Songbird. Sweet.

[Mr.Sticky]

Hey,

Well I'm on another cross platform mission.. this time with my audio player. As I posted before i'm trying to get my system seamlessly dual-booting, with apps on both OS's running shared profiles.

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=33677

 

I tried fiddling around with the iTunes library in OSX to point to a shared location only to discover that the song path variable is completely different between XP and OSX. Dead end.

 

I was looking at Foobar2000 but it seems to be only running via X11 which is sub-optimal (but my only option for Gaim at this point). During this research I stumbled upon Songbird. What an awesome (although still young) app! It's a little buggy (at version 0.2) but shows promise.

http://www.songbirdnest.com/

 

Anyway, i've got it up and running on both OS's and was able to hack together a way to share the library.

Since it is a Mozilla based app the process is very similar to profile sharing for Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird/etc.

 

Here's how i did it:

I installed Songbird in windows first, this is necessary to get the song path to work (down near the end).

 

Once it had imported my iTunes library (seamlessly i might add) i shut the app down and copied its profile under (c:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Songbird\Profiles) to my shared profile directory on a Fat32 partition.

Edit the profile.ini and change 'IsRelative=0' then put the full path to the Fat32 partition.

Start it up to make sure it's reading the new path fine.

 

Boot OSX (damn it boots fast eh?)

 

Install and run the same OSX version of Songbird (i'm currently running a 'nightly' build from the 15th).

Quit the app and go to your ~/Library/Application Support/

Open up the profiles.ini again change IsRelative=0 then put the path (/Volumes/[drive and full path])

 

The final trick is fixing the song path variable, as OSX uses /Volumes/DATEN and windows uses d: (my music partition - same idea if you had it on /Volumes/Local Disk and c:)

 

Drop in to Terminal and sudo -s (i generally do stuff as root -it may not be necessary)

make sure you are in the root directory (cd /)

type:

ln -s /Volumes/[the name of your music partition] d: <- in my case, if you have music on c: use that

this will put a symbolic link called d: that points OSX to your music partition (which would be d: in windows).

 

Fire up Songbird and you /should/ be in business. It's workin for me! So now when i make a change to my library in either OS I dont have to do it twice.

 

Cheers!

IAN

[munky]

afaik you can share your itunes library between os x and win32, there were posts about it in the genius bar...?

[Mr.Sticky]

This is true:

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...=itunes+library

 

is a method requiring 'Macdrive' software (which isn't free). It appears to share the library metadata which is the key.

 

 

Using my method, I discovered that music added in OSX will not play correctly in windows as the file path structure does not translate in that direction. Looking at a workaround for this, but it may not be possible with windows..

[Hikari]

I tried Songbird, but it's like totally bloated like Firefox... and it uses XUL and doesn't run natively on Mac OS X. =p