How superior - or not - is iTunes to Windows´best?

[billyboy]

I have been transferring my CD collection onto my external hard drive and I am so impressed with how easy it is.

Is there a Windows program out there that is anywhere near as good as I think iTunes to be? In all seriousness, am I misguided to tell my PC friends that they will be completely blown away by iTunes for Windows?

I set one preference to automatically import a music CD straight into MP3 format. I pop the CD into my slot loader, and iTunes automatically references the CDDB for track info, then imports the tracks into my library. A few minutes later the CD is ejected and I put it in a cupboard hopefully forever. Therefore to get that album into the library in MP3 format has literally only required me to insert and remove the CD, nothing else.

To catalogue the tracks using one idiot proof display panel the process equates to 1 click, 1 click and drag, 2 keystrokes and the album name typed twice. 5 minutes to record and perfectly catalogue an album. And on my 867 Mhz Powerbook, I do this in the background while listening to other music, surfing the web and wordprocessing this.

Downloading streams is even more stupidly easy. Right click a playlist in MP3.com for instance and a millisecond later the link is on my desktop. I press "+" for a new playlist, type in a name, click and drag the link icon into the playlist. Bang, 149 streamed tunes ready to play, and nothing stored on my hard drive. It is sickeningly slick. Or is this the norm on Windows too and I should just shut up and be happy being a deluded minority maccer?

 

[Schiffi]

Streams work fine in Windows.

However nothing matches the other features you mentioned. Brag away.

 

[King Cobra]

Don't forget iTunes also can work with and play AAC.

Versiontracker yielded NO freeware AAC encoder/player results for Windows when I performed a search a week ago. The best thing for AAC encoding currently for Mac, Windows, etc. is Quicktime, not iTunes, not another encoder, etc. iTunes does some of the encoding work, but with iTunes 4 and Quicktime 6.3, you have AAC encoding for free. You don't even need QTPro.

It is only a matter of time before someone completes a Windows code for supportive AAC encoding with Quicktime.

 

[DVDSP]

Originally posted by King Cobra
It is only a matter of time before someone completes a Windows code for supportive AAC encoding with Quicktime.

And that "someone" could very well be Apple!! Come on iTunes for Windows!

I'm just rooting for higher iTMS sales here

 

[MarksEvilTwin]

Removed

 

[King Cobra]

Before I ever used iTunes I was trying out the latest versions of Musicmatch Jukebox, SoundJam, and Audion for the "best" computer music player, at least in my opinion, at the time.

SoundJam was not bad. At the time the visual frequency reception meter was immediate and responsive. This is one thing that sticks out in my mind about SoundJam as a plus.

Do yourself a favor: Click the triangle on the left side of the yellow shape displaying the current song. See those visual bars "travel" up and down?

In SoundJam, smaller dots were used, and they traveled much faster. At the time, I was also using my 233MHz iMac with OS 9.1, not a G4 or a G5, just a G3, so just imagine how fast those dots traveled in SoundJam. They peaked the most intense sound, stuck there for a split second, then dropped down smoothly like a rock.

The SoundJam equalizer, though, used a linear frequency scale on one axis when it was programmed. Traditional I vs. Hz scales read with the Hz. scale in the form of 2^x, or (some number)^x.

Also, SoundJam was not free. You paid for the equalizer settings.

The interface was acceptable, but not great. It's been at least 2 years since I touched the software, so it's hard to remember any other details.


When I tried out Audion at the time, it was version 2.5. Again, another pay software.

I remember playing with the Audion interface colors with a built in option to do just that. It was sort of entertaining.

Audion had options at the time, as well as a rating scale, more analog than I would have liked, though. iTunes was not the first to include a rating system for your songs, and it did not include them for over 2 years, but Audion did not do bad with their version of a song-rating system.

Any song I played in Audion sounded awful. Perhaps it was a preferece setting I missed, or perhaps there was a quick mention in the Help section I overlooked, but I could not any song I had to play like a song.


MusicMatch did not require a shareware pay, but at that time, I had to click off the launching pop-up per launch of MusicMatch.

I particularly liked the interface of MM. It also incorporated the CD photo feature that iTunes didn't until version 4.

The color scheme they used was a dark cyan with black. There was a section on the bottom of the single MM window for every song you wanted to play.

I remember that I could not make playlists in MM. Instead, every song I didn't want to have played had to be removed in MM instead of being check marked, as in iTunes. Also, I do not remember seeing an equalizer setting.


DVDSP, perhaps this is true. But I also bet you Windows users are working on a beta software to do just this, as well.

 

[ewinemiller]

I think you would be misguided to tell your friends that iTunes will blow them away. Unless there is some super secret special functionality of iTumes I have somehow missed, it really doesn't strike me as significantly different than Window Media Player. I use both every day and they both are fine tools for riping, building playlists, listening to music, burning CDs. etc..

I did rip everything to AAC on the Mac because I have an iPod. I also copied all those files to the PC laptop and use a third party codec to listen to them through Windows Media Player. In a head to head I think I prefer WMP just a bit mostly because the quality of the downloaded track information seems to be a little better but I have no hard data to quantify that.

 

[zvitali]

I can comment on the first feature you mentioned. RealOne player can be configured so that after you insert a CD, it automatically starts and then asks you if you want to record the tracks. If you click yes, then it will find the CD info and will start recording. Pretty simple.

I am a PC user, but hope to switch pretty soon. I haven't used iTunes much, but have to say that the quality of the sound differs a lot amont the music players. I tried quite a lot of stuff, including WMP, RealOne, WinAmp, Sony's SonicStage and MusicMatch and have to acknowledge that MusicMatch sounds the best of all, and the worst is WMP. SonicStage is the most user friendly. I just hope iTunes combines all these important properties in one nice package.

 

[ColdZero]

I actually like winamp a lot on the PC side. It doesn't have all the features that iTunes has, but it is streamlined and gets the job done.