iTunes to go
November 29, 2003 12:16 PM
With a month and a half of using, I am convinced iTunes for Windows is the Music Jukebox app I was always looking for. A combination of simplicity and rich features is what iTunes is all about. After using and dumping Musicmatch, Creative Playcenter and a host of Music and Tag management software, iTunes is here to stay on my Windows desktop for a long time. Read ahead for my detailed opinion on iTunes.
iTunes comes bundled with Apple Quicktime 6.4 and includes Audio ripping & CD burning software for creating Audio/MP3/Data CDs. But the existence of iTunes is only because of iPod, the audio jukebox player from Apple. I have another jukebox player which is cheaper and has better audio output quality. So iTunes was never on my list of jukebox software till recently.
Player
The Player uses Quicktime internally for playing music and the audio output quality is as crisp as you can get. I have never had any AAC files but MP3s play very well and with minimal CPU resources. 
The controls are minimalistic but adequate for daily use. The only problem I find is that iTunes cannot play video files like WMP or Winamp, inspite of using the Quicktime engine. The 10 band graphic equalizer is adequate as is the visualization unless ofcourse you are a Winamp vis-freak. The audio CD player fetches track info from CDDB if you want it to. Another useful thing is the comprehensive list of Internet Radio stations available. Its nice to find one of my favourites in the list. It have it running at work all the time. Other standard features are crossfade play, sound enhancement (similar to the SRS WOW effect on WMP/Winamp) and auto volume levelling.
Interface
Simplicity is defined by the iTunes interface. The brushed metal skin and blue transluscent controls are a treat to look at. Apple has successfully ported the MacOS Jaguar feel onto Windows with iTunes. And I am hooked. Always wanting to emulate MacOS on my PC, I have gone to the extent of replacing system dlls in the past to get that Jaguar look on my desktop. Once you see it, the aesthetic appeal rubs off on you.
Music Manager
The most interesting part of iTunes is the ease that it lends to managing MP3 tags. You can edit individual track details directly in the library view and changing details of multiple tracks at a time is easily possible. Some advanced ID3 tools like track auto-numbering or a search-replace function are missing but they are rarely required anyway. 
You can set both ID3v1 as well as ID3v2 tags for a particular MP3 file. You can insert album artwork in the ID3 tag. You can assign Equalizer presets and a rating to each of your songs. You can create dynamic smart playlists using parameters like the most played songs, most recently played songs, etc. When you are ripping songs from an Audio CD, the tags are automatically filled using CDDB information. If you are ripping MP3s from a CD, iTunes automatically creates folders by artists/albums and names the files by the trackname. One grouse I have with iTunes is the inability to control the filenames.
An interesting feature is the Consolidate Library feature. I had my MP3s scattered across tens of folders on the hard drive. After I was done with the ID3 cleanup of almost all MP3s, I simply used this feature to bring all my MP3s to a single folder, autimatically arranging the files by artists and albums. A neat feature, but dangerous also unless your ID3 tags are clean. iTunes changes the filenames without warning you! (You can turn off the moving & renaming feature in Edit-->Preferences-->Advanced) The way I figured out is to fill in your ID3 tags, consolidate your library, rename the files again using a MP3 renaming app and create the library again. That way your MP3 library remains perfectly organised.
CD Extraction and Creation
CD Extraction is fast and clean. You have lot of flexibility in selecting the storing format - WAV, MP3, AAC or AIFF. The one I am concerned about is MP3. iTunes allows you to create both constant bitrate as well as variable bitrate files. The encoding speed is decent enough to ensure high quality MP3 files. iTunes allows you to create Audio CDs as well as MP3 CDs. The third option of creating a Data CD does not mean that. It only means that you can create a CD with a mixture of various audio formats. The process is so simplified that a novice user wont even notice it.
Music Store
I cannot possibly say much about this. One, I stay outside the US so am not eligible to buy music at the iTunes store. Second, I would rather buy an open audio format than a proprietory DRM format. The online music store has been a hit in the US. All said, its a good start for online sale of music, music that is not too expensive. I have heard of people buying hundreds of dollars worth of quality songs from the store, an amount they would never have spent on buying crappy cd albums.
Conclusion
A simple music jukebox is what iTunes is and it is going to improve. With more than a million iTunes downloads, Apple will be compelled to iron out a few bad points - absent dead file management(you have to manually remove a dead file from the library), limited text field for ID3 tags, more flexibility in ID3 management, playing video files. But for its current features, I give an eight to iTunes Windows.
18 comments have been added.
Add your comments.
1.
Kumaraguru said...
>> I would rather buy an open audio format than a proprietory DRM format.
What DRM ?
http://www.nanocrew.net/software/QTFairUse.tar.gz
;-)
2.
Nilesh said...
If anything that discourages one from buying the AAC format songs it is the DRM terms of use. And if you are not going to respect the terms of use, you might as well download pirated songs! Why use the cumbersome utility just for removing restrictions?
3.
Sikosis said...
iTunes is crap. It's okay for gumbies but apart from that it's useless.
In fact it renames all your MP3s and puts them into it's OWN directory structure.
I've now got a large HD with nothing but Artist folders - great for those mixed CDs - not !
4.
Nilesh said...
In fact it renames all your MP3s and puts them into it's OWN directory structure
But for that "feature"...
5.
Sachin Nair said...
i've been using itunes for sometime now, and its simply great. Ofcourse it renames your files but you have a choice of not having it change your file names. Plus you also have a choice of dumping as u said or not dumping in a particular directory.
Infact they have been so nice about the little feature that they warn you about it dumping the entire mp3 formats in the dsame directory. :)
6.
Tushar said...
Ok, how the hell did you get your WinXP to look like that? I can't seem to find anything apart from themes.
7.
Nilesh said...
I can't seem to find anything apart from themes
Google for "Iceman's Emulation Styles" and you will be on your way. You are warned - it involves replacing lots of system dlls. :-)
8.
Sachin Nair said...
o yea iceman rules ... but it did manage to bore me after a while... :/ . All the eye candy gave me sore eyes ... kinda reminiscent of win xp theme itself ... my staid old windows desktop with realtype font option set to "on" seems better most of the time.
i do keep changin the fonts though ;)
9.
Abhi said...
Try using Winamp 5. Its very good.
10.
Rajas Sambhare said...
iTunes for Windows
The Good:
The best available AAC encoder. This outperforms MP3 at the similar bitrates. Check http://www.rjamorim.com/test/ for details of the double-blind listening test which proved this at 128kbps. Plus it's free! (Also note AAC itself is not DRMed, you can share iTunes AAC tracks with your friends which you have ripped using a CD, DRM is only applied to tracks which you purchase from the iTunes music store. )
Relevant URL's:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/presentation.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/presentation.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/results.html
The Bad:
1. iTunes installs 3 different memory resident programs. Gearsec.exe for CD burning, Ipodservice.exe for Ipods and Ituneshelper.exe for "help ??". These programs run all the time even if iTunes itself is not currently running. Not good.
2. iTunes library management is not the best. It's quite good but not the best. There is no best available for Windows. The candidates are
a. iTunes
* no customizable user interface
* no tabbed playlists
* no hierarchical music library view
* average masstagger
* will rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told not to
b. Winamp 5.0
* highly customizable user interface
* no tabbed playlists
* very slick hierarchical media library view
* average masstagger
* will not rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told to
c. the relatively unknown foobar2000
* moderately customizable interface - there is an iTunes clone UI plugin
* tabbed playlists -Joy!
* no hierarchical media library view
* extremely powerful masstagger - Guess from filename/directory etc.
* will not rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told to
3. Crashes galore apparently (though I haven't faced them)
11.
Chet said...
iTunes is definitly the greatest. In fact, I might go as far as saying that it is the best windows program out there. Hows that for irony. Its so intuitive, clean, powerful, and fun. I got an iPod mini too so that puts the icing on the cake. Now if I can find a BMW...lol
12.
Kondy said...
Dude, the iTunes store idea rocks. I hadnt purchased the latest U2 album although I was hooked onto their Vertigo single. Now by paying just a dollar I can own that one track. Thats the sweet sport that Steve Jobbs hit, when he went for a compromise between Napster and the music industry.
Everyone has played football with their opinions of the interface, not much for me to add there.
However, one gripe about iTunes is that the player does not "sound" that great when you compare it with Windows Media Player + SRS plugin. I agree its the plugin that adds the $ex appeal to the Windows mesia player, but hopefully Apple will also add the plugin to iTunes soon. that will make it kick a$$
Otherwise, as usual , I remain a faithful fan of this weblog...
Truly yours er. sorry. Yours Truly,
Kondy :)
13.
john said...
Hi
I was wondering what file itunes stores the results of CDDB lookups. I know about the iTunes 4 Music Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files but when i back these up on an other machine and put in a ripped CD the other instance of itunes doesn't recogise it.
Any ideas, i like to be able to backup this information.
14.
Wasil Akhtar said...
Itunes is very useful but i have sound inteferences, and when i close itunes and use windows media player the sound quality is superb.
15.
Wasil Akhtar said...
Itunes is very useful but i have sound inteferences, and when i close itunes and use windows media player the sound quality is superb.
16.
Shounak said...
iTunes is a memory hog. It uses 50 mb of RAM (not much to me but I know a few resource challeneged comps).
As far as I am concerned, both iTunes and WMP are bloatware. And Winamp seems to be trying to catch up with them.
I have been using Winamp for ages now (right through 2.x Vs and 5.x, I skipped the 3.xV) and I have always loved it. I choose to not install the bloat. All I need from my audio media player is the best audio quality possible with as low as resource usage as possible. I don't care for visulaizations. I mean I don't usually smoke joints and sit and stare at the computer screen and go on gratifying trips.
But recently I have switched over Foobar.
IMHO, Foobar is the best audio player out there. Absolutely no bloat unless you wish to add them. It has the lowest memory footprint (1.96 MB if you dont care for the frilly stuff). I like the eye-candy GUI of Winamp skins, but I can live without them. I mean I live without Paz Vega, don't I? Of course it helps that you can customize Foobar until your fingers hurt without having an extensive coding experience. I had none and it took me about 4 hours to make my Foobar match my favorite XP theme (Inspirat SE by Stefanka).
Plus, it has support for every audio codec out there unlike iTUnes which won't play WMA without converting it to AAC which obviously degrades quality.
GAPLESS PLAYBACK! This is very important to me. I have a few live albums and Pink Floyd albums and it irks me no end when there is a 3 second delay in playing songs that should semalessly merge into one another. I don't even think gapless playback is possible on iTunes (read it somewhere. Why I dont know). Winamp *Can* support it but it's a hassle.
It has a few different output methods which should theoretically give better sound than the Directsound Windows Mixer.
It also can rip cds and write them (surprise surprise) gaplessly! I don't use it to rip cds though. I use Exact Audio Copy to do that. It is THE BEST ripper out there and it is free. It will rip songs from heavily scratched CDs without those skips and ticks that you often get from these other rippers.
This is of course in addition to whatever Rajas said about masstaggers, tabbed playlists et al.
17.
Ro said...
You Can take off the gap in songs by going into preferences then take off the crossfade playback.
18.
Duck said...
You can stop it from sorting everything by going to the preferences -> Advanced -> General then making sure the "Keep my iTunes music folder organised".
Also, if you import a mixed CD, you simply select the tracks on the CD and in the ID3 tags state that it is a compilation so it keeps them all together.
Duck
Your Comments
* Please do not put off-topic comments. We reserve right to delete them at our discretion. You can post anonymously. If you are unable to see your posted comment immediately, it may have been queued for moderation. So do not submit it again. HTML formatting is allowed (only a, b, i, br, p, strong, em, ul, li & blockquote are allowed). Do not put paragraph tags. They are automatically inserted.
With a month and a half of using, I am convinced iTunes for Windows is the Music Jukebox app I was always looking for. A combination of simplicity and rich features is what iTunes is all about. After using and dumping Musicmatch, Creative Playcenter and a host of Music and Tag management software, iTunes is here to stay on my Windows desktop for a long time. Read ahead for my detailed opinion on iTunes.
The controls are minimalistic but adequate for daily use. The only problem I find is that iTunes cannot play video files like WMP or Winamp, inspite of using the Quicktime engine. The 10 band graphic equalizer is adequate as is the visualization unless ofcourse you are a Winamp vis-freak. The audio CD player fetches track info from CDDB if you want it to. Another useful thing is the comprehensive list of Internet Radio stations available. Its nice to find one of my favourites in the list. It have it running at work all the time. Other standard features are crossfade play, sound enhancement (similar to the SRS WOW effect on WMP/Winamp) and auto volume levelling.
You can set both ID3v1 as well as ID3v2 tags for a particular MP3 file. You can insert album artwork in the ID3 tag. You can assign Equalizer presets and a rating to each of your songs. You can create dynamic smart playlists using parameters like the most played songs, most recently played songs, etc. When you are ripping songs from an Audio CD, the tags are automatically filled using CDDB information. If you are ripping MP3s from a CD, iTunes automatically creates folders by artists/albums and names the files by the trackname. One grouse I have with iTunes is the inability to control the filenames. 
CD Extraction is fast and clean. You have lot of flexibility in selecting the storing format - WAV, MP3, AAC or AIFF. The one I am concerned about is MP3. iTunes allows you to create both constant bitrate as well as variable bitrate files. The encoding speed is decent enough to ensure high quality MP3 files. iTunes allows you to create Audio CDs as well as MP3 CDs. The third option of creating a Data CD does not mean that. It only means that you can create a CD with a mixture of various audio formats. The process is so simplified that a novice user wont even notice it.
18 comments have been added. Add your comments.
1. Kumaraguru said...
>> I would rather buy an open audio format than a proprietory DRM format.
What DRM ?
http://www.nanocrew.net/software/QTFairUse.tar.gz
;-)
2. Nilesh said...
If anything that discourages one from buying the AAC format songs it is the DRM terms of use. And if you are not going to respect the terms of use, you might as well download pirated songs! Why use the cumbersome utility just for removing restrictions?
3. Sikosis said...
iTunes is crap. It's okay for gumbies but apart from that it's useless.
In fact it renames all your MP3s and puts them into it's OWN directory structure.
I've now got a large HD with nothing but Artist folders - great for those mixed CDs - not !
4. Nilesh said...
In fact it renames all your MP3s and puts them into it's OWN directory structure
But for that "feature"...
5. Sachin Nair said...
i've been using itunes for sometime now, and its simply great. Ofcourse it renames your files but you have a choice of not having it change your file names. Plus you also have a choice of dumping as u said or not dumping in a particular directory.
Infact they have been so nice about the little feature that they warn you about it dumping the entire mp3 formats in the dsame directory. :)
6. Tushar said...
Ok, how the hell did you get your WinXP to look like that? I can't seem to find anything apart from themes.
7. Nilesh said...
I can't seem to find anything apart from themes
Google for "Iceman's Emulation Styles" and you will be on your way. You are warned - it involves replacing lots of system dlls. :-)
8. Sachin Nair said...
o yea iceman rules ... but it did manage to bore me after a while... :/ . All the eye candy gave me sore eyes ... kinda reminiscent of win xp theme itself ... my staid old windows desktop with realtype font option set to "on" seems better most of the time.
i do keep changin the fonts though ;)
9. Abhi said...
Try using Winamp 5. Its very good.
10. Rajas Sambhare said...
iTunes for Windows
The Good:
The best available AAC encoder. This outperforms MP3 at the similar bitrates. Check http://www.rjamorim.com/test/ for details of the double-blind listening test which proved this at 128kbps. Plus it's free! (Also note AAC itself is not DRMed, you can share iTunes AAC tracks with your friends which you have ripped using a CD, DRM is only applied to tracks which you purchase from the iTunes music store. )
Relevant URL's:
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/presentation.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/128extension/results.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/presentation.html
http://www.rjamorim.com/test/aac128v2/results.html
The Bad:
1. iTunes installs 3 different memory resident programs. Gearsec.exe for CD burning, Ipodservice.exe for Ipods and Ituneshelper.exe for "help ??". These programs run all the time even if iTunes itself is not currently running. Not good.
2. iTunes library management is not the best. It's quite good but not the best. There is no best available for Windows. The candidates are
a. iTunes
* no customizable user interface
* no tabbed playlists
* no hierarchical music library view
* average masstagger
* will rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told not to
b. Winamp 5.0
* highly customizable user interface
* no tabbed playlists
* very slick hierarchical media library view
* average masstagger
* will not rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told to
c. the relatively unknown foobar2000
* moderately customizable interface - there is an iTunes clone UI plugin
* tabbed playlists -Joy!
* no hierarchical media library view
* extremely powerful masstagger - Guess from filename/directory etc.
* will not rearrange folders/rename files unless specifically told to
3. Crashes galore apparently (though I haven't faced them)
11. Chet said...
iTunes is definitly the greatest. In fact, I might go as far as saying that it is the best windows program out there. Hows that for irony. Its so intuitive, clean, powerful, and fun. I got an iPod mini too so that puts the icing on the cake. Now if I can find a BMW...lol
12. Kondy said...
Dude, the iTunes store idea rocks. I hadnt purchased the latest U2 album although I was hooked onto their Vertigo single. Now by paying just a dollar I can own that one track. Thats the sweet sport that Steve Jobbs hit, when he went for a compromise between Napster and the music industry.
Everyone has played football with their opinions of the interface, not much for me to add there.
However, one gripe about iTunes is that the player does not "sound" that great when you compare it with Windows Media Player + SRS plugin. I agree its the plugin that adds the $ex appeal to the Windows mesia player, but hopefully Apple will also add the plugin to iTunes soon. that will make it kick a$$
Otherwise, as usual , I remain a faithful fan of this weblog...
Truly yours er. sorry. Yours Truly,
Kondy :)
13. john said...
Hi
I was wondering what file itunes stores the results of CDDB lookups. I know about the iTunes 4 Music Library.itl and iTunes Music Library.xml files but when i back these up on an other machine and put in a ripped CD the other instance of itunes doesn't recogise it.
Any ideas, i like to be able to backup this information.
14. Wasil Akhtar said...
Itunes is very useful but i have sound inteferences, and when i close itunes and use windows media player the sound quality is superb.
15. Wasil Akhtar said...
Itunes is very useful but i have sound inteferences, and when i close itunes and use windows media player the sound quality is superb.
16. Shounak said...
iTunes is a memory hog. It uses 50 mb of RAM (not much to me but I know a few resource challeneged comps).
As far as I am concerned, both iTunes and WMP are bloatware. And Winamp seems to be trying to catch up with them.
I have been using Winamp for ages now (right through 2.x Vs and 5.x, I skipped the 3.xV) and I have always loved it. I choose to not install the bloat. All I need from my audio media player is the best audio quality possible with as low as resource usage as possible. I don't care for visulaizations. I mean I don't usually smoke joints and sit and stare at the computer screen and go on gratifying trips.
But recently I have switched over Foobar.
IMHO, Foobar is the best audio player out there. Absolutely no bloat unless you wish to add them. It has the lowest memory footprint (1.96 MB if you dont care for the frilly stuff). I like the eye-candy GUI of Winamp skins, but I can live without them. I mean I live without Paz Vega, don't I? Of course it helps that you can customize Foobar until your fingers hurt without having an extensive coding experience. I had none and it took me about 4 hours to make my Foobar match my favorite XP theme (Inspirat SE by Stefanka).
Plus, it has support for every audio codec out there unlike iTUnes which won't play WMA without converting it to AAC which obviously degrades quality.
GAPLESS PLAYBACK! This is very important to me. I have a few live albums and Pink Floyd albums and it irks me no end when there is a 3 second delay in playing songs that should semalessly merge into one another. I don't even think gapless playback is possible on iTunes (read it somewhere. Why I dont know). Winamp *Can* support it but it's a hassle.
It has a few different output methods which should theoretically give better sound than the Directsound Windows Mixer.
It also can rip cds and write them (surprise surprise) gaplessly! I don't use it to rip cds though. I use Exact Audio Copy to do that. It is THE BEST ripper out there and it is free. It will rip songs from heavily scratched CDs without those skips and ticks that you often get from these other rippers.
This is of course in addition to whatever Rajas said about masstaggers, tabbed playlists et al.
17. Ro said...
You Can take off the gap in songs by going into preferences then take off the crossfade playback.
18. Duck said...
You can stop it from sorting everything by going to the preferences -> Advanced -> General then making sure the "Keep my iTunes music folder organised".
Also, if you import a mixed CD, you simply select the tracks on the CD and in the ID3 tags state that it is a compilation so it keeps them all together.
Duck
Your Comments
* Please do not put off-topic comments. We reserve right to delete them at our discretion. You can post anonymously. If you are unable to see your posted comment immediately, it may have been queued for moderation. So do not submit it again. HTML formatting is allowed (only a, b, i, br, p, strong, em, ul, li & blockquote are allowed). Do not put paragraph tags. They are automatically inserted.