Monday, September 26, 2005

Windows Media Player Vs. iTunes

A hard decision faced my many; is WMP or iTunes the better music player. As an iPod user i am forced to use iTunes but I do not necessarily think it is better. Here is the way it is.

iTunes is great software for music playing. Everything about it is good, except some may not like the way your library is viewed. It is one big list and you change how it is categorized by clicking the tabs at the top. Playlists are easy to make and are viewed by a bar on the right side. WMP uses a system of menus similar to right clicking the start button. The visualizer for iTunes is stunning. In preferences you can change it to go over 30fps. I saw it go as high as 93 fps without causing a problem. Also there are so many scenarios you will never see the same one twice. Also they are more fluent and visually pleasing than the ones in WMP. One thing I dislike about iTunes is that the installer comes with Quick Time. It automatically installs itself and puts itself in the quick launch bar. Then it installs a process called qttask, ituneshelper, ipodhelper. Although these do not at all slow your computer I am not happy when they are there. You kill them with process explorer and they re generate. I even did a regedit and they appeared to be running in the background. This shouldn't bother you or stop you from getting iTunes, although I do not like it because I am deep in thread/handle .dll hell.

Over all I find iTunes as my personal favorite but if you prefer a menu system(which I do) WMP is for you. For you broadband users, it may be worth to download iTunes to see if you like it. It installs clean so there should be no problems.

4 comments:

  1. Personally, i don't see how there can be such a debate about which is better, iTunes, or WMP. iTunes is a terrible music player. sure, it is simple, you can download music off it, and it connects yo your iPod eaily, much easier than WMP connects to anything, even WMP Plays for Sure (yea right. anything with the word Windows in it is not for sure)devices. But that is about all it does. There is nothing special about it. you would think that if it is part of iLife, that they would give it some extra fetures to help it work wit hyour life better, but no. It only plays music.

    First, iTunes has its own music store. Don't you think it would be really simple for Apple to sync the song names with those from it's store, as well as the Album Art. WMP get the album art with the song names. simple as that. No searching the internet for the pictures, or downloading a widget that gets the wrong cover all the time, with mix-matched sizes.

    The way iTunes 6 (5 too? i never got to use it because it was only out for 2 weeks, but i think it was exactly the same. just looked better) burns CD's is stupid. You have to make a new playlist with those songs? then click burn? Sure it is easy to make a play list, but with WMP 10, it creates a Burn List on the right-hand side, where u can drag and drop the songs u want (just like iTunes), and then click burn. When u are done, u can eather save the playlist, or just let it go and forget about it. No Need to save.

    WMP also sorts groups the songs from an album with multiply artists together. iTunes splits them up by their names, and in order to get the whole album, u have to sort it by album. Or, you may have a CD wit hall of one artist, and one song that is by someone else, which ends up getting thrown way down the list. I usually end up making a play list of those artsits, and put them all in the right order. waste of time, and easy to fix.

    WMP browsing i find much easier. The little menu things with he +/- sign, and they expand to show all the artists, or songs, or albums, or ganra, or whatever u want. very organized. iTunes's browsing button at the top is usful, but it requires too much clicking, and only shows a few of the songs, so u have to constantly scroll down.

    WMP 10 has lots of music stores. I never used any of them, but it has Napster, and all the big ones, plus i remember seeing a MLB thing.

    I have a Mac, which i love so much mor ethan our old PC. Just, i miss a normal music player. so I'm ranting on the internet about how much iTunes sucks, hoping that someone will care. Also, for anyone else who cares, iPhoto is good, but it could use a drawing tool, and the library (the actual folder, under pictures) is so confusing, u can't find anyhting in there i you ever need to.

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  2. I love WMP 10's GUI ITunes for window's silver interface looks pretty pathetic to WMP 10's glassy black interface. WMP 10 has SRS Wow feature that's really great. Music library is also highly enhanced, it manages music library on HDD as well. Buring and Ripping process is easy to use as well. simply put I don't like Quick time and ITune's GUI and lack of SRS Wow feature, Though I have to say I havent used Itunes alot so there might be an alternate to SRS Wow but I really didnt care because to be honest it's interface sucks as compared Vista styled mediaplayer10. I dont do purchases of online music so it doesnt matter to me if there's an online search embeded or nor and for all those who like to there's URGE.
    Mac is no doubt great when it comes to GUIs but safari, itunes or Quicktime FOR WINDOWS just aint going to click Me. Mac should sell their OS separately without the machine I am sure this would snatch a huge market share from microsoft. I myself will be interested to buy Mac OSX or leopard just to see if I can be comfortable with it so that I can switch to mac machine

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  3. I'm a Mobile DJ I've over 2000 CD i want to store in a computer at home so i can access via the internet when i'm on the road. Can you recommend a player that will do the job for me

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  4. I will know, many thanks for the help in this question.

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