The Hickensian
35 comments
Waiting for Songbird to nest on OS X
Despite what I said last year, working completely off a Powerbook does work (now that I have a functioning powerbook of course!). Only one thing mars the experience – high CPU usage from iTunes.
I have a lot of hungry apps open, Fireworks and Omniweb can be quite greedy, but they’re beginners next to iTunes with its range of 31-60%. Obviously, playing music from another source (such as radio or iPod) would solve this, but I prefer being able to play music from my computer. Especially when I have bluetooth niftiness such as Salling Clicker pausing iTunes whenever there’s a phone call.
Playing music is important part of work and home life, but on OS X, there seems to be no alternatives to iTunes. Audion has long since died, and while its still available, its no match for iTunes for managing and playing a library of music.
This is why I’ve been keeping an interested eye on SongBird – an open source XUL based app for playing media. I have no idea whether it uses less CPU, or when a version for OS X will arrive, but I’m really keen to try it. I love what they stand for and the approach they’re taking. I have high hopes! (I also love the sound of this job, shame I’m not qualified! :D ).
So in the meantime, if anyone has any ideas for lower CPU music playback on OS X, or tips to reduce iTunes CPU usage, I’d love to hear them. Have I missed a good OS X alternative?
Update: Some of the comments gave me an idea – I turned off my Volume Logic plugin and CPU dropped dramatically! Aha, culprit found!
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karmatosed said 1129 days ago:
I also work off a powerbook completely myself and would be very interested to see what alternatives come across. My CPU is always having a bouncy time due to iTunes so I am interested in seeing what anyone else can suggest.
Kuswanto said 1129 days ago:
Do you know SkiTunes? http://skitunes.iindigo3d.com/
Not as pretty as iTunes, but it does play mucis.
I just notice that there’s no text cursor (blinking ”|”) when i am yping. This is a problem, i can located my text cursor when editing the comment. On FF 1.5.3.
Mark Lawler said 1129 days ago:
30-60% !?
I just checked my cpu usage using top on iTunes and mine seems to average between 5-15%. I’m running the latest version of Mac OS X and iTunes, and using sound enhancer, equaliser, sound check and crossfader playback. I have no idea why yours is so high, I have a 667mhz DVI powerbook which I’m sure is much less powerful than yours. So unless you are constantly running it with the visualiser on or something I have no idea why it would be doing that.
I also have quite a large music collection (about 25gb) and use a whole lot of smart playlists.. So beats me!
Marcus Taylor said 1129 days ago:
Hmm… I’m a complete Powerbook user (with Cinema Display of course!) and didn’t even realise iTunes ate all that CPU. Just opened Activity Monitor and – hey presto! – iTunes was vying for the top spot. I’ve found ways to optimise PhotoShop but not much else. I could always switch off iTunes, but when you’re in code mode nothing other than deep progressive house will do to get me through the day! But I guess that’s another thread…
KB said 1129 days ago:
30+%? Really? I use iTunes more or less constantly on my PowerBook (an early 2005 model) and its CPU usage usually hovers in a 5-10% band. Occasionally, for no apparent reason, it will get greedier, but quitting and reopening iTunes restores it to saner levels.
Chris McElligott said 1129 days ago:
I have a 1.33ghz 12” Powerbook and my iTunes is as of me typing this, taking 7% with Sound Check and the equalizer on.
alex morris said 1129 days ago:
i would advise against keeping your itunes library on your pb if you can avoid it, laptop hds are fickle little monkeys and unless you are running an uber tight backup regime then you’re heading for a fall sometime soon.
i work exclusively off a 17” 1.5ghz pb hooked into my media server (old mac) and stream the itunes library from that.
cpu use never ever goes above 15%
happy days
Jon Hicks said 1129 days ago:
That gave me an idea – I turned off my Volume Logic plugin and CPU dropped dramatically! Aha!
Alex said 1129 days ago:
VLC all the way!! My gripe with iTunes is the wat it “manages” my music library, the messy navigation when your library gets huge (I like to browse using the directory structure on my mac) and it’s lack of support for WMAs (I never encode using WMA, but share music with family that do).
With VLC I just set up a playlist that contains my music folder, and then browse as if I were in finder.
Plus it had a low CPU overhead, and can play all of your video files too! Oh, and it’s open source!
Tauquil said 1129 days ago:
Been looking at my iTunes for the last couple of songs and it’s never hit more than 15% usage, normally hovering around 4.3% (On a MBP).
Something’s got to be a tad iffy if you’re averaging between 30-60%...
Alex said 1129 days ago:
iTunes shouldn’t be using that much CPU, and if you look at the discussions on Apple’s forums it sounds a lot like a bug:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2447804&
There’s a lot of people talking about it on various threads, with CPU issues on Mac OS and Windows XP.
I say this only because my Macs and PC seem to use around 3% CPU for iTunes.
CottonIJoe said 1129 days ago:
iTunes runs on 5-15% CPU usage on my iMac G5. No need for me to look for alternatives…
Marcus Taylor said 1129 days ago:
And VLC has an icon to die for in your dock!
alex morris said 1129 days ago:
VLC is great at what it does but it does feel kinda agricultural?
Either someone needs to invest some money on the interface or apple needs to buy it and integrate all that goodness into quicktime.
and that icon… a cone? a frickin cone?
Stew said 1129 days ago:
Just checked my usage and it was about 15 – 20%.
Went into itunes preferences and turned off the “Sound Enhancement” dropped the usage to 3 to 4% much happier now.
Thats on a 1.25Ghz G4 Mini streaming the music off a windows server but set as being my own music library (mounted drive)
Christian said 1129 days ago:
Strange. Even on my old iBook 500, I didn’t have such a problem.
Now on my Powerbook 1,5 Ghz, iTunes takes mostly between 0,4% and 1% of CPU, but never more than 4% when playing music locally.
karmatosed said 1129 days ago:
Well turning off the sound enhancement and plugin helped me too so now I am also a happier bunny.
Patrick Haney said 1129 days ago:
Ouch. 30% of your CPU? I hope that plugin wasn’t too useful because I’d never enable it again.
Speaking of Omniweb, I gave it a fair try in the past week and I’m back to Firefox. The Sneaky Peeks were interesting, and I really want to like Omniweb, but I think a memory leak was causing issues with my MacBook Pro, wreaking havoc on OS X and constantly slowing my 2.0 GHz CPU to a painful crawl. Since I switched back to Firefox, everything seems fine.
6ft5 said 1129 days ago:
I have all my music on an external Lacie disk and play music through my laptop with hardly any CPU-usage at all!
Alexis Gallisa said 1129 days ago:
VolumeLogic certainly does add a bit of CPU even on my Dual G5. I typically see my processor use go up from 10%/12% to 18%/20%
One thing you want to make sure to do is to turn off the meters display. This seems to add a good 5% or more to CPU use. Other than that, I love that little plugin for use with small speakers (kicking myself for buying the apple pro speakers and iSub with my old Quicksilver). Audiophiles will say that you shouldn’t mess with equalizer settings since the music has already been mastered in studio settings, but in real world settings most peoples desktop speakers are not studio quality and AAC/MP3 compression adds its own amount of quality loss. One other plugin which I highly recommend is iVolume. It does a much better job at setting the soundcheck volume setting than iTunes does since it analyzes your music to a certain db, whereas iTunes tries to average all your music out.
Cam Trollope said 1129 days ago:
Um, mine’s about 80%!! I know Frank Sinatra was a hell of a guy, but enough to take 80% of my CPU usage….
Just restarted itunes with Activity Monitor running, and now it’s running at a nice 4-5%.
One curious thing though: I had to start itunes twice after it was using 80%. The first time i started it, it said i didn’t hve enough memory!?? I’m running a PB 1.5Ghz, 1.5GB ram.
Strange.
Anatoli Papirovski said 1129 days ago:
As much as I like the fact that Songbird is an alternative to iTunes, it doesn’t justify the direct rip-off of iTunes’ interface. That’s the one and only reason I will NEVER use Songbird. Any developer who copies an interface and can’t even admit it, is bad developer and one I have no interest in. My CPU usage is around 5% – 10% most of the time, nothing to get worried about.
Adam Schilling said 1128 days ago:
@Anatoli Papirovski: are you referring to the crystal-like display iTunes borrowed from most physical CD/DVD players? ;-) Just because something appears to be copied doesn’t mean it has been, or that it is bad. There are always other considerations, like standards (official, or not), usability, and familiarity. Think search engines. Or piano keyboards. Or maybe even car dashboards. A certain sameness is inherent. I actually find anything too different to be a hassle: “you mean I have to learn how this works?
sigh”.Markus Altendorff said 1128 days ago:
Well, iTunes doesn’t go above 5-10 % on my 12” PowerBook G4 – unless i switch on the equalizer and/or the “bouncy bars” visualizer. (Spam following:) A nice way of keeping an eye on CPU, network and stuff – if you can spare some pixels in the menu bar – is MenuMeters http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/
Daniel Beattie said 1128 days ago:
Seems like you rproblem’s been solved Jon, but I’ll add my penny’s worth anyway. I too work based on a powerbook and my iTunes is hovering around 7-8% all the time. I love iTunes! Songbird does look interesting, but I think it would have to be REALLY good to drag me away from it.
Chris Fonnesbeck said 1128 days ago:
I would be very hesitant to move to software (Songbird) that has already taken this long to come to the Mac platform. That indicates that they are less than committed to developing for OS X, and so you are likely to get hung out to dry both on updates, new versions, and support. Opera is an example—the Mac version languished for years behind the Windows version, and to this day is a pretty marginal browser for OS X, while the Windows browser is pretty good.
Onetimer said 1128 days ago:
There was once a music player. Yes, way before iTunes. Audion. From the guys that also created the wonderful FTP-Client Transmit. Today it isn’t developed anymore, but freely avaible. Reacts alot more snappier than iTunes and eats less CPU-time. Get it here:
http://www.panic.com/audion/download.html
cheers.
Jon Hicks said 1126 days ago:
@ Onetimer – I love it when people read the entry before commenting ;o)
Jon said 1126 days ago:
Seems like you don’t have to wait for Songbird much longer:
Screenshot of Songbird on OS X
Jon Kantro said 1125 days ago:
I am a learning Objective-C developer (since April) and I have always wanted to create a music player for Mac (not necessarily and alternative to iTunes). I have already sketched full UI plans with a friend of mine ( http://improvpastence.com ) and I know that if I keep practicing I would be able to code it. This all sounds great, but as someone had mentioned before there was skiTunes. I knew the developers of the application (they were only in high school) and the project died. This was not only because of school work, but because of how big of a task it was and how much involvement it needed. In the end though, I often find myself thinking that anyon trying to make this type of app would be a total failure (specifically for the Mac platform). Call me pesimistic but that is my view. As far as Songbird is concerned, what makes you think that this won’t be a resource hog? All I will say is integrated web broswer via mozilla components and XUL. Both of those in one app on a Mac alone will cause it to be a hog. i.e: Unless you are using G4 or G5 optimized build of FireFox it will be a hog (at least on my PB).
Titus said 1125 days ago:
You could always try Air Whisper or MP3 Dock from Softwarium – have not been updated for a long time – but do use less cpu. I use a 17” powerbook, and itunes hovers between 6-12% usage. Air Whisper uses only 5% at most.
It’s very basic, (doesn’t have any equalizer etc) but it does work. Just drop your itunes music folder on the player and away you go…
Jaakko Knuutila said 1125 days ago:
Songbird is coming to OS X soon, check out http://www.songbirdnest.com/node/487
Peter Holloway said 1124 days ago:
I use a PC laptop as my main machine, and have struggled to find a player I’m happy with. Windows Media Player adds rights management to my ripped CDs. Real Player installs update and notification software without asking. I’ve been using Winamp for some time – it’s basic, and I’m not too sure about it’s ripping features. Songbird has now been installed and is up and running. I’m sure, as a 0.1 release there will be some problems, but I like the style. I don’t think it’s an iTunes clone. I did try this as well on my laptop, but hated the interface – it just didn’t seem to be obvious to use.
I’m all for choice, and Songbird at least adds to that choice. If you do install it, please let me us know what you think of it.
john galt said 1123 days ago:
The only alternative for a player that I know of that plays multiple formats on OSX is Cog (http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/). It doesn’t have any kind of file management at the moment, just a player. The real interesting application is amarok (http://amarok.kde.org/). downside is it is kde (linux). However, some have gotten it to work natively (http://www.khaitu.com/projects.php?item=23), but the process isn’t clear for non-techies. If amarok can make its way to OSX I will be doing cartwheels down the street.
James Chalmers said 1115 days ago:
Not bad. I find the range of open – source apps out there really encouraging.
Talking about macs, anyone heard of the program designed for the new macbooks with their motion sensor protection thing designed to protect the hdd from sudden shock/movement head crashes, that changes it so that when you move your macbook, it makes cinematic lightsaber sounds.
Might need to try that out sometime. soon as i can get my hands on it!