No iTunes for you

[mmcirvin]

iTunes for Windows requires Windows XP or 2000. This should not have been a surprise, since recent versions of iTunes don't support old legacy versions of Apple's own OS either. It's a pity, though, because ever since Steve Jobs announced its imminence, I'd been eagerly anticipating the day when samantha2074 would no longer have to use MusicMatch to manage her iPod. Some early reports imply that the user interface is sluggish on older PCs, anyway. Well, she's starting to get a hankering for a laptop.

That Belkin memory card reader should be smaller, prettier, and cheaper, but I want one, since it enables something I've wanted to do for a long time. I take my iPod on vacation anyway; I'd love to be able to take a gigabyte of photos and stash them there. The price does make me hesitate, since for that kind of money you can just buy a hefty second memory card, which gives you less extra capacity, but is also much less cumbersome. I might wait for some independent word on how well it works.

Further thought: You know, it's interesting that Apple added firmware support for external mics, memory card readers, and iPhoto syncing over Firewire, but left the construction of the actual devices to a third party. Given the general pattern of these things, somebody else ought to jump into the game with a better attempt. Paging Griffin?...

Comments

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

When my friend tried to talk me into getting an iPod (something he desires more than I do) I looked into whether I'd have to use the odious software that is MusicMatch, and apparently iPod does support m3u and pls playlists, so you could use WinAMP instead of music-match. I think. Not sure how easy it is-- depends on weather Windows is willing to treat iPod like a regular drive (be it removeable or whatnot), I'd think.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

whether, not weather. Also, call me when iPod has a frikken FM tuner. Geez, that's the one feature I want most, and sometimes it's the hardest to find.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't listen to radio much these days, but they've gotta add an FM tuner eventually. Most of their up-and-coming competitors offer them or will soon, so they'd better get cracking.

I think Windows can mount the iPod as an ordinary drive. What MusicMatch offers is auto-sync, but that's not really necessary. However, I'd ask someone more knowledgeable about these things.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

FM tuners (and AM would be nice, but I suspect the HD would create too much RFI for AM) generally imply a recording feature, so you can record (or even time-shift using a timer) your radio programs of choice. Recording means adding a microphone, because hey, why does it have a record button if I can't dictate?

(The direction some makers are taking into video is just silly, as long as battery life is what it is.)

I never understood the benefit of synchronization, either for files or email-- I never know if deleting a file somewhere means that both copies will be gone once I've synched, or the file I deleted will be restored, or what-- I'd rather delete a file twice than delete once by accident and lose thefile for good, even though I have another copy. So for the most part I prefer to manually "sync" and organize what's on portable devices. (Not that I've managed to accept them into my lifestyle very much. I have a hand-me-down PocketPC that I don't know what to do with.) Likewise, auto-sync is almost always built into the most heavy-handed applications that I try not to use anyway. I think I'll dislike iTunes for the same reason I hate Music Match-- trying to do all things, and not doing any really well. They tend to be option-poor, inflexible, etc. Ranjit tried out iTunes tonight and from what he said I know it's option-poor compared to my ripper, CDEX. I have little doubt that it burns CDs as well as Nero Burning ROM. (doesn't help that his PC/CD-RW combination is half-defective, heh)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

As a guy who doesn't really care much about encoding options, I like iTunes, just because it is pretty solid and has a well-organized user interface that doesn't push evil shit at you-- but the interface makes sense in the context of Mac OS X, maybe not in the context of Windows.

People who want to use third-party codecs, or exert a lot of control over the ripping process, or who just want to organize their music library files any way other than Apple's way, don't usually like it. Like the other iApps, it's a one-stop consumer solution that assumes you're probably a neophyte to start with. It tends to deal poorly with preexisting schemes for managing music files; it can work with references to files located in places other than the iTunes library, but it really wants to pull you into using its scheme. I actually was when I started using it, so I was in the target audience.

It also wants you to buy an iPod. On Windows it will probably appeal most to people who already have or want iPods, because it makes available several features of the iPod that they couldn't use before. There are actually lots of syncing options and they're handled pretty benignly. The default assumption is that the iPod simply mirrors everything in the host drive's library, but you can instead have it mirror the content of selected playlists, or you can turn off syncing of the file library and manually manage the iPod contents.

iTunes/iPod sync not just the song library but also any playlists you have, and also play statistics. What I particularly like are the Smart Playlists: you can have playlists that are selected by search criteria, and they're mirrored on the iPod too. This includes ones that depend dynamically on play statistics, which will update remotely on the iPod as you listen to stuff (this behavior improved with the last few firmware revisions). There's a "song rating" feature that I find stupid, but the whole system also keeps track of time last played and number of times played. So two of my playlists are simply a list of the 200 most-played songs in the library (CB's recording of "Pumpkin, Mrs. Farnsworth" is holding steady at #1), and a list of 40 songs that I haven't listened to in a long time, if ever.

One thing that Windows users will miss is the ability to script it, unless they put in some Windows-specific method. On Macs you can control just about everything it does with AppleScript, so people have devoted lots of energy to adding new features to iTunes that way.

All that said, iTunes is a billion times better than MusicMatch and RealPlayer. Of the heavy-handed players it's almost certainly the best. The people who object to it will be people with elaborate roll-your-own software ecosystems for handling music; that's the case on Macs as well.

[astrange.livejournal.com]

Unless Realplayer plays something other than RealAudio, I think iTunes would have to try really, really hard to be worse.

And there are encoding plugins for it; I think there's one that lets you use the LAME MP3 encoder instead of the default (LAME is much better than any other mp3 encoding tool available, although still not as good as AAC or Vorbis).

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I don't listen to radio much these days, but they've gotta add an FM tuner eventually. Most of their up-and-coming competitors offer them or will soon, so they'd better get cracking.

indeed! Via Gizmodo: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/7021794.htm

The article's about the Samsung player (YP-910GS) that's Napster-branded-- apparently it has line-in and an FM tuner, as well as recording-to-mp3 from both sources. It also has a built-in 5-frequency FM transmitter (though looking at its frequency range makes me note that as far as Seattle is concerned, it's a crowded section of the dial). As usual, the interface is a counterintuitive mess, so naturally the iPod has it there, but it has a longer battery life (when not transmitting FM), it offers USB 2.0, which is speed-competitive with standard Firewire. Same price as the size-equivalent (20GB) iPod, $400, but since it's co-branded with Napster you'll get a couple album's-worth of free songs of your choosing out of the deal, as I recall. Sounds like it has some software issues, both with the PC itself and with Napster, but that's what patches are for.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha, so Samsung/Napster are running this the same way as Dell/MusicMatch. That's probably the only way to do it.

BuyMusic.com is the odd man out, I guess.

In the long run I don't really care who wins this fight, I'm just happy so many companies are starting to come around to selling people some semblance of what they want.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, many people who use iPods on PCs prefer to use an open-source program called ephPod. But when Sam tried it, she wasn't terribly impressed. The main thing she wants is just to be able to use the Composer ID3 tag, and hardly any music software seems to be written with any consideration for classical music; it's all in the pop song paradigm in which all you want to know is album, artist and song title.

The latest version of WMP apparently does support a Composer field, though, as does iTunes. But even iTunes really has a long way to go before it can organize the information that a classical-music listener wants (especially considering that the serious classical-music fan often tends to be a tad obsessive-compulsive). Really you want Movement, Composer, Arranger, Conductor and Soloist fields in addition to the normal ones, at the very least. As it is, people end up cramming this information into the meager available metadata in tangled and arbitrary ways.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I'd like to think that programmers, when not working in the employ of a corporate master, are developing software after their own needs, and that somewhere out there there's a Windows programmer who's also a total sucker for classical music and recognizes the problem. But you're right the current solution would be to cram it into existing fields in arbitrary ways. I can also envision a techno or dance music fan coming up with fields like BPM, author-of-remix, and of course SciFiLoopCount.

Hopefully as mp3-for-sale services become more common, the publishers of music will see the problem as they start to hear from their legitimate buyers. It wouldn't hurt, as I recall you once suggesting, to pull a Tyler Durden on the classical section of the CDDB.

Following all of that, expect to see, under "views" in Windows Explorer (Along with icon, list, details, thumbnails, etc.) one or two (or customizable? but I'd be dreaming) ID3 options, so you can have all songs displayed in the way you want. The risk, of course, is sending a file to someone still running XP, which would be the computing dark ages by comparison, and they're stuck with a moronic-user-created filename that may or may not offer a clue about the song's details.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, I am a programmer in the employ of a corporate master, and for me it's extraordinarily difficult to work up the will to do any more programming in my spare time. I messed around with Cocoa a little a couple of years ago, but didn't get very far. I'd really rather do something else when I'm not getting the paychecks.

However, I get the feeling that there are other programmers whose attitude is very different. Dave Hyatt seems physically unable to stop creating new Web browsers, for instance.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

It may be folly to wonder, but does Windows iTunes work with other devices besides iPod?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Aha, there is the rub. I do not know, but I strongly suspect the answer is no, except in the trivial sense of manually hauling songs out of the iTunes library without using iTunes.

The situation on Macs was once different-- the initial versions of iTunes supported many third-party players-- but support for other players then rotted away after the iPod became a hit.

It's simple, really. iTunes was once a loss leader for Macintoshes, but now circumstances have driven Apple to change their strategy, and iTunes (including the Music Store) is now a loss leader for iPods. Thinking on this will explain everything. Some analysts express bafflement at such things as lack of WMA support, as if the planned profit center were the Music Store, but it's increasingly clear that that's not the case. The Music Store is not profitable-- though according to Apple, it's not a huge money sink either; it's pretty close to breakeven (I don't know if that includes stuff like TV advertising; I doubt it). So that means they can afford to scale it up massively as a further enticement for iPod sales, which is the real revenue stream they're aiming at.

(This also implies that all of their competitor å la carte download services in the PC market are the walking dead unless the economics change profoundly, with the single possible exception of Dell, which I think is developing a branded version of MusicMatch's new music store to integrate with their iPod knockoff.)

So if I had a Windows PC, I probably wouldn't mess with it unless I had or were thinking about buying an iPod, in which case I'd definitely use it.