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Comment by vito | Hacker News Reader

Looks promising, but very basic so far. No shuffle/repeat, enqueueing, or really anything beyond play, pause, previous, and next. It did import my iTunes library in <2 seconds though, which seems impressive compared to iTunes', what, 15 minutes?

Excited to see a hopefully serious competitor to iTunes, it's actually great to see them starting simple. What's there works well.

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Keep in mind that iTunes had already done the hard work for Winamp. iTunes has to walk your directory structure, open each file, and read the ID3 tags. That takes real, actual time, especially on a spinning disk. iTunes is probably slower than it has to be, but there is a limit on how fast that sort of thing can be. Parsing a single XML file takes a lot less time.

It took a lot longer than 2 seconds for me as well - about 16k songs.

I just started using Songbird on my Mac at work, and I'm actually pretty happy with it. The interface is pretty close to iTunes, for what it's worth, but it integrates with all sorts of other things. Not really sure if it's a serious competitor to iTunes, though..

To be fair, Winamp "import" seems to only read iTunes Library (XML file) rather than rescanning the whole library.

    FEATURES
    - Import from iTunes Library (XML) or music files from specified Watch Folders

I really like vlc, since it works on windows and mac flawlessly, as well as playing video

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