Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
iTunes is a nice piece of software that does the things I need, has some really cool features and a nice interface. It also benefits from the interesting advantage Apple has in my mind when compared to Microsoft.
Windows Media Player: Media library? I don't want no stinking repository of song information taking up my hard drive! Even if I did, I sure wouldn't want a Microsoft app to be in charge of it. I bet it does sneaky things behind my back ...
iTunes. Store files in the media library? Well, it can't hurt ... I'd better fill in all this missing information so things can sort properly ...
As you might realise, I haven't even tried using Media Player the same way I use iTunes, and I most likely never will either. I stuck to Winamp for playing music and making playlists, so that's where my refernce point is. I don't know what my opinion would be if I'd met Media Player 9 with no opinion either way about Microsoft, but as it is my opinion will always be biased negatively. From what I can tell, they share many features, and I suspect the largest difference is that iTunes may have a nicer interface. It will be interesting to read direct comparisons once iTunes shows up on Windows.
In any case, the main reason I migrated my whole music collection from PC to Mac wasn't that I fell in love with iTunes. The main reason was that I planned to get an iPod and had read that it was by far nicest to use the iPod with iTunes on the Mac. In the process I cleaned out my music library quite a bit and got to know iTunes' builtin tools for editing track information very well.
When it comes to screen real estate, iTunes feels a little bulky. Nice corners, tasteful spaces and readable font sizes means it takes up a lot more space than my previous main music player Winamp. There is a collapsed window mode that's small, but it still could be smaller.
However, the design philosophy of OS X pretty much makes this a non-issue. Closing a window does not (normally) mean closing a program, and thus iTunes keeps going when you close the window to reclaim your space. Click the dock icon and it's back just the way you left it. Also, control-clicking the icon gives you access to basic controls as well, so in the end I haven't missed the mini-mini windowshade mode of Winamp much.
Smart playlists are a really neat idea. They work like a filter of your song collection, a search result or whatever metaphor you like best. Anyway, what you do is define a number of criteria for the songs to be included in the playlist. Say all pop songs the titles of which contain the letter a that you have rated three out of 5 stars or better that haven't been played in the past 2 months and no more than seven times in all. You can also limit the size of the list in time or megabytes and set one selection criteria for the limit (I'd like to see several criteria in a future update). Making it all even more useful, you can set smart playlists to update in real time. So when a song on your "least played" playlist is finished it'll drop out of the list since it's now the most recently played song. I haven't been able to come up with any really creative smart playlists yet, but I hope to do so in time.