iTunes for Windows: far from perfect

I downloaded Apple’s iTunes the day it came out. Steve Jobs hailed it as “the best Widnows app ever.” Sorry Steve, but it’s far from the best. I agree that iTunes has a lot of great features — the smart playlists are nice, you can rank songs, and it syncs to an iPod. However, there are too many shortcomings in the program for me to use it on a daily basis.

Importing songs and managing the database in iTunes is a nightmare. There is no option to remove duplicate entries, and you can’t have the program rescan a folder for new songs without it importing all the songs in the database. Winamp does this without a hitch.

The crossfading support is sketchy. Yes, it will blend the songs together and the default setting is five seconds of crossfading, but there is no gapless output support. If you set the crossfading to zero, iTunes doesn’t remove the half second gap between songs like a CD player does. You can easily set this in Winamp by configuring the DirectSound output plugin to buffer 150ms before the next track and opt to cut silence at 40dB. Apple needs to introduce this feature to stay competitive.

iTunes’ support of ID3 tags is also far from impressive. I tag my files in ID3v1.1 with Lyrics3 v2.00 because it saves the track information at the end of the file. This has been common practice among audiophiles for quite some time because it is easy on your hard drive. When you update a song with ID3v2, the whole file is rewritten to the drive whereas with ID3v1.1, it just rewrites the end of the file. Your hard drive will live longer as a result. iTunes doesn’t support Lyrics3 extended tags at the moment.

Also, you can make playlists in iTunes, but you can’t export them to a common format. iTunes will let you export a playlist as XML but no other player out there that I know of lets you import XML playlists. Once you make a playlist in iTunes, it will only work in iTunes. The programmers need to add .M3U support.

I like the native support for MP4 (AAC) in iTunes, but the program’s ripping ability is limited. The codec works great but you can’t choose how you want to name files on the system. Apple clearly wants you to only use iTunes when accessing your music, so file names don’t matter, right? Wrong. Nero, Exact Audio Copy, and Easy CD-DA Extractor all support MP4 and they let you manage file names.

Sorry Apple, iTunes is nice to play with, but I’m sticking with tried and true Winamp for my everyday listening.

Unless you are not familiar with the company, you might have missed the fact that apple does not compete with features. What they are best at is combining feautures to create an overall solution that simply works. you just have to look at their products to realize this. i mean no offense, for i am a believer of choice. if winamp works for you, and heck i know it probably does, then good for you. Itunes may never have even half of the features that winamp 5 has now. But most of these features that will never make it to itunes will be the ones that most ordinary users will not be needing, lest be discovered if incorporated into itunes the way it is done in winamp. Just to illustrate: the method you proposed for a gapless playback of a playlist in winamp….you said that it can be easily done in winamp by “configuring the DirectSound output plugin to buffer 150ms before the next track and opt to cut silence at 40dB”. The 2nd question, do you really think that that was easy and discoverable? and the First and most importand question, would ordinary computer users care?

You’ve got to remember, iTunes came from the Mac. So, it uses the Apple interface for multimedia, QuickTime. That’s where you’ll find things like directsound buffer sizes.

I’m not a normal computer user. So I agree, if able is going to claim that iTunes is the best windows program ever then they should have the features that I want. My biggest gripe with ALL Apple products is their lack of customization. I’d rather have a program be overly customizable than the “user friendly.” But that’s just how I am; I realize this. Basically I’ll wrap up my rant with this: iTunes is meant to be the only progam that you use to listen to music and those music files should be aac files. If what you’re doing varies from this then you’ll end up ****ing about iTunes.

Long Live Winamp :)

Bingo. Long live WA5 – the best music player/database ever created.

Windows and (specially) Linux users are used to have hard to use but very configurable applications. Steve Job’s proposal for personal computers is way different, things have to just work, simply work. The problem might be that advanced users might like to toy with it and such thing won’t be possible in an iApplication, lets call it.

I’m using iTunes, by the way, it sounds same as Winamp when using ASIO output (Winamp with DirectSound has not such a perfect output). Linux’s just as good as ASIO.

So, iTunes is simplier and easy to use, they don’t expect you to use other applications or a more advanced use of computer. If so, guess Winamp is ur answer =P.