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"Look elsewhere for a good music managment program"
1.0 starson by thecoffmanPros: Attractive interface, speedy, easy to use for beginers
Cons: lacks almost any in depth features.
Summary: If you want a one sentence recomendation, try this. Use windows media player 10, it is easily the best media managment program out there and beats iTunes hands down. Now for the more in depth stuff.
I have tried almost every music software out there, and I figured it was time to jump on the bandwagon and try iTunes, after all, everyone's doing it.. right? At first I was highly pleased by the attractive, clean interface, and the speed of the searching (an apple hallmark) and even the music store. Yes I didnt mind the music store personally, I know there are many complaints, but hey if you want to use a player other than an ipod, its easy to strip the drm and rencode, however you will lose audio quality, but you get what you pay for and itunes is free.
Now on to the cons. This is where iTunes loses ground to a more in depth solution like wmp 10.
1. First off there is no option to use more than stereo speakers. While music is only 2 channel, it would be nice to be able to at least listen to it in all my speakers even if it just duplicates the front channels. I paid for 5.1 speakers and a soundcard, i might as well get to use them.
2. Burning is a complete mess. I know that playlists are all the rage nowadays, but I dont use them, at all. I know I'm not the only one either, but for some reason apple assumes that you would never want to burn a cd, only a playlist, and as such there is no burn option when viewing music that isnt a playlist. What this means is if you want to burn a cd, you will have to creat a playlist with all the tracks from that cd, and then burn the playlist. Am I the only one that finds this mind bogglingly annoying?
3. iTunes does not look up album art for you automatically... you'd think this was a standard feature by now, especially with access to apples extensive music store but nope, you have to manually add art for each cd, im sorry but with 60+ gigs of music, i dont have time for that.
4. No advanced tag editing features. to edit track information you have to either click each field in the media library view and edit it one thing at a time, or highlight multiple tracks and hit "view track info" (one would think it would say "edit" but oh well) but for some reason even when using this option, the changes dont save outside of itunes, which brings me to my next point.
5. no folder monitoring. for some reason itunes assumes that all new music is going to come from ripping with itunes, or from their music store, if you get music any other way it will not appear in your library unless you manually scan for it (at which point all your tag changes from point #4 revert back to their original values) this also creates the problem of duplicate tracks. im not sure why itunes has such a problem with this, as i never encounter this in other media players. even when rescanning my library
6. itunes reorganzied and fractured my folder and directory structure, even after had explicitly told it not to reorganize anything.
7. songs purchased from the music store are only 128 bitrate
All in all the gripes i have with itunes far outweigh, its benefits. I'm sure if you have your ipod and 10 cds and you wanna be "cool" walking around campus, then itunes is perfect for you, but if you want a rich full featured, music managment program, you'll have to look elsewhere. My personal recomendation is windows media player 10.
- 10 replies to this review
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I think it's perfect for what you want. I wrote up a detailed thing, but it got deleted, so you'll have to check it out for yourself. It costs money, but it's so good anyway. Better than iTunes IMO.
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WMP is a good player overall, but iTunes is built for music ONLY. And it does it best, without any bloated software. It's better than WMP for music, but Quicktime<WMP<VLC MEDIA PLAYER
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iTunes is great. To burn a CD all you have to do is create a playlist of about 17 songs for a 700mb CD. I have about 30 playlists and I am very pleased with the simplicity of burning CD's. It takes a click of a button and you wait a very short time and it is finished.
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the music store is rather limited in the uk, and utterly useless if you have any MP3 player other than an Ipod. Its a free download and the interface is very good, but come on apple, If I buy music from you I want to be able to listen to it without having to carry my Laptop with me!!!
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This guys reeks of Bill Gates you know what. Apple Itunes is a wonderful program that has revolutionized the music industry. Itunes is able to do more and is easier than window media player could ever wish for. I am a Windows PC type of guy, but Apple makes incredibable software. As soon as Apple get better hardware this next year I will finially switch over. Windows is great, but can not compete with Apple's software.
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WMP 10 is not in in anyway better than I-Tunes. Ihave WMP 10 and I-Tunes so I speak from experience. The Interfaces on WMP is horrible they put the controls to manage your library and playlist on top of the play screen and volume control below it! Thats the worst arrangment ever, and since many music stores use WMP to manage purchased music it gets really complicated to try to find songs you need or even transfer them to your mp3 player
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I own a 30GB ipod photo which I love. So I'm kinda stuck with iTunes, since there really isn't much else that integrates as well with the iPod. I do like the fact that iTunes is very clean and simple. I hate digging through endless menus and setting just to burn a CD or something. The playlist thing is not a big deal. When you burn a cd with any program you still have to select and add the songs you want to the cd anyways, so I really don't see how the playlist burning is that big of a deal. What has really frustrated me is the fact that I cannot get iTunes to run stable. It constantly crashes doing the most random tasks. My XP Pro system is very clean and EVERYTHING is up to date, right down to the firmware on the burners. Yet, I cannot get iTunes to run properly. There is no support either. I know I'm not the only one having this problem. There are plently of other people on Apple's and sevral other forums complaining of this problem, yet no one seems to have an answer.
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Sorry all you Itunes koolaid drinkers out there, this is one area where MS stomps Apple.<br><br>I have been using my computer exclusively for my music via SPDIF digital to my home stereo and a cheap 30 dollar remote for a while now. I got tired of dealing with Itunes serious lack of depth and ability to configure decent hot-key controls(which could then be mapped to my remote). <br><br>I went looking for something else...and finally got around to (skeptically) trying media player 10. It works great with my remote and makes things so easy. It DOES actually find the cover art automatically(something I have been kind of annoyed with at times...when it finds the wrong cover for some of my obscure music).<br><br>On the negative side, I miss "party shuffle", and I miss the simplicity of the Itunes music store. I don't own and Ipod(right now my PSP is my media player), but I plan to purchase a large capacity player soon. <br><br>I DO acknowledge that the iPod/iTunes combo is still pretty seemless, but things like folder monitoring and hot-key combos for most every major command are really important to me. Not to mention the seemless integrating with WinXP in MP 10. If I owned a Mac(I am not a Mac hater...just don't want to buy one right now), I would PROBABLY go back to iTunes.<br><br>Anyway, for me, and I think for the average person who uses their computer as a repository for a large library of music(250 CD's for me), MP 10 is MUCH better on the WinXP platform.
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I've used iTunes for windows for quite a long time now.I use it every single day of the week and love it.I can't stand WMP 10.It looks pretty,but as any other sub-par microsoft product,it is cluttered,STOPS the workflow and connection between what you're doing,and has major bugs.Honestly,did you go in looking for the negetives or did you go in wanting the best music management software?I just jumped in and found it:iTunes
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have to agree with some of your rantings, at first putting songs into a playlist is furstrating, but later you get the hang of it. its not that hard. <br><br>secondly, wmp 10 is no different . It also requires that only playlists can be burned. <br><br>thirdly, songs bought from 'plays for sure' stores dont automatically come with song art (this is not the case with itms) and there is no such album art retrieve in wmp 10 eaither. <br><br>Also, when importing a cd itunes looks up the tag info if u are connected to the internet. Otherwise you have to type it in manually and yes, that is frustrating. <br><br>And you can choose to have your files copied to the itunes folder when it is added to your library. The option is there under the ’advanced’ tab under preferences<br><br>Most other stores don’t go higher than 128, and those that do don’t have the same amount of selection<br><br>I don’t know if u have used wmp 10, but its not much better and more confusing to the average user (especially with the multiple online stores crap and the drm scheme). Ill stick with itunes
