

Miro 4, the open source music and video player, is released - 16BitTons
http://www.getmiro.com/

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SwellJoe
I wish media player developers would stop trying to imitate iTunes. I hate
iTunes. It's confusing (it's caused me to delete my entire music collection on
my PC on multiple occasions), it's huge and demanding (of my focus/attention,
and also computing resources) where it shouldn't be, and its integration with
iTunes store is pointless and annoying to me (I don't shop at iTunes).

It's great that seemingly high quality cross-platform tools like this are
being developed, though I wonder what this does that Songbird (the last big
"iTunes replacement" I can think of) does not?

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sigzero
"It's confusing (it's caused me to delete my entire music collection on my PC
on multiple occasions)"

What? Ummmm....even my super non-techie wife hasn't done that.

~~~
SwellJoe
I'm Appletarded, and get confused by a lot of Apple software. I don't know how
I did it, but it's happened on three separate occasions. Twice on a Windows PC
and once on a Mac. Somehow my misunderstanding of the sync feature led to the
PC getting what was on the iPod, and the music collection on the PC being
deleted. It was many years ago; I eventually learned my lesson and stopped
trying to use the damned thing. Maybe it's better/safer now. But, I'll never
find out, as I can't think of any reason I'd have to use iTunes.

~~~
thought_alarm
Syncing your iPod will never delete music from your PC. It is and has always
been a one-way sync, PC to iPod, as far as music content is concerned.

~~~
SwellJoe
Seems like that would be the way things would work, wouldn't it? Again, it's
been many years since it happened. The precise details of what happened are a
bit fuzzy at this point, as is often the case with very painful events in
life. It may have merely "forgotten" where to find all the music and emptied
the library. And, it may be that the actual file deletions happened on the
iPod rather than the PC (I'm still pretty sure it deleted files on the PC,
though). I remember being furious and confused by the behavior of the
software...and I remember having to re-rip several albums that I hadn't backed
up lately, and I lost a few mixtapes that someone had made for me.

That reminds me of another thing I _hated_ about iTunes...it was always re-
indexing its library. All the damned time. Every time I would start it, it
would go galloping all over my PC (this was back in the days when I had three
or four hard disks, plus a file server) for like 30 minutes.

Regardless of the specifics, iTunes made an enemy for life out of me by being
so damned confusing, and so hostile to my existing workflow. I'd been using
digital music for a decade before iTunes came along, and iTunes just did not
fit into how I'd been using it.

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cormullion
I know iTunes isn't very popular with HN readers, so I'll balance things out a
bit and play devil's advocate for a while: I like iTunes quite a bit. There
are certainly some minor gripes and irritations, particularly with the UI, but
overall I'm satisfied with the performance of iTunes and wouldn't want to
replace it without much careful thought.

I'm not a computer power user, more of a 'system dadmin'; we run iTunes in the
house on about six (Mac) computers and half a dozen or so devices. iTunes runs
happily on all the computers, ranging from an old original iMac from 2001
(which runs Tiger and iTunes 8 and acts as an internet radio and music
'terminal') to an eMac from 2005 running Leopard and iTunes 10) and various
Snow Leopard machines and attached drives.

The different copies of iTunes copes with various libraries (the biggest one
is 110GB) with apparent ease, and keeps track of the settings on various
iPods, including a 60GB classic from 2005, two iPhones, three iPod Touches and
a couple of Shuffles. It's easy to play music from other machines around the
house - click on the computer's name and start listening to its music. It's
also nice that when one of my children, say, buys an app for their iPhone on
their iTunes Store account it appears automatically on mine too; similarly if
I put music on mine it appears in their library, but of course you can be more
selective in what you copy from family members' accounts and machines...

I love the power of iTunes playlists - those heavy duty database-query-like
nested multiple smart playlists - and it's a great way to control what gets
put onto your iPod while it charges and you sleep.

I also like: the automatic downloading of the latest podcasts and TV episodes;
adding PDFs to my library puts them on my iPhone; broadcasting music around
the house using iTunes DJ mode and Rogue Amoeba's Airfoil - controlling the
music from any room using the Remote iPhone app (and sometimes letting people
select music from their iOS devices); browsing the iTunes University and
downloading lectures; tracking my App store spending with Wetfish Software's
App Store Expense Monitor; writing new visualizers with Quartz Composer (which
is cool if weird); ripping CDs with automatic track naming. I could go on.

OK, I'll accept that iTunes is a bizarre behemoth of an application, and has
certainly outgrown its moniker. But, for day to day use, people like me find
it a solid and reliable media and device 'engine' that doesn't require much
thought or effort to use effectively.

But don't get me started on those stupid scrolling boxes within boxes...

Edit: when I started typing this, I was sure the title said 'Miro 4 ... iTunes
replacement ...'. When I finished typing, it didn't. (I went off to work
between those two times.) So I was thinking about whether Miro could replace
more than 10% of iTunes' functionality. This comment seems less relevant now.

~~~
citricsquid
Yeah, I agree with you. iTunes has some stupid things and "wtf?" moments, but
overall I do enjoy using it. It makes media consumption very easy.

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bruce511
Ok, so it's billed (here at least) as the "iTunes Replacement". And it
advertises strongly "Converts and syncs to Android" (front and centre on the
main page).

But I'm really unclear if it'll actually replace iTunes for my iPod Touch. It
doesn't say anything about i devices that I can see (except for advertising an
iPad app that doesn't seem to be available yet.)

So either; a) it doesn't sync my iOS devices in which case it may be a great
media player, but it's not an iTunes replacement or b) They're hoping I'll
take a huge amount for granted.

My guess is that the heading in Hacker News is the bit that's completely
misleading and I do wish folk wouldn't editorialize the headline.

If it _is_ an iTunes replacement then a lot more info is needed - like will it
sync my apps? Can I purchase new apps? and so on.

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Goronmon
From their FAQ:

 _Can I sync my videos to an iPod or other video device?

Currently, Miro doesn't directly sync with any portable devices. However, we
will be working on this in future versions. In the meantime, you may be able
to sync the video files themselves with a separate program._

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runjake
"Replacement" is a bit too tough a word.

It doesn't sync with (Apple) mobile devices, the primary reason I stick with
iTunes.

It also seems more sluggish and bloated than iTunes on my MBP i7 running 10.6.

Seems like it was released way too prematurely. They could have spent more
time building features & polish and utilized their launch hype much better.

Sorting through all the marketing fluff, what are the true advantages of Miro?

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vaporstun
Horribly annoying that on their website, when I click play on a video then
close the popup, the video keeps playing! I tried to view a few clips and they
were all playing in the background. Had to re-open the video again and
manually press the pause button to stop them.

Otherwise, it looks very similar to DoubleTwist but with the addition of
syncing iOS devices. Wish it could drop some of the bloat (for example the
torrent client) to make it more compelling. It is very tough though to make
things more simplified.

I know everyone has their gripes with iTunes, but it is very tough to have an
interface that is complex enough to combine local management of music,
management of apps, music, and videos on a device, a store and still allow the
user the power to make decisions about individual songs, etc.

I think Apple should diverge them and have the device syncing component as a
separate program entirely, but tightly integrated so it can nab playlists,
podcasts, etc. from iTunes.

I hear iTunes is horrible on Windows, but on Mac it's not too bad and I can't
think of many ways they could really optimize it without stripping features
that would piss off a lot of users.

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rawsyntax
It's not an iTunes replacement at all. I have an iPhone and buy apps through
iTunes sometimes. This doesn't have that functionality (nor the syncing with
the iPhone).

Also, it has a bittorrent client built in... Why?

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Argorak
Because Miro is the client for a video publishing platform that allows content
providers to publish video streams to miro using rss and then have miro
distribute it via bittorrent. Users are then able to search the Miro catalog
and subscribe to those feeds if they are interested. For video-podcast
addicts, thats really great.

Its not a tacked on feature, this is actually the core feature of Miro - its a
distributed video player/content provider. Not an iTunes replacement at all.

~~~
Periodic
This makes that BitTorrent client really make sense. Distributing video
podcasts really has to be done via YouTube or not at all for a lot of people
because it's such a pain to distribute the video due to bandwidth costs.
BitTorrent helps, but many people aren't savvy with BitTorrent or are freaked
out by piracy concerns.

I'm a huge proponent of more legitimate BitTorrent usage. It really is a good
distribution protocol.

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jz
Looks interesting, however I really dislike iTunes' "everything under then
sun" motto. If you are looking for something much more lightweight for playing
music, check out mpd <http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki> .
There is a really nice Mac mpd client called Theremin:
<http://theremin.sigterm.eu/>

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aidenn0
Thanks for the link. I've been using qmpd on the mac with a lot of success for
some time now, but I'll check out the native solution.

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antihero
How does it handle large (+50,000 files) collections?

Also: Oh no, it does that homepage spammy feeling option in the installer
thing. This instantly makes me not want to donate, tbh, as it just feels
scummy.

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beza1e1
Miro is a great application, but i would not call it an "iTunes replacement".
I use it as a "video feed reader".

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tmcw
Miro's a very cool project - the Participatory Culture Foundation does a bang-
up job of productizing what they do and making it pretty.

For someone who'd want to switch from iTunes for higher performance and
simplicity, rather than just going for an equivalent, what would I do?

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Brashman
I've switched to using foobar2000 (<http://www.foobar2000.org/>) and I think
it's the first music player that I actually like. It's extremely simple and
I've found it quite fast and responsive, even on my netbook.

~~~
jokermatt999
I'd also strongly recommend foobar2000. It's incredibly fast, automatically
adds music pretty much as soon as it's in the directory, is extremely
customizable, and can look really, really nice. It has customizable global
hotkeys, addon support, but works well out of the box.

If any one is still trying to use iTunes on Windows, I strongly urge you to at
least try foobar2000. Once I switched, there was just no way I was going back
to iTunes. It alleviates so many of the stupid daily annoyances I had with
iTunes.

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uast23
Oh I just read the heading 'iTunes replacement', installed it and plugged in
my iPhone to see how it behaves; and ta-da nothing happens! My mistake that I
did not read the features, but whatever, why do we want to call it an iTunes
replacement when it can't even sync

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yankcrime
I'd have hoped that an 'iTunes replacement' would be one that's somewhat less
bloaty. I don't see Miro filling that gap, given it includes such nonsense as
a BitTorrent client.

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Argorak
Which is actually the greatest feature of Miro. There are a lot of interesting
feeds flying around the Miro bittorrent network. For example all confreaks
conference videos.

~~~
callahad
Isn't that how Miro started life? As a video player that used torrents for
distribution, and RSS feeds for discovery?

In that light, the inclusion of a BitTorrent client is less surprising.

~~~
Argorak
Yes, exactly. And it actually works and is used.

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lurker19
But can it play files over DAAP? That is the (my) holy grail for Mac music.

Songbird sort-of can, in a buggy crashy way. Nothing else I have tried
(Banshee, Amarok, Rhythmbox, firefly player jar) compiles and loads and runs
an plays on Mac.

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firethief
Yeah, it has DAAP support.

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NHQ
an "open" media player that is trying to eat Apples crumbs and wants
independents to join in should have some kind of decentralized market for
producers and publishers.

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StuffMaster
That website makes me _not_ want their software.

~~~
olalonde
You obviously don't visit much open source software websites. I thought this
one wasn't bad at all compared to what I'm used to.

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olalonde
I've been a long time user of VLC media player and unsure if it'd be
worthwhile to make the switch. Did anyone transition from VLC to Miro?

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kodisha
on mac (MBP laptop):

\- it doesn't react on previous/play/next buttons on keyboard

\- no last.fm integration

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udoprog
The hackers solution. A media server running mpd or XMMS2, with the proper
metadata organizing utility for your medialib. Plus running mplayer and
possibly some ffmpeg tweaking for when you're out in the deep end. Plays
anything, anywhere, and leaves the rest up to your imagination.

I guess Miro is great, but any complete solution will always be inferior to
the proper tools for the right jobs.

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vetler
The first thing that struck me was how visually identical to iTunes it was.
Considering how Apple sued Samsung over UI similarity, I wouldn't be surprised
if Miro could run into similar problems.

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lurker19
But can it play files over DAAP? That is the (my) holy grail for Mac music.

Songbird sort-of can, in a buggy crashy way. Nothing else U have

