doubleTwist for Mac

It doesn't work anymore

I used this on and off a year or so ago, and thought I'd check it again just to use a player to keep language-learning tracks away from my general music collection (nothing worse than shuffling to one of those when on a run to break rhythm!), and what can I say? Pure garbage. #1 it requested a login... WTF? #2 "New account" would not sync either with Face book not with Twitter accounts, despite these being options. And an account linked with neither, but just a regular email, address returned "server not found". Fuck this for a game of soldiers. The command-line player cmus (cmus.github.io/) was easier to install and use than this! -1 star

I don't what changed, but for some reason many of the songs DT would export to my USB drive for use in my Jeep began showing up on the display with %20 (aka space) in the file names. At first I thought my iTunes music folder had been hosed, but I found the files in iTunes were just fine. After some testing I found the problem is with DT. So it's now been removed. Replaced with Export for iTunes.

Well, it's not a good sign that the app hasn't been updated in four years. Still worse, it turns out that it will create dupes in its library. The only way to avoid that is to compress/hide the .xml version of your iTunes library; of course your iTunes needs that, so you can't operate both doubleTwist and iTunes together in any normal fashion. It will also scan your whole hard drive if you aren't quick about excluding specific directories. I can't see any way to turn off automatic scanning of iPhoto, movies, podcasts, or other things I want doubleTwist to leave alone. The Mac version of their desktop app badly needs work.

doubleTwist scanned all drives connected to my computer when it started up. I then went to preferences and excluded folders and the external hard-drive from future indexing, just keeping the music files I wanted. It then told me that those files already scanned would need to be manually removed. I started on my external hard-drive, removing them from doubleTwist and noticed something odd. It didn't just remove the files from the program, but deleted them outright. Not moved to Trash, but deleted, gone forever. Support's response was little more than 'that's what the program does'.