
Show HN: jmc – a new open-source macOS media organizer - jcm_
https://jcm93.github.io/jmc/
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mrmondo
I /really/ like Swinsain which looks quite similar, the only thing it's
missing is Apple Music integration but I can't imagine any third party player
will integrate with Apple Music properly. My music library is 1.3TB which is
fine in iTunes until you enable Apple Music which loads a lot of metadata
similar to genius etc...

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jcm_
Yeah, Apple Music integration is unlikely to ever happen here. If you're an
Apple Music user, I would project that you're totally locked into iTunes for
the foreseeable future.

I did use Swinsian for awhile. While, in broad terms, it satisfied a lot of my
requirements in terms of pure functionality, I still found myself frustrated
by certain parts of the interface. My criticisms of Swinsian would mostly boil
down to small aspects of the design, usability and polish, which, taken
collectively, made the experience of using it frustrating and subpar, at least
for me. I wanted something that worked just as elegantly and looked just as
nice as iTunes does (or used to).

The simple fact that Swinsian doesn't have an equalizer, for example, makes me
really wonder whether the developer understands the needs and desires of the
power users for whom Swinsian seems to be designed.

Also, an open-source media organizer run by a communicative/responsive
developer is much better in the long term than a closed-source, totally
proprietary application, in my view.

Postscript: If RAM and CPU use is of any concern, you might be pleased to find
that jmc uses significantly less resources than iTunes, with generally
superior performance. My personal library numbers around 30,000 tracks; memory
use peaks around 200MB when scrolling through the entire library and generally
hovers around 100MB.

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mrmondo
Totally agree with all your points especially around the software being open
source.

I got round to trying it out at home last night and at work today, it wouldn't
add my music and just sat there with a scrolling pinwheel on both machines,
I'll log a bug this week.

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IMcD23
Looks exactly like iTunes. Other than being "simpler" and only for music, how
is it better than iTunes.

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jcm_
If you've ever used iTunes to manage a large collection of music, then you've
probably watched iTunes get progressively worse at managing that collection of
music, while becoming progressively more bloated and full of cruft.

I thought about starting this project way back when Apple got rid of the album
artwork view while in the songs view of your library. To me, that change was
such an obvious mistake that demonstrated that Apple didn't really understand
how people used iTunes. The Artist and Album Views that Apple provided to
supplant the songs view were half-functional and incredibly buggy with large
libraries, and often just played tracks and albums completely out of order.

Other examples include taking away the user's focus when skipping songs, not
preserving selection when you leave and return to a playlist view, the track
queue in general...I could go on. jmc tries to provide a smoother experience
in all these areas. I would try it out!

But basically, continued fundamental missteps in iTunes' application design
and engineering spurred me to write my own application to fix some of these
glaring problems with the UI. I also wanted to fix problems that occur when
you migrate your library to a new hard drive and provide better location
management for media stored externally in general.

Even more broadly, I want to provide a fully featured hackable media manager
along the lines of foobar2000, but for macOS, because macOS really doesn't
have anything that's very good. jmc aims to do that, without the cruft and BS
that iTunes is currently stuffed with. While it's not all the way there yet,
it will be!

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Esau
I hope you succeed because I really like Foobar2000.

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evolve2k
Our usecase is wanting a shared workplace playlist that everyone can
contribute to, from their computers, with the host computer wired up to the
sound system. Is jmc good for this? I got a sense it could be but wasn't
completely sure.

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anonfunction
Looks nice, I only wish it was for photos and videos as well.

