iTunes has a small number of things that keep me using it over the alternatives. These can basically be boiled down to this moral:
- A fifty-minute podcast ought to be treated differently from a four-minute pop song.
Think about it. If you've got a podcast or audiobook, you don't listen to it in the same way as you do a song. If you are listening to a pop song and you pause it, then play something else, when you go back to it, you are quite happy that it plays from the start rather than from where you left off. With a podcast or audiobook, without storing your place in the file, you end up having to fast-forward back to where you remember you were stopped - which is often not the same as where you actually did stop.
Everyone tells me I should stop using my Mac. One of the main reasons I continue to use a Mac is because I like iTunes. The main reason I like iTunes is because it has this functionality. It also has a synchronisation facility with the iPod.
Everyone seems to think that this is a bad thing. I think it's a very good thing. The method everyone seems to prefer is dragging files on and off - manually managing the player. I don't want to manually manage my digital audio player. I want the computer to manage it. I've got better things to be doing - I should be able to define some simple set of rules specifying which songs, which playlists or whatever - and those things should sync as intelligently as they can the moment I plug the device in. Perhaps I'm wrong, but that's the way I'm used to, and I think they are fucking awesome defaults - and they are why the user experience guys at Apple get paid the big bucks they do.
This page is an attempt to try and prompt the open source community into replicating these two good patterns:
Keep Playback Position: Store where I am in long files. Have a bit I can flip for each file telling it whether it is 'long'. In iTunes parlance, this is called "Resume playback position".
Sync Playback Position: Not necessarily just with an iPod - preferably all music players should support this. Certainly, if I plug an iPod in, it should do this.
Banshee
Banshee doesn't support Keep Playback Position. Bug #405452 is the closest things I've found in the issue tracker.
Rhythmbox
See bug 328943 for a patch that hopefully fixes up Rhythmbox so it does just this.