not to mention that it is always trying to call home, which I find tiresome.
>
> And not to stoke anyone's paranoia :evil grin: but I also remember seeing a wikileaks post of a leaked promotional video from a security firm that featured itunes as the central part of a trojan horse scheme (if anyone has a link to the video please share - I'll dig deeper but a quick google search failed to turn it up)
>
> Anyway - recommendations appreciated.

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