I've done a bit of Googling but as a non-iTunes user I'd like some real user experience if possible.
A customer of mine has ended up with a "ASUS little shitty netbook thing" (his words!) for his daughter, and with the requirement that "all she wants to do on it is surf the internet & manage her itunes on it".
They don't like the noddy interface (presumably Xandros?) and I could replace that for him. But iTunes I know nothing about. I gather that Songbird is a suitable replacement, but I have no idea how similar it is to iTunes and whether it'll allow her to manage her music files.
Surfing the internet is easy, and they can already do it.
What they'd like, of-course, is the XP model. But installing XP is expensive and I'd like to show them that they don't need XP to do what they want. Assuming that they can....
I've done a bit of Googling but as a non-iTunes user I'd like some real user experience if possible.
A customer of mine has ended up with a "ASUS little shitty netbook thing" (his words!) for his daughter, and with the requirement that "all she wants to do on it is surf the internet & manage her itunes on it".
They don't like the noddy interface (presumably Xandros?) and I could replace that for him. But iTunes I know nothing about. I gather that Songbird is a suitable replacement, but I have no idea how similar it is to iTunes and whether it'll allow her to manage her music files.
I don't know much about Songbird, but when I had an iPod I used to use GTKpod to manage the music on it - and I think it's the library from this project which is used by Songbird and other apps to talk to the iPod. However, that's only going to fit the requirement of getting DRM-free songs on/off the iPod. If she wants the full iTunes experience - including being able to buy songs / audiobooks from the iTunes store, then I don't think you've got much option bar trying to get a version of iTunes running with WINE or under a Virtual Machine. There are more open alternatives to the iTunes store, of course, if she can be persuaded to use them.
If she just wants to be able to rip music and stick it on the player though, it should be fairly straightforward.
It has been over a year since I did this sort of thing, though.
Peter.
On 26/03/10 14:27, samwise wrote:
I don't know much about Songbird, but when I had an iPod I used to use GTKpod to manage the music on it - and I think it's the library from this project which is used by Songbird and other apps to talk to the iPod. However, that's only going to fit the requirement of getting DRM-free songs on/off the iPod.
According to the Songbird website they support DRM, but I haven't looked into this in detail, and it could just mean that they support in on a Windows platform where iTunes is installed alongside or something. I'm not too interested what the websites say anyway, I want user experiences before I recommend this to someone I don't know all that well!
If she just wants to be able to rip music and stick it on the player though, it should be fairly straightforward.
If she wants to rip from CD's then the O/S is the least of her problems on the netbook!
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Mark Rogers -
samwise