Topic: iTunes

[Bloodworth]

Anyone else here check out the Windows version of iTunes?  Penny Arcade mentioned it this morning, and I downloaded it and am darned impressed.  It imported the songs from the My Music folder as soon as I started up, it gets my local radio station clearer than my stereo, I can preview songs and purchase them for a measly buck (add up a 9 - 10 song album and that easily beats an $18 CD), and it has some of the nicest visualizations I've seen on a player.  Except for a few specific uses hear and there, this is going to pretty much replace WinAmp for me.

[Grey Ninja]

If I have to pay to use it, that's it for me right there.  Assuming I had a credit card, that money would be better spent on porn.  As far as visualizations are concerned, I am more than content with Milkdrop, and can't possibly imagine what might be better.

Nevertheless, I'll give it a shot.

[Bloodworth]

You only have to pay for songs you want to buy.  The program and radio channels are free, and you can use any mp3s you already have.  

[Grey Ninja]

Alright, I tried it out.  I know that it's only been 10 minutes since I said I would try it, and I honestly tried to give it a chance.  But when I started using it, I just started to feel really dirty, and felt the compulsive NEED to remove it from my computer.

It began with the nightmarish installation.

I ran the executable I got from Apple's website, and ran it.  It promptly loaded for a few minutes (I am having performance issues with hard drive reads because I am too lazy to defragment and my swap file is way huge), then started on its way.  I thought it was a little big for a music player, but I just let it do its thing.  As it continued, it told me to exit all my quicktime programs so that it could install the newest version.  Having finally gotten RID of that blasted infernal media player for good (I thought), I shuddered as I let the installer close my browser and install the infernal quicktime codecs all over again.  When the installer was done, it told me to restart my computer.  I knew that was going to be a problem right there.  Restarting your computer after installing a "simple" app is NEVER good.  It means that something has gone seriously wrong.

I found out what it was when I started up the player.  The thing was as huge as your average quicktime window, and just about as functional.  The reason it wanted me to restart my computer was that it had installed its own custom CDR codecs...  By this point, I was furious.  If I want to burn a CD, I will use Nero, thank you very much.  I don't want my media player installing its own bloody codecs and cluttering up my system worse than it already is.

When I imported my MP3 collection, I cringed as I watched it collect its data and display them in a big pretty screen.  I listened to a peaceful song in Winamp to calm me down while it was doing that.

I listened to one song and watched the Visualization after it did its stuff.  While listening to it, I wondered how in the hell anyone could think that it could replace Winamp.  It doesn't support plugins (that I know of), it takes more than 10 seconds to load (although I still haven't restarted, and the CDR codecs are probably timing out), and is more bloated than Winamp 3.  If I wanted this agrivation, I would buy an Apple...  That's all I have to say on this one.

I am going to go like... burn my hard drive or something.  

PS:  Check out Milkdrop for Winamp.  It's 100X better than iTunes

[Berto2K]

I downloaded it.  There is nothing special about it.  The best part I see to it is being able to make playlists easily.  Other than that, it is a memory hog at 17MB, and very limited in playback controls.  I may leave it on and open it from time to time, but I'm still sticking with winamp.  Winamp also does playback louder too.

[Bloodworth]

Heh heh.  Start out with a bias and that's what you get I guess.  

For what it's worth, I tried Milkdrop, and I think the two are on par really.  I still prefer the iTunes visualizations and certainly like that they display the track info within the visualization when you have it full screen if you want.

You didn't have to install Quicktime.  I know there was a specific option for that, and you must have just rushed through.  I almost didn't install it myself since I rarely use the older version I had anymore.

As for ten second start-ups, etc.  I think that has more to do with your system than anything.  For me at least, I haven't had a program access my files faster, and being able to just type the name of a song in the top and go straight to it is a lot easier than poking around my file structure.

You are right though in saying it can't replace WinAmp entirely, although it may for a lot of people.  If you're using specific plug-ins like ShoutCast, you will still need WinAmp, but for playing mp3s, I prefer iTunes, and being able to check out or buy new music is probably the biggest advantage it has.

I think one thing we can certainly agree on though is that it beats Windows Media Player.  That selfish little app wouldn't quit opening when I put in CDs, even when I disassociated it and associated WinAmp.  Now iTunes has finally rid me of that annoying curse.

[ThePerm]

at school we use macs.....iTunes is freaking spiffy as far as i'm concerned. Ima install it as soon as i get my damned router workign and the internet works(fücking died on monday while i was downloading scrapped princess) in my room. And Bloodworth is right aboiut the bias dealie...

fuck doesnt work on 98!

[Grey Ninja]

Bloodworth, I understand what you are saying.  But I am just really not into the whole form over function thing that Apple has going, and every bit of that philosophy seems embedded into iTunes for me.

I will tell you what my main gripes were with it when I actually tried to use it though.

1)  My music collection is composed about equally of MP3, SPC, and PSF.  In Winamp, every one of those plays just the same.  iTunes will only play MP3s.

2)  iTunes seems intent on creating one big collection from what I see and sorting by the ID3 tags.  I pay no attention to ID3 tags, and play individual songs from my hard drive via Windows Explorer.

3)  In Winamp, I double click a file, and it INSTANTLY plays.  In iTunes, I have to wait for a while if I want to start up cold with a single file.  I realize that my hard drive has access issues at the moment, but that's no excuse for the vast difference in loading speed.

4)  iTunes uses about 3X more memory than Winamp.

5)  iTunes is integrated with Quicktime software, which means that you need Quicktime installed to use iTunes.  I don't like that AT ALL.

Now, in regards to a few comments...

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For what it's worth, I tried Milkdrop, and I think the two are on par really. I still prefer the iTunes visualizations and certainly like that they display the track info within the visualization when you have it full screen if you want.

Try pressing F1 while running Milkdrop.     (Also, it might be cool to hunt down some 3D glasses)

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I think one thing we can certainly agree on though is that it beats Windows Media Player. That selfish little app wouldn't quit opening when I put in CDs, even when I disassociated it and associated WinAmp. Now iTunes has finally rid me of that annoying curse.

I don't play any real CDs...  I converted mine to MP3 long ago.  But on the odd occasion that I do play a real CD, it always plays fine with Winamp.

As for iTunes beating WMP...  I am not so sure about that.  I find that surprisingly... the Microsoft app is a lot less invasive...

[ThePerm]

sets out to create a simple playlist editor.....

[Bloodworth]

1) If you play that many SPCs, etc., then yeah WinAmp is going to be your best bet.

2) This says nothing but prove you hardly touched the software.  Yes, that's how it imported them, but you create your own playlists however you like and you can sort by album, artist, etc.  Plus you can type in just a few characters in the search box to jump to any song you want.  Navigating through file structures in Windows Explorer every time you want to look for a new song easily takes longer.

3) With your admission, this is just silly to bring up.  Your computer's not running well?  Then programs aren't going to run like they're supposed to.    The same programs I have at work don't respond as well on my PC at home. On this machine, I have exactly the same instantaneous response in iTunes as I do in WinAmp.

5) I seriously doubt that they'd give you an option to not install Quicktime if it required it.  They bundle it in, perhaps for the visualizations, but I don't think it's required.  That's also likely part of the extra file size.

7) I have far too many CDs (a few hundred) to hog that kind of storage space and it's far easier to pop them in.  

Perhaps one of the big differences here is that I find this to be a great solution to get digital music legally.  I spent a lot of time seeing what they had in the store, checking out 30-second previews of each song, comparing different takes on songs that were recorded multiple times, etc.  Their copying limits are pretty liberal too.  You can burn songs an unlimited amount of times, burn identical playlists up to ten times (but change the playlist slightly and you could do it more), and have a purchased song on up to three machines without having to pay for it again.

Anyways, I'm not trying to convert you.  It seems that you definitely need WinAmp to play a lot of your files.  Most of all I'm just bothered that you spent very little time checking out the program before you started ranting, and it's clear that you decided you weren't going to like it from the start.  

It's a nice program.  I probably shouldn't have openly declared that it's going to replace WinAmp, but I didn't say it necessarily would for everyone anyways, just for me -- and others like me that rarely need specific plug-ins for niche file types or broadcasting.    

[Caliban]

Here's my experience from itunes:

1-I installed it perfectely and I don't mind the quicktime stuff because that's one of my main media players(I use it to extract audio from videos or edit videos that I have downloaded).

2-Restarts fine.

3-I iniciate Itunes & it says that I cannot yet buy music because the country(Canada) where I live doesn't support it yet.

4-I said "OK" I will just browse the Itunes for videogame & anime sountracks just to check if they have any. Well they don't have what I want so I just mind yelled at the screen to Itunes: Get the **** out of my beast!"

5-I uninstalled it. End of story.

Conclusion: I think Itunes is a good idea but there is no support for Canada yet and they don't have what I want so I will just ignore it for a while until they come with something better.

[Grey Ninja]

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Perhaps one of the big differences here is that I find this to be a great solution to get digital music legally.

One of the benefits of living in Canada is that to obtain music legally, all I have to do is open up Kazaa, and start downloading.  

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Anyways, I'm not trying to convert you. It seems that you definitely need WinAmp to play a lot of your files. Most of all I'm just bothered that you spent very little time checking out the program before you started ranting, and it's clear that you decided you weren't going to like it from the start.

I know.  I freely admit that I didn't give it much chance, but I did TRY.  The invasiveness of it was bothering me before the installation was even finished, and it felt like I was installing MSN Messenger...

And yes, you are correct that I decided I didn't like it when I first loaded it up.  I saw it take up half the screen and I saw all the features I knew I would never use, and I went back to Winamp.  I favor simplicity and streamlining in my most used apps, and iTunes just doesn't have much of that.

But yes, one of the prime reasons I will stick with Winamp no matter what, is that Winamp is about as small as it can get, and every kind of audio file I have is treated identically by Winamp.  It's about the perfect audio player for someone like me.

[StrikerObi]

It's the best player I've ever downloaded. I think it just might replace WinAmp totally for me. I've been waiting for iTunes simply because I've seen it on Apples before and I've been craving the amazing orginazition abalities of it.

[StrikerObi]

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One of the benefits of living in Canada is that to obtain music legally, all I have to do is open up Kazaa, and start downloading.  

Heads up, that's not legal. It's actually probably more illegal seeing as you're breaking laws over international borders.  Ass-headed comments like this only make you seem stupid.

[Grey Ninja]

Heads up StrikerObi.  It might be worth your while to do a little research before calling someone an Ass-Head.  It makes you look like just another retarded flamer, rather than a moderator and a role model for us all.

Here in Canada, we have something called tax.  Say it with me, T-A-X.  Basically, we pay a little extra on every product we buy, which goes to the government to do whatever with it.  We have taxes on pretty much everything, and that money is distributed appropriately.  Our paycheques are taxed in many different ways, but we get that money back if we fall ill and need to go to the hospital, as the government will cough up the money to pay for some of our treatment, which is paid for by "tax".

One of the more interesting taxes in Canada is our tax on optical media.  We pay a surcharge on every blank CD we buy, which is collected and given to the music companies.  This very act makes downloading and burning MP3s to a CD legal.

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A lot of people seem to be saying that file-sharing is legal in Canada. Upon close interpretation of Canadian law, we think that downloading songs from the internet is legal, but sharing files or uploading files via p2p is strictly illegal. We don't want Canadians exposing themselves to lawsuit liability because of the wrong ideas, so please read our analysis.

In other words, downloading songs is perfectly legal.  Uploading songs is about as legal as jaywalking in Canada.  

[Doerr]

Downloading music is legal here in Canada because we have a CD-R tax levy and we pay $.20 cents more for cdrs.
That money goes to the Government and then is somehow supposed to go to the Musicians.

[robofish]

I am a Mac user, so I have had the wonder of iTunes for more than a year now.  But, just for fun, I also installed it on our WinXP system.  I rather like the fact that it only runs MP3s.  I love making MP3 cds, and having all those different file types really screws with that.

[Grey Ninja]

lol... spoken like a true Mac user.  

[Pale]

Grey, I appreciate your knowledge of things and all...But you really need to tone down your arrogance.  I don't mean any offense, but you do come off sounding like a jack ass.  Everything in technology isn't as cut and dry as you think it to be.  Some things work better than other things and yeah striker was a little off base by being so belligerent (sp?) but you started it with your second post in this thread.

[The Omen]

I may be out of touch, but i don't have Winamp, or any other of these programs mentioned, what am i missing out on? I play my MP3s with Musicmatch Jukebox, and it has the visualizations and album info, and all my Mp3s i can seperate by Genre, artist, album or mood.

[Grey Ninja]

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Originally posted by: PaleZer0
Grey, I appreciate your knowledge of things and all...But you really need to tone down your arrogance.  I don't mean any offense, but you do come off sounding like a jack ass.  Everything in technology isn't as cut and dry as you think it to be.  Some things work better than other things and yeah striker was a little off base by being so belligerent (sp?) but you started it with your second post in this thread.

Well, I'm sorry but some things are cut and dry.  Take for example, a PSF.

I'm sure that some of you have the FF7 OST.  It spans 4 discs, and contains a LOT of music.  That's about 2.6GB if you had all the tracks in WAV format.  If you convert them to MP3, you lose a bit of quality, but you can get the file size down to about 3 - 4MB per song.  Since there are 87 tracks in total, that comes to about 305MB, assuming 3.5MB per song.

I have the complete FF7 OST in PSF format, and it takes up less than 1MB on my disc.  The sound quality is IDENTICAL to actually running the game on a PSX, and is higher quality than even the original CDs of the OST.

If I were to burn the tracks onto a CD, I would convert them to WAV format, and burn them to a CD.  Total procedure would take me about half an hour if you include the time it would take to burn 4 CDs and label them and such.  The final result would be a CD collection that sounds every bit as good as the original OST tracks.

I'm sorry if I sound arrogant, but stupidity of great magnitude bothers the hell out of me.  Some things in technology, such as whether an AMD CPU or an Intel one is better is not cut and dry at all.  Some things, such as whether an MP3 or a PSF of a given song is better is certainly cut and dry.  As for iTunes, I have many legitimate complaints with the product that warrant my not using it any cost.  I'm sorry if you think that makes me a jackass, but I don't believe in running inferior software on my computer at the cost of more resources.

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I may be out of touch, but i don't have Winamp, or any other of these programs mentioned, what am i missing out on? I play my MP3s with Musicmatch Jukebox, and it has the visualizations and album info, and all my Mp3s i can seperate by Genre, artist, album or mood.

The biggest things that Winamp has going for it is its plugin system, and its extreme simplicity.  It's got an equalizer, playlist, and basic playback functions built into it, and everything beyond that is controlled through downloadable plugins.

Plugins are available for input (different file types), output (different sound qualities or outputs), visualization (pretty much anything you might want.), DSP/Effect (special effects), and General Purpose (I don't know?)  The player is also skinable, so you can make it look however you want.  I have had a Xenogears skin featuring Miang for a very long time.

The simplicity of Winamp 2 means that it runs well, even on computers with very low specs.  I used to run Winamp with MP3s on my good old P-120 with very little problem.  (we are talking like 20% CPU usage).  On my Athlon, CPU usage reads as a very nice ZERO, and is currently using less than 4MB of my memory.  I can play a game online and run Winamp at the same time without noticable loss in performance.  (I have a tiny amount of memory, and I need every spec of it to run anything at full speed).  I can't even run my internet browser without slowdown in an online game.

Winamp 3 features very little of the above stuff... so it hasn't really been adopted by the geek community.  It mainly features crappy support for video, and lets you do more stuff with the skins, at the cost of performance and speed.

Basically, if there's ANY audio file that you want played, Winamp will do it, and do it well.

[Pale]

Just to clarify my points...i don't think you are a jack ass, though i'm not a frequent poster I read quite a bit.  I was saying you come off as a jack ass sometimes..especially to people that don't even know what a PSF is.  It would have helped your argument if you explained those a bit and you would get less flame responses and more civil ones...know what I mean?  I have a lot of heated opinions about crap too....I'm just saying thats all..... I've worked on the end user side of tech enough to know that just stating something will not change their opinions.  They want to believe what the commercials tell them too because its easier.  We all fall prey to that sometimes.

As for iTunes, in theory I think it is a great concept.  Would I stop buying music on regular cds for this?  No, not in a heartbeat...there are two main reasons why.

1. I'm not happy with the quality of MP3s.  I spent forever downloading the FLCL osts and they sound like sh*t.  That really pisses me off.  MP3s in theory have great potential for matching the quality of cds (when played on the average stereo) but it seems shoddy encoding and frequent transfers cause too many clicks and fuzz for my liking.

2. itunes does not remember previous purchases which I think is essential to making a concept like this work.  I don't want some god damn virus to wipe out hundreds of dollars of music and have no (legal) way of replacing them.

[manunited4eva22]

Meh, how about DVD-Audio for a buck a song?  Sounds good to me.

[Grey Ninja]

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ust to clarify my points...i don't think you are a jack ass, though i'm not a frequent poster I read quite a bit. I was saying you come off as a jack ass sometimes..especially to people that don't even know what a PSF is. It would have helped your argument if you explained those a bit and you would get less flame responses and more civil ones...know what I mean?

Ok, sorry I snapped at you.

I do recognize this as a problem with the way I present things.  I ALWAYS present things in this manner.  I will give the name of something, and clearly state that it's better than the alternative.  I then wait for people to object, and I get a good debate going.  Truth be told, I have no idea why I do things this way.  It's just the way I do things.  It could be my upbringing in that I was always taught to be on the defensive, but whatever.  It's not important.  The fact is that I do things that way, and in spite of all efforts to the contrary, that's the way they remain.  It's just the way my mind is trained to work, and I am getting too old for a paradigm shift in my thinking.

For those who don't know, a PSF is a direct rip of the music files from a Playstation game disc.  The disc is scanned for sequenced audio code, and the code is extracted from the disc, and has a bit of C code wrapped around it.  The file is then known as a PSF (Playstation Sound Format).  There is a plugin for Winamp that emulates the SPU (Sound Processing Unit) of the Playstation to produce completely accurate audio of the game in question.  Since the Playstation 2 uses the same hardware as the Playstation for producing sound (just more memory), it's also possible to rip Playstation 2 soundtracks in a similar manner, although only 2 games at present have a soundtrack available in PSF2.  (Final Fantasy X and Breath of Fire V).

As for my first post regarding PSFs, I didn't really feel like explaining what a PSF was at the time.  I didn't think it would do any good anyways.  In my experience, Mac users are too accustomed to having things at their fingertips, be they inferior or not to bother switching.  PC users are generally more inclined to want to maximize their output while Mac users prefer to use what they have.

But let's put it this way.  The most fun I ever had while programming was when I was programming in Assembly.  I am not going to explain that, but if you get it, that's good.  

[Pale]

Assembly is definately cool, but hard to get eye popping results...  Hmm the most fun I've ever had programming is doing modeling using open GL and straight C.  I had all these drawings on graph paper and it was really cool.  I created this whole key frame engine for a game involving a slightly modified version of the Serpent Custom from Endless Waltz.  Too bad nothing ever came of it.