Today I was playing with iTunes in OSX.2 and started wondering if there's anything better out there for playing mp3's on my older Powerbook G3 (Pismo). After some google research (I wonder if students use google urls for their bibilographies in school these days, I guess that's a whole different rant) I found this page at xlr8yourmac that has a side by side comparison of iTunes, Audion, and MacAmp Lite. After a brief overview of the results I quickly went to download MacAmp Lite and was very impressed. It's lightweight, has a nice playlist, and best of all is free.
I actually started this experiment a few days ago when I downloaded, compiled, and installed mpg123 (a commandline mp3 player, popular on linux platforms). I read the warnings that it wasn't stable, but ignored them and boldly started tinkiering. After about 30 minutes of partially-stable playtime mpg123 brought my machine to a complete halt and was forced to do a three finger salute to reboot. Needless to say mpg123 is not my player of choice.
On the note of iApps I have to say that I'm finding a lot of alternatives to iApps that I am finding work better, are faster, and have more options. So far I have replaced:
iPhoto = iViewMediaPro 1.5.5
iChat = Adium 1.6.2
iTunes = MacAmp Lite
I'm still using Mail and I find the anti-spam technologies to be revolutionary, but the gui eye-candy of fading and such seem very tedious on my older PowerBook. I'm starting to consider checking out Mailsmith or possible installing the new Eudora beta.
Posted by slugworth at October 04, 2002 03:07 PM