I see that Songbird 1.1 is coming out soon and I too plan on migrating from iTunes to Songbird. I also also own a squeezebox boom and so I too would like to see real Songbird SqueezeCenter integration. And because I find the current "integration" SqueezeCenter & iTunes (I am using a MacPro and Mac OS 10.5.6) to absolutely NOT be integration... rather it's like SqueezeCenter is serving a life sentence on my Mac and gets only occasion conjugal visits with iTunes.
If you take the example of playing an Audio Book on an iPod with iTunes as an example of media manager and device integration and the use case of using a new CD: You rip the contents of CD and make a new playlist. You mark the content as an Audio Book, You select the options Remember Playback Position, Skip when shuffling, and part of a gapless album. You add the playlist to the iPod and sync. At this point iTunes will remember what you have played no matter where it is played. I can remove my iPod from the dock and play my new audio book while I go for a walk. When I return home I simply put my iPod back in its dock and it automatically syncs. At this point if I begin to play that audio book again it begins play in the exact position of where I left off on the iPod... I can play the audio book for a time on my Mac, stop the playback, eject my iPod and begin play on the iPod in the exact position I left off on my Mac. Now if you examine that same use case using iTunes as the media manager and my Squeezebox Boom as the device. I rip the disk, make the playlist, and either wait until next time SqueezeCenter scans my library or open the interface an dig around the UI for the button to initiate a manual scan. It takes well over 7 minutes for SqueezeCenter to scan my iTunes library. So after SqueezeCenter is convinced of the existence of new content the SqueezeBox can now play it. However SqueezeCenter will never update the iTunes library's metadata with new play information (I was told that they decided never to write to the iTunes database). There is a 3rd party plugin available (iTunes Update) which does update the iTunes Library directly with some metadata. However, it is incomplete and does not update the track bookmark metadata. This creates a tolerable situation if you break your audio book into tiny tracks (as it appears on CDs) and intolerable situation if you (as I do) join and chapterize your content. A similar situation arises in the use case of serialized podcast content. Examining the behavior of iPod & iTunes both iTunes and the iPod know what has been played and where the last played bookmarks are in each podcast and what new podcasts are available. It is not possible to manage podcasts with iTunes and play them using SqueezeCenter and keep track of what's played, what's new, and where you are in a given podcast. So when I request Songbird / SqueezeCenter integration I am requesting real integration and not just the coexistence that currently exists with iTunes. -- Bhima ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bhima's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=20580 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=60712 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
