Thanks very much for sharing the compiled version. That's too bad that you are not interested in open sourcing it, but of course it's your software and your decision. Keep up the great work, I'm excited so see how it turns out.
Nice. I think you should be VERY up front about why this beats iTunes though as this is essentially supposed to be a replacement for a 1st party app that literally everyone uses. Can I sync my iPhone? I REALLY like that there's FLAC support.
iPhone sync is always going to be difficult: you are forever chasing a moving target, although the libimobiledevice and libgpod guys have done a great job. The encryption used to sign the music database on devices released after iOS4(+original iPad) hasn't been cracked yet (they changed it from the previous versions), although you can edit a file to tell the device to use the old db encryption if you have jailbroken your phone (I've not tested this with iPhone4S; things may have changed again). Building a product around the feature is probably unwise — Apple is a capricious master.
(Disclaimer: I develop a competing os x music player which can add music to (some) iOS devices)
Hmm, it crashed 7% into importing my iTunes library. Can I help debug at all (forward you my .xml file, etc)? Email me at my HN username <at> gmail.com.
I love the design! I especially like that the Now Playing functionality is so prominent. While I like iTunes as a media database and sync tool, it's bloat-tastic as a music player, and I've wanted something faster and cleaner for years now.
I have a question, though: Does this perpetually read or write from the iTunes library XML, or is the import a one-time affair? I use the hell out of ratings and smart playlists, and I want Enqueue to run side-by-side with iTunes rather than replacing it. (i.e., iTunes to manage music, Enqueue to play it back.)
Regardless, this is fantastic work, and I look forward to the finished version. This app is something I would definitely be happy to pay for.
Have you looked into the possibility of two-way sync, or is that a non-starter? For now, iTunes is still necessary for syncing iDevices, and keeping two libraries updated sounds like no fun.
I think the top question in your FAQ should be "Why should I use this over iTunes?" Then clearly state what you do better (such as file support, interface, etc).
Fist impressions can never be reproduced, so I'm typing this as I go along:
1) Welcome dialog is... out of place. The design is not consistent with Apple UI guidelines, I can't tell the three options are buttons.
2) The cancel button on the welcome dialog looks like an odd man out. It's just floating there in the center, and I think the caption (cancel) is also something you can improve.
3) I think the now-playing thing in the sidebar needs to be pushed down by ~60 pixels, basically starting under the main bar across the rest of the screen. It's not very symmetric the way it is now. You should also have a divider between the close buttons and the now playing section - see Chrome.app for a good example of doing it smoothly.
4) Playlists: now change when I hover over the entries, I was expecting them to go blue. Clicking on them has no effect, I must double-click. non-intuitive.
5) I love the statistics and charts in History, but I wonder if the name is accurate? I'm seeing a breakdown of my music collection, but the only "true" history tab is "Recently Played" which is also given the least prominence.
6) When starting the app, the whitespace stretching from under the now playing section to the bottom of the screen in the sidebar is jarring. It doesn't look nice empty, I'm assuming something will show up there at some point in my playing around with it.
7) Playlists uses an entirely different UI from Library. I like Library's detail view drilldown. I think something like that should be used for the playlists too. See point #4.
That's all for now. May update later with more feedback.
Good work. It looks very promising. I love that it's fast and not-bloated.
EDIT:
No way to turn off Growl messages? Oops.
EDIT:
Add Playlist -> then press esc. The playlist gets added anyway with the default name.
Playlist list needs right-click functionality, even if it's the same menu that shows up when clicking the cog. Don't disappoint your users expectations as to how an interface will act.
EDIT:
Playlist tab's "Add Playlist" pretends to be a tab but it's actually a button. Very confusing. Don't do that - buttons are buttons, tabs are tabs. Even if they're right-aligned.
EDIT:
I think you have a bug when you turn on repeat and shuffle in the middle of a song. When the song ends, it will be repeated immediately, then everything works out.
All good points! Regarding #3: I actually like this look. The primary divider is simply shifted from being top/bottom to left/right, and the album art gets to have the most prominent real estate. Perhaps it's just a matter of taste.
You should be able to turn them off from the Growl preference pane. I was always under the impression that this was the recommended way to do things, the idea being to have a central place to control them. Now that full Growl costs money and people start using Mist (which as far as I know has no central pref pane to turn off notifications) I guess devs will have to start adding individual Growl options to every app.
No, they're not. There are Apple-published UI guidelines, there are decades of User Interface research, and there are time-motion studies to back what I'm saying.
FWIW, I've been paid thousands of dollars as an outside consultant to just look at an app provide my initial feedback. If it were just whimsical, subjective musings, I can assure that would not be the case.
what about basically just a search bar and que, you search for a song, and hit enter and it gets added to the que, press skip and the next song plays etc...
This looks so promising! Kudos to you for working on it for a year and following through! Ill try it and if it really is speedier than iTunes it looks like a good candidate to be my default player. iTunes, I love but it can use a speed boost. Thanks man.
Do you have a business model? There might be a serious market for this. Maybe keep the app free, even open source, and charge for an iOS Remote style app?
I probably won't use this to replace iTunes, but I will probably switch to it from Cog as my FLAC player. I know SHN is no longer developed, but does Enqueue support it?
This is phenomenal. Were you a Windows Media Plyaer v8-v11 user? The playlist on the side reminds me of my favorite feature from the WMP8 days, where I could queue up music even while another album played. It was wonderful, and when I went Mac full-time nearly a decade ago, I lost the easy queueing in iTunes (where I had to create a playlist every single time).
Bravo, this is a great app and I would love to support it. I'd be willing to pay $39, but that may just be me. I'm going to switch to it full-time and see what happens.
And I don't need the same piece of software to handle my iPhone and my music library. Don't bother supporting iPhone sync, it's just not part of the value of a good music player. I can open iTunes when I sync (and now with iOS 5, I don't think I'll ever need to manually sync again).
If you want a gratis NewsBlur premium account, let me know: samuel@ofbrooklyn.com. It's the only way I know to actually pay you for such great software.
Excellent music player. I noticed one little bug: during import of library from iTunes, the percentage on the top-right is incorrect. For me, it set it at 209%.
Otherwise, the app is fairly solid. The design could use a bit of tweaking, but that's pretty much it.
It imported my little "other" iTunes Library of about 1,500 songs, albeit with some stalls. However, for my main 20,000 song library it just crashes out.
I hate to say it considering the other feedback, but I'm not a fan of the UI. The giant words instead of icons, off colour and sort of grafted on now playing box, and no ability to hide the "browser" all put me off pretty strongly. Integrated preferences was a bad choice, too IMO. That's a good lazy solution for an app like Chrome to support all platforms, but for a proper OS X app I see no reason to avoid a standard prefs window. Prefs shouldn't be given equal prominence to actual application functions. In fact, because you are using words instead of icons and "Preferences" is such a long word, you are actually giving it greater prominence.
I'm lost as to the purpose of the sidebar. I get that it jumps to the currently playing album, but why can I scroll around to other unrelated albums? It's like there are two completely independent browsing frames in this window. Plus I can delete things in the other frame with the "x" button, but they just go away temporarily until I start playing a song again... I just don't get it.
Honestly, besides startup time, iTunes does everything this does better and it does it with a more refined UI. I know the standard response is "great job! can't wait to see the progress!" but I feel like I need to be honest. There are a million iTunes replacements and companions out there. They all suffer from requiring more effort to manage two music playing apps and offer dubious benefit. They all have small dedicated user bases but they never take the platform by storm like they seem to be hoping to. I'll keep it around as I would like to see if it can handle a 20,000 song library with future updates, but I don't see myself using it over iTunes. Sorry.
EDIT - Before you reply about the draw of features like extended filetype support, last.fm and queuing, consider that almost every iTunes replacement/companion (and there literally are dozens of them) has these features already. That's also a reason to take comments like "Can't stand iTunes bloat, definitely interested!" with a grain of salt. If these people were actually receptive to change, they most likely would have switched to an alternative long ago.
The sidebar is a "now playing" playlist and I think the most interesting part of the app. When you double click a song it copies the current library into the sidebar. It lets you edit the order things get played, or what gets shuffled. You can drag and drop songs in and out of it.
You can hide the browser by right clicking the header and selecting 'hidden'.
> The sidebar is a "now playing" playlist and I think the most interesting part of the app.
Why is mine filled with things that aren't playing and I haven't played? If that is its intended purpose, then it needs to convey that a little better by not filling it with other unrelated content for no reason. As someone who rarely uses sub-lists and typically just flips around the main library, copying the entire existing library to the sidebar isn't a great idea. I get it for playlists and other subsections, not so much for the entire unfiltered library.
> You can hide the browser by right clicking the header and selecting 'hidden'.
Good call, although this is a UI issue in and of itself. No function like that should be hidden behind a right click, something many Mac OS X users don't even know how to do.
I'm having trouble putting it in words. Maybe thats a bad sign. Its kind of like the iTunes DJ but not really. I can tell you that nothing in there is unrelated. Imagine the main library is a completely separate entity from the 'player'. The music player plays from the sidebar. You fill the sidebar with songs from the library.
And yeah I probably should add a menu item for hiding the browser.
I got that in a second reading, and I edited my comment accordingly, here is the relevant bit:
> As someone who rarely uses sub-lists and typically just flips around the main library, copying the entire existing library to the sidebar isn't a great idea. I get it for playlists and other subsections, not so much for the entire unfiltered library.
I guess it's not so simple if the app is built around that concept. I always use my main library and rarely have an urge to structure a queue, so maybe it's just not the app for me.
This application is very interesting. I like what you've done with the UI. The top-left album view / controls panel is neat.
As a recent Spotify convert, I may not find as much use out of it as I would have a few months ago, but thank you for sharing a free beta. I will certainly be watching this project in the future.
Also, I think the icon looks great, for what it's worth.
The app is very nice looking, and already packs quite a good amount of features. Special mention to the import from iTunes (although not playlists?), global hotkeys, visualisation of most played stuff, Growl integration... The monitored folders look really cool too.
That said, iTunes+GimmeSomeTune already gives me those features and a killer one: iPod sync. In my case, Enqueue doesn't have quite different features enough to make me switch completely from iTunes (yet?).
It's already very good work though, and the development seems to be going strong. Keep up the good work!
A question: When you import from a location do you consider playlists and audio files?
It seems if you have a folder /music/album/ and inside are the audio files for the album and a playlist for this album that your app would create an entry in library for all items on playlist and the files thus duplicating.
iTunes used to do this but I believe now consolidates.
A few things from my first impression.
1. Importing music did not seem to show a progress dialog of any sort. For a user with a large library this may not be desirable.
2. The equalizer is a nice feature. Adding some more presets to the equalizer may be nice. Most come with a slew . (nit picking)
3. Playlist/History/Preferences areas should be the full width like the library window is. Those 3 areas feel out of place in consideration with the rest of the app.
4. Nice work, you just found a new user! Let me know you would like a guinea pig. Happy to help if I can! (Development or feedback.)
134 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] thread(Disclaimer: I develop a competing os x music player which can add music to (some) iOS devices)
I tried it twice and it always fails on the same file ("Love Is a Many Splendored Thing (feat. Al Alberts)")
I have a question, though: Does this perpetually read or write from the iTunes library XML, or is the import a one-time affair? I use the hell out of ratings and smart playlists, and I want Enqueue to run side-by-side with iTunes rather than replacing it. (i.e., iTunes to manage music, Enqueue to play it back.)
Regardless, this is fantastic work, and I look forward to the finished version. This app is something I would definitely be happy to pay for.
Please also consider adding Internet Radio.
1) Welcome dialog is... out of place. The design is not consistent with Apple UI guidelines, I can't tell the three options are buttons.
2) The cancel button on the welcome dialog looks like an odd man out. It's just floating there in the center, and I think the caption (cancel) is also something you can improve.
3) I think the now-playing thing in the sidebar needs to be pushed down by ~60 pixels, basically starting under the main bar across the rest of the screen. It's not very symmetric the way it is now. You should also have a divider between the close buttons and the now playing section - see Chrome.app for a good example of doing it smoothly.
4) Playlists: now change when I hover over the entries, I was expecting them to go blue. Clicking on them has no effect, I must double-click. non-intuitive.
5) I love the statistics and charts in History, but I wonder if the name is accurate? I'm seeing a breakdown of my music collection, but the only "true" history tab is "Recently Played" which is also given the least prominence.
6) When starting the app, the whitespace stretching from under the now playing section to the bottom of the screen in the sidebar is jarring. It doesn't look nice empty, I'm assuming something will show up there at some point in my playing around with it.
7) Playlists uses an entirely different UI from Library. I like Library's detail view drilldown. I think something like that should be used for the playlists too. See point #4.
That's all for now. May update later with more feedback.
Good work. It looks very promising. I love that it's fast and not-bloated.
EDIT:
No way to turn off Growl messages? Oops.
EDIT:
Add Playlist -> then press esc. The playlist gets added anyway with the default name.
Playlist list needs right-click functionality, even if it's the same menu that shows up when clicking the cog. Don't disappoint your users expectations as to how an interface will act.
EDIT:
Playlist tab's "Add Playlist" pretends to be a tab but it's actually a button. Very confusing. Don't do that - buttons are buttons, tabs are tabs. Even if they're right-aligned.
EDIT:
I think you have a bug when you turn on repeat and shuffle in the middle of a song. When the song ends, it will be repeated immediately, then everything works out.
You should be able to turn them off from the Growl preference pane. I was always under the impression that this was the recommended way to do things, the idea being to have a central place to control them. Now that full Growl costs money and people start using Mist (which as far as I know has no central pref pane to turn off notifications) I guess devs will have to start adding individual Growl options to every app.
FWIW, I've been paid thousands of dollars as an outside consultant to just look at an app provide my initial feedback. If it were just whimsical, subjective musings, I can assure that would not be the case.
Don't point them out like facts.
Looks great on first impression, will keep playing with it.
Also, sent you an email :)
It's a small (and free) music player.
This is phenomenal. Were you a Windows Media Plyaer v8-v11 user? The playlist on the side reminds me of my favorite feature from the WMP8 days, where I could queue up music even while another album played. It was wonderful, and when I went Mac full-time nearly a decade ago, I lost the easy queueing in iTunes (where I had to create a playlist every single time).
Bravo, this is a great app and I would love to support it. I'd be willing to pay $39, but that may just be me. I'm going to switch to it full-time and see what happens.
And I don't need the same piece of software to handle my iPhone and my music library. Don't bother supporting iPhone sync, it's just not part of the value of a good music player. I can open iTunes when I sync (and now with iOS 5, I don't think I'll ever need to manually sync again).
If you want a gratis NewsBlur premium account, let me know: samuel@ofbrooklyn.com. It's the only way I know to actually pay you for such great software.
The other thing, so far Enqueue does not support syncing back to iTunes, so I won't have my star ratings and all that stuff...
Otherwise, the app is fairly solid. The design could use a bit of tweaking, but that's pretty much it.
I hate to say it considering the other feedback, but I'm not a fan of the UI. The giant words instead of icons, off colour and sort of grafted on now playing box, and no ability to hide the "browser" all put me off pretty strongly. Integrated preferences was a bad choice, too IMO. That's a good lazy solution for an app like Chrome to support all platforms, but for a proper OS X app I see no reason to avoid a standard prefs window. Prefs shouldn't be given equal prominence to actual application functions. In fact, because you are using words instead of icons and "Preferences" is such a long word, you are actually giving it greater prominence.
I'm lost as to the purpose of the sidebar. I get that it jumps to the currently playing album, but why can I scroll around to other unrelated albums? It's like there are two completely independent browsing frames in this window. Plus I can delete things in the other frame with the "x" button, but they just go away temporarily until I start playing a song again... I just don't get it.
Honestly, besides startup time, iTunes does everything this does better and it does it with a more refined UI. I know the standard response is "great job! can't wait to see the progress!" but I feel like I need to be honest. There are a million iTunes replacements and companions out there. They all suffer from requiring more effort to manage two music playing apps and offer dubious benefit. They all have small dedicated user bases but they never take the platform by storm like they seem to be hoping to. I'll keep it around as I would like to see if it can handle a 20,000 song library with future updates, but I don't see myself using it over iTunes. Sorry.
EDIT - Before you reply about the draw of features like extended filetype support, last.fm and queuing, consider that almost every iTunes replacement/companion (and there literally are dozens of them) has these features already. That's also a reason to take comments like "Can't stand iTunes bloat, definitely interested!" with a grain of salt. If these people were actually receptive to change, they most likely would have switched to an alternative long ago.
You can hide the browser by right clicking the header and selecting 'hidden'.
Why is mine filled with things that aren't playing and I haven't played? If that is its intended purpose, then it needs to convey that a little better by not filling it with other unrelated content for no reason. As someone who rarely uses sub-lists and typically just flips around the main library, copying the entire existing library to the sidebar isn't a great idea. I get it for playlists and other subsections, not so much for the entire unfiltered library.
> You can hide the browser by right clicking the header and selecting 'hidden'.
Good call, although this is a UI issue in and of itself. No function like that should be hidden behind a right click, something many Mac OS X users don't even know how to do.
And yeah I probably should add a menu item for hiding the browser.
> As someone who rarely uses sub-lists and typically just flips around the main library, copying the entire existing library to the sidebar isn't a great idea. I get it for playlists and other subsections, not so much for the entire unfiltered library.
I guess it's not so simple if the app is built around that concept. I always use my main library and rarely have an urge to structure a queue, so maybe it's just not the app for me.
As a recent Spotify convert, I may not find as much use out of it as I would have a few months ago, but thank you for sharing a free beta. I will certainly be watching this project in the future.
Also, I think the icon looks great, for what it's worth.
That said, iTunes+GimmeSomeTune already gives me those features and a killer one: iPod sync. In my case, Enqueue doesn't have quite different features enough to make me switch completely from iTunes (yet?).
It's already very good work though, and the development seems to be going strong. Keep up the good work!
A question: When you import from a location do you consider playlists and audio files?
It seems if you have a folder /music/album/ and inside are the audio files for the album and a playlist for this album that your app would create an entry in library for all items on playlist and the files thus duplicating. iTunes used to do this but I believe now consolidates.
A few things from my first impression.
1. Importing music did not seem to show a progress dialog of any sort. For a user with a large library this may not be desirable.
2. The equalizer is a nice feature. Adding some more presets to the equalizer may be nice. Most come with a slew . (nit picking)
3. Playlist/History/Preferences areas should be the full width like the library window is. Those 3 areas feel out of place in consideration with the rest of the app.
4. Nice work, you just found a new user! Let me know you would like a guinea pig. Happy to help if I can! (Development or feedback.)