I'm officially sick to death of iTunes. I can't stand the way it has to load everything I want to play into its database, even streams and other one-off files.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a simple (preferably free) mp3 player for MacOS X? I've tried Audion, and I just didn't quite like the way it worked, though it's much closer.

xAudic (formerly MacOSXAmp) is OK. Or with a little more trouble you can just run XMMS.

I remember trying that one, too, and, though I can't remember now why I didn't like it, there was something quirky that bothered me.

However, as is typical of such things, I found Whamb shortly after posting this, and it seems pretty good so far. It seems to have some of the playlist quirkiness that Audion had, but it seems less intent on it. It seems to be doing not too bad with CPU usage, too.

Nice. I like it. For some reason I skipped right over that in the google search results.

Okay, so does anyone know how to make it so that mp3s, streams, etc. will open in something other than iTunes from my web browser? I'm using OmniWeb mostly.

just change your preferences in iTunes!

ADVANCED CHECKBOX BELOW

good luck

There's an option there to set iTunes to be used for ``Internet Music Playback'', but not to unset it or change it to something else.

I don't have my mac in front of me but I think you want to do this:

Right click on an mp3 somewhere and select "Get Info." There should be an option in the Get Info window to set the default program associated with that file type.

I'll check to make sure that that's correct when I get home.

- trs

**EDIT** : In the Get Info window, There's an "Open With" section where you can set the default app for that file type.

Yup. That's what I already did, and it works for double-clicking mp3s from the Finder, but it doesn't work in my browser; it still runs iTunes, even for Ogg streams which it can't play at all.

I think if you go to IE and change the associations ("File Helpers") it will really change your Internet Config file, which other apps like OmniWeb also use for mapping.

Whamb has a preference button to associate itself with the appropriate things. I'd already clicked that. When I got to the File Helpers in IE, it was already in the appropriate places. However, it still opened in iTunes. Then I noticed that many of the involved mime types were set to download only, so I changed them to play with Whamb. That led IE to still open them in iTunes. Then I noticed that it had before downloaded .pls files, which were still Finder-associated with iTunes, so I changed that to Whamb within the Finder and it started working. Then I had to add Whamb to the acceptable programs to start within OmniWeb and everything was good.

Thanks for finally pointing me in the right direction. It would appear that there are many databases in MacOS X, some of which are now apparently deprecated and unused. I still think it ought to rely on mime types and not filename extensions, but maybe it does, even though I can't see that info in the Finder.

And just imagine when Panther comes out. All that same inconsistency we've come to love in Mac OS X, but twice as fast! I can hardly wait.

Bruno