14 DAY TRIAL // I like iTunes, I use it all the time and have never really felt the need for any other music player. That having been said, it does have its downs as well as its ups, and not everyone loves it equally. On the Mac, there are other music players out there, but most of them are small side programs that only a few people use, the vast majority sticking with Apple's software. viewTunes is one such music player, one that has its own approach on things.
A potpourri of sorts viewTunes combines elements from iTunes, WinAmp and media-center applications. It seems strange and monstrous at first, but after an hour or so, you get used to it. However, most of the benefits that are gained from combining the elements of the different programs are not fully exploited because of silly limitations.
Visually orientated A visually orientated music player may sound quirky, and although it reminds of 'dancing about poetry' it is an interesting approach. Unlike iTunes, viewTunes works heavily with the album covers to show you what music you have in your library. There is no album or artists list, only a list of album covers.
The main window holds three rows of album covers, each with 5 columns. This is the first thing that struck me as being a very bad design move. In a program where you rely heavily on album covers to find what you are looking for, the 5x3 grid is set in place, and you can never see more covers than that on the screen. Software such as this should allow you to resize the window to whatever you think is appropriate, and it should allow you to set the size of the album covers. Something along the lines of how iPhoto lets you scrub the size of images would have been good.
Finding things While the fine tuning part of the search is done by looking at the album covers, the program does offer two means through which to refine the search.
The first is the Sort By Artist/Sort By Album toggle. This lets you change the sorting criteria from albums to artists and back? pretty self explanatory.
The second option at your disposal is an alphabet at the bottom of the viewTunes screen, which will automatically jump you to the selected letter. This approach reminds me of the old jukeboxes, and is something I would expect to see in a Media center application the likes of Front Row. However, since this program works with a keyboard and mouse on a computer, it seems limited.
Once you have found the album you are looking for, double clicking on it will open up a pop-up window with the tracks in that album and a bigger image of the cover. At this point you can add certain songs, or the entire album to the playlist. From within this window, you can also move through the albums, one at a time, using the mouse scroll or the dubiously labeled "Last" and "Next" buttons.
The Playlist The playlist is reminiscent of the way WinAmp works. iTunes functions on an entirely different approach, but since the 'Party Shuffle' was added, it too offers something of this sort.
In viewTunes, the playlist holds the songs that can be played. If a song is not in the playlist, it cannot be played. It is very much the WinAmp approach and nothing like the iTunes one. To make things even worse, the playlist is horribly implemented. Occupying about as much space as the previous, play/pause, next buttons and the volume slider, the playlist can display a whooping six songs at a time.
Once songs are loaded in the playlist, they can be reordered by dragging them around. This is a task which proves to be overly complicated when all you can see is six songs at any given time. It might not have been that bad if there was some "Play Next" option which would add the song just underneath the currently playing one, but there isn't.
There is also a playlist editor, which displays all the playlists you have created, and lets you change between them. It is quite big and can actually fit more than six songs, however, it comes at a price. You cannot change the order of the songs, or add any new ones? your only options are to remove a track or clear the entire playlist, as well as delete the playlist and make a new one.
No biggie I thought, I'll just open up the album details window and the playlist editor and drag and drop between them. It doesn't work, unsurprisingly, because both of these windows are treated as 'alert' windows, much like a save/close/cancel dialogue that will not let you interact with the application or document behind it until you resolve the dialogue.
Dependencies In the documentation, the developer mentions that this program is not intended to be a replacement for iTunes. Not much chance of that happening, since this program basically needs iTunes to function at all. If you do not have an iTunes library stocked with music, then viewTunes will not operate, because it relies on the iTunes library to load the songs.
The second issue is if you don't have album artwork for all your music. Sure, the viewTunes logo looks ok, but if you see it 12/15 times in that little album cover grid you get cored of it really fast. Not to mention that finding anything becomes a royal pain since album covers are the only real way to find anything.
The Good Has an interesting approach to working with the music, which can be appreciated by those visually-orientated.
The Bad Fixed album cover size and window size make browsing unnecessarily tedious. The embedded playlist is far too small to be useful and the playlist browser is far too limited to be used for anything at all.
The Truth viewTunes relies on iTunes to work, however, it is a pain to use, and the limitations it has are plain silly and entirely the fault of bad design choices. You are better off just using iTunes.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
