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

[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).