Apple’s iTunes 4.1.0.52 for Windows was released today. I downloaded it a few hours ago, and so here are my first impressions on the product. Screenshots included. iTunes’ package comes in a 19 MB file, and includes QuickTime Player 6.4 in it, and also some CD burning add-ons/drivers. Installation is very easy and it requires a reboot for the CD burning software to be initialized.
Upon loading the application for the first time, it scans your “My Music” folder for songs and other media files. They are automatically added to your Library in the iTunes database. Double clicking the songs will start them playing and quality and multitasking with the system is excellent (I get no drops of sound when doing other processor-intensive work).
I like the Radio collection that iTunes is fetches from the web, as I am an avid listener of Di.Fm/Eurodance and while the first time iTunes could not find any radio stations, the second try found them all and fetched their streams with no problems at all. However, I found that that iTunes “loses” the stream on the 128kbit versions and it needs to rebuffer every 4-5 minutes (setting buffer size to “high” doesn’t help). I don’t have such a problem with my WinAMP usually. The 56k streams work fine with no gaps.
The Music store is there, same as in the Mac version of iTunes. You can shop either with a shopping cart or via the “one click buy” feature.
I liked how iTunes automatically found some songs on my library, e.g. The Sound Of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel and placed it seperately on a special folder “60’s music,” presumably to demonstrate the categorization features. The Visual Effects on iTunes are also very nice, but I am not yet sure if there is a way to add new effects and plug-ins to it as you can for other media players.
Importing songs from CDs works like a charm, and you have the choice of using mp3, AAC, WAV or AIFF as the encoding format, but I can’t test burning yet as I haven’t found the time to install my new Memorex combo drive on this machine yet. You can also share music within the same network, but I saw nothing about Rendezvous (possibly requires OS support). Other features include de-authorizing computers from using your shared music, checking the status of purchased music, fetching artwork from the music you currently listen, and opening other streams.
So far, so good. I found no glitches with the application or its stability. Except one thing: its UI speed. For the life of me, I am almost unable to resize the iTunes window (with visual effects OFF no less)! Its window UI is almost unresponsive. Menus and native-windows-looking alerts are responsive and fast, however the metal interface is just unusable here. I can’t easily resize the application, and with difficulty I can scroll the scrollbars in the store or the Library! After many attempts, I managed to get the window size down to about 640×480 and then the application did become more responsive and workable. But on a normal ~1024×1000 window, it is just unusable. There are times I can’t even move the whole window across the screen! Note: I am not talking about playback (which works fine with no performance issues), or when in mini-mode: I am talking about scrolling/resizing the app when the window is in normal mode and bigger than 800×600. Resizing the window when in “Music Store” is almost impossible here! Update: Upgrading to the latest graphics drivers didn’t help.
This machine is a dual Celeron 2×533 Mhz with WinXP PRO (Apple recommends a single 500 Mhz Pentium-class CPU as minimum), and I swear, this is the slowest application I have ever run on this machine. Ever. Even some big java apps I ran in the past were not that bad. I also have here a Cube G4 450 Mhz machine, and iTunes on OSX “flies” compared to the Windows version. Well, it doesn’t actually fly either, but it is absolutely usable and responsive enough to do the job. On my WinXP PRO, the speed is just not acceptable.
I like iTunes for Windows (especially when used in the mini-windows-mode where doesn’t take much space). However, its overall UI speed needs to be worked out by Apple, because it is back to WinAMP 3 for me until speed is improved. Even users with faster machines than mine won’t be happy to burn up cpu cycles for nothing.
Yes, WebCore is very portable, a guy had a preliminary port already for windows a few months ago. Apple has “freed” the code from Qt toolkit.
Eugenia, I have a Compaq at 500MHz running XP Pro with I only 128MB (it grinds a lot.) Performance wise, iTunes snaps right up and is pretty fast accessing the store. I have no problem expanding it almost to the full size of the LCD (1024x..) though it has no maximize button, instead the maximize turns into a Mac “Zoom” type button.
I believe this is due to the “textured” window. I believe Apple must be using DirectX to handle the windowing and not the typical Win32 primitives. I’m just guessing, but it is running surprisingly well on my setup at 500MHz and limited RAM. If you want me to send you some specs and screenshots I’d be happy to do it. Everyone I chatted with is having an excellent experience and the Rendezvous sharing between PC’s and Mac’s is pretty cool!
Well if she has Dual 500MHZ celeron and thinks that every new application is going to run perfect on it.. she is dead wrong and needs to come to terms with it. Don’t give us any of this “Joe User still runs 500mhz pentium3’s.” Joe User probably doesn’t even know what iTunes is and isn’t going to bother trying it out because Joe User can use Kazaa.
It probably came down to this: support Win 95 and up, and release in January (or sometime much later than now); or support only Win2k/XP and release it now. With so many other people jumping in to the market, Apple needed a release now. Maybe they’ll release an update later on that supports Win9x, but I doubt it.
IF that is true, i?Tunes using DX and my card can’t do what iTunes asks, then my friend, Apple SHOULD HAVE written more comprehensive REQUIREMENTS. Not just that “500 Mhz Pentium class CPU”, but also list the graphics cards required to run the application!
>Well if she has Dual 500MHZ celeron
It is dual 533 Mhz. Dual.
The speed issue was a factor for her, and she should report it. She reported plenty of positive stuff as well. I think she should be highlighting issues with the software because that is news. “iTunes works as well as is expected.” That statement sums up the good news. Why should she spend fourteen pages talking about every expectation that is met up. “However I noticed the following issues…” That statement requires some backing up. That’s exactly what she did. That’s exactly what she should have done.
To be honest, I’m not going to use it except for the Music Store. I spend most of my time listening to Sirius Satellite Radio’s music streams nowadays. It is far better than any other streaming service, but you have to reset the channel ever 20 minutes if you aren’t a service subscriber (which I would wholeheartedly recommend anyway).
Well, since everyone is putting up points:
IBM T23 Laptop (1.13G P3M, 256M, SuperSavage/IXC)
400 mp3 in Library
Playing Mp3, no vis: 3-6%
Shaking resize: 100%
System Idle: 0%
itunes idle: 0-2%
Full Screen Vis: 90%
Resize and scrolling: reasonable. There’s a little delay, but nothing that kill the app.
I’m using iTunes on Mac from version 3 on OS9 and 4.1 on OS X and today I did installed Win version on my PC.
Speed of rendering was normal, like any other app with empty Library. When I updated Library with 1159 mp3 files the speed become noticeably slower when rendering and resizing window.
CPU usage when moving or resizing window is close or 50%, CPU usage when playing MP3 file is 1-3%, same goes for playing directly from CD player. When encoding MP3 file CPU usage tops at 90%.
This is on P4 2.8c with 512 RAM and nVidia GeForce 3ti.
I believe there will be speed issues with big Library or with iTunes store on slower machines.
Installed fine on my Toshiba PIII-650 laptop (384mb ram, crappy 8mb S3 video). Runs no prob. Uses 6-7% CPU time while playing mp3s. CPU usage spikes to as much as 100% while resizing the windows, but music keeps playing without missing a beat. Haven’t tried burning or the iTunes store yet.
Imported my music no prob. I’m not letting it manage my music, however, as there have been horror stories on the mac side about it getting confused and tossing it’s database, misfiling songs into one folder (HUGE issues when duplicate song names by different artists are mixed onto one folder!), so I’ll keep my manual organization methods for now. But it did import all 2000+ songs (in 43 folders) without incident, during the initial install. guess I’ll have to wait to get more songs before I can see how it does adding more. Nice to share my collection with my iMac and PowerBook. Will be nicer at home, where the bigger collection resides on my main PC, I suspect.
All in all, so far, a great first effort. Never thought I’d see Apple developing products for the Windows platform, but they’ve done well their first time out. Suspect it will get even better with time. Dunno if I’ll ever let go of WinAmp, but am happy to have the option when I want it, now.
Finally, lay off Eugenia. Good article, reporting what she sees. Issues may her her vid card, may not be, but her job to report what happens regardless.
I am using an old PIII 667 with Intel810 graphics. iTunes was dead slow at scrolling/resizing. Also, in the Music Store the bottom half of the window would often not repaint properly. I figured this might be a graphics driver issue, so I installed the latest drivers from Intel. Guess what, it’s working great now. Resizing is still not that fast, but is definitely usuable.
iTunes sharing between my G3 iMac and my Windows box (both directions) works fantastically well. Very impressed.
Why would they need more specific REQUIREMENTS if your machine DOES NOT FILL them in the first place?
the multicasting from OS9 worser as W98 ??
did u try OS9 ? I can’t believe it ! it’s much better !
And yes, I understand why Apple didn’t support itunes for win9x. It would need to much support, and there would be to much security problems. Microsoft also doesn’t support win9x anymore. And apple didn’t programm iTune only for 1 year … Wait one year, and everythere there will only be XP .
….is now very good. It finished doing whatever it was that it was doing.
It seems that CPU Utilisation has now settled down very nicely. No more than 6% as I type this, with a MP3 playing and a couple of things open in the background.
Resizing and general UI feel is not Ultra fast and I can see how this app would feel somewhat sluggish on a 500 MHz class machine. As it is, it is absolutely fine on my machine….however it doesn’t feel as crisp as “normal” windows apps. Of course it is NOT a normal windows app. It has fancy metal textures, funky every thing and animation for everything else. It?s the compromise Eugenia pointed out in her Panther review. If you have funky UI, it costs you something in responsiveness.
Stop being a jerk please. Celeron IS a Pentium-class processor (that Apple asks), it is an i686, it just doesn’t have as much cache as the PII/PIII. And I even have more CPU power than the minimum required.
1) iTunes is not a Windows app. It certainly wouldn’t get logo certification. No right click. Menus don’t work properly. Inconsistent mouse-over help. I’m sure I could find more.
2) Slow screen refresh when sizing main window or scrolling playlist/library. This is pathetic. iTunes is the slowest painting app on my system. What did they do to cripple it? Why? Did we need “Aqua” on Windows? No.
3) No MAXIMIZE button. This is retarded Apple-design at work. In fact, I couldn’t even manually get the window to be maximum size. It would stop expanding a few pixels short of the screen edge.
4) Okay, this is even worse. Right Click = Left Click in some areas. However… right click does work on the left “source” items. How inconsistent can Apple’s vaunted UI corps be?
5) For music playback, CPU usage runs about 5% to 8% on a 1Ghz P3. Not bad, but not as good as Winamp.
6) iTunes cannot tell if there is a CD in my drive or not. So it shows “Eject Disc” even when there is no disc in the drive. At the least, the labeling for this item should be fixed.
7) “Import Folder” does not function.
8) Drag and drop of a directory full of MP3 files (2593 files) puts iTunes into a locked-up state. Maybe it’s working on something, but there is no way to tell. No progess meter, nothing.
9) Overall, Winamp is far superior to iTunes. It certainly doesn’t have a store… but it doesn’t have unknown and undocumented DRM features either.
Altogther, it looks like iTunes was rushed out the door. And it certainly was written by Mac-heads, not Windows programmers. A stepping stone on the way to the future, but nothing special.
Just installed itunes for windows on my compaq athlon 2200 running windows XP with 640 MB ram, attached to my tv (use it as my multimedia hub; ie recording TV). Download was a snap, install a breeze (didn’t even ask for email info or anything). Asked to restart after install- done. Opening it up for the first time runs through the same info as itunes for OS X, offers to look for songs and offers to take straight to itunes music store (I declined both offers). Connected to my libraries on both my airport ibook and my G4 without any problems, started playing songs without any trouble! gotta love rendezvous. Visuals work great (I have a radeon all in wonder 7500- great card, wish they made them for the mac). Havent noticed any problems with window resizing but will keep an eye out. Recognized my burner (havent tried
burning a cd yet but will let you know what happens). Going through the menues and the preferences it seems to be functionally 100% identical to the mac counterpart, and visually it’s nearly the same (though there is the quite unattractive menu bar across the top). Havent tried plugging my buddies windows ipod up. It is definitely a huge step up from musicmatch, and with the rendezvous music sharing means I dont have to keep any music on the windows PC (more room for recording video). I would have to say that for a first release it works well.
So I guess I’m the only one who’s unable to install it
The installer fails during the QuickTime 6.4 installation step (yup, I’ve tried with my default QT installation removed as well). (Error 1722 – something with SuppressRegistrationDialogs)
Not trying to turn this into a support forum, but hey, I’m a bit envious…
I’m glad iTunes was finally ported to windows, but I have a folder with all my albums ripped and ID3’d with CD-EX. Having iTunes installed for only a few ours, it destroyed my system, creating new folders for some tracks on the album and renaming mp3s so my current m3u files no longer work even after i got all the mp3s in the correct folders. I believe this is a result of the “Keep Library organized” “feature” of the program. I more or less like the program, but it has set me back about an hour to re-organize my folders
I have not exactly been happy with the way iTunes has been working. From the install I noticed it reguired Quick Time. I have had my system running with out it for months and I don’t like the fact I need it back to run iTunes. It also tried to automatically associate files (I did catch the options however and stopped that). Then it added two MSCONFIG entries (iTunes Music Helper and QTTask). It would be nice if I was told what these are and why I can’t throw them out. Next it added a iPod Helper Service. This is unbelievably annoying as I don’t even have an iPod (I have a Nomad Jukebox 3). The speed of iTunes is far too slow for me. I understand my 600 Mhz. Pentium III with 256 MB Ram running XP Home is no speed demon. However, every other music ap (like Winamp, XMMS in Linux, and even Windows Media Player) has run much faster. The program has been very slow when resizing the window like the review said. The interface isn’t really any nicer then any other programs I have used. I don’t exactly see anything compelling in the software other then maybe the Music Store. I also don’t like the fact so little technical information is given, like what 3rd party applications can play AAC files. The program has also already crashed on me once. This to me feels like a rushed beta release. I doubt it, but if Apple is purposly crippling the software to make me want a Mac, that plan doesn’t work.
Here is the answer to some of the CPU hogging issues:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?14@13.xArhalejiZP.0@.599ac9b…
Sorry, it is not that. My SoundCheck is unchecked by default.
I just put it on my athlon XP 1700 with 512MB and it is running very slow as far as resizing goes. I also notced that it seems to be taking up about 70% of the CPU at first but I looked at it’s display and it showed that it analyzing the volume levels on all of my music, once it finished that the CPU usage droped to normal (5% – 10%) level. Overall I would say it’s nice but defintaly could use some optimizations.
Does everyone here realize that this is version 1.0 of iTunes for windows? Hell its probably closer to .1 as fast as they shoved it out the door. They need it done and something that worked. It works doesn’t it? They’ll fix the speed/cpu issues now that it works. expect updates. apple does that you know. update their software. and updates actually FIX AND IMPROVES it, instead just adding more features. think about it.
Who else thinks a Celery doesn’t qualify as a Pentium?
I’ve got my hand up!
Who else thinks this message is going to get modded down because Eugenia realizes this also?
I’ve got my other hand up!
ok, I just upgraded my Matrox drivers to the latest ones (before I used MS’ qualified drivers, now I use Matrox’s). SAME THING: Resizing the music store window is _imposible_.
>Who else thinks a Celery doesn’t qualify as a Pentium?
Give it up buddy. Celerons are Pentium-class processors, they are i686s with less cache. Get a clue.
With the release of iTunes for Windows, I was finally able to check out their selection. Of course, they won’t let me buy it because I live in Canada, but at least now I can check what they got.
Blind Guardian – nothing
In Flames – nothing
Nightwish – one song from some obscure multi-artist disk
Dark Tranquillity – nothing
Dimmu Borgir – nothing
Emperor – nothing
Apocalyptica – only the earliest album, nothing else
Children of Bodom – nothing
Norther – nothing
Symphony X – nothing
Green Carnation – nothing
Death – nothing
Therion – nothing
Hmmm, 1 album and one song from all those bands? Wow, that’s a great selection. My local A&B Sound got more.
Computer: Sony VAIO PCV-RX850 (2.4 GHz P4, 768MB RAM)
iTunes Library: 3,782 songs
iTunes idle: 0%
iTunes playing: 4%
iTunes w/Large Visual affects: 64%
Window Resizing (w/o effects): 69%
Window Resizing (w/ effects): 91%
Window resizing is slightly less responsive than other installed applications. Noticeable, but not to the extent that it’s bothersome.
Note: Other than those applications which came with the computer from OEM, I only have three applications on this computer; two stock/options trading applications and now iTunes. Not scientifc by any means, but not disppointed at all with this software package.
Apple has introduced a malware app for the PC. Apple changed my files and folders without my permission. Without even telling me.
Time for a nice letter to Apple Legal.
And time to delete this crap from my system.
Apple’s braindead monoculture is just not appropriate for the PC environment.
For some reason, right click just started working, though.
No KMFDM. No Metallica. No Cradle of Filth.
Apple Music doesn’t contain metal (black or death) music. It contains mostly commercial stuff.
As for not supporting anything before 2000, Apple does not have iTunes for anything under OS 9. The more OSes they support the more that can be problematic. Plus it could mean more bloat to the program. If you havent paid for an upgrade since 98 perhaps you wont be buying music? That is the reason apple extended iTunes to the window product base … to sell music and iPods.
You’re one of those great big idiots, aren’t you?
Did you Notice that box about Organizing your Music Library? And the one about being the default player for media types? You didn’t, you clicked right through them, and now you aren’t whining about Apple, you are whining about your own idiocy.
Apple has introduced a malware app for the PC. Apple changed my files and folders without my permission. Without even telling me.
Time for a nice letter to Apple Legal.
And time to delete this crap from my system.
Apple’s braindead monoculture is just not appropriate for the PC environment.
For some reason, right click just started working, though.
Funny. It didn’t change anything on “My Music” folder. WMP9 used to do that (ie Broke my AC/DC folder in half, AC and DC!!!)
What did it do to change your folders? I am curious.
P3-700 Compaq Laptop!
This is the most clean Windows app I have ever seen. WinAmp is an jarring nightmare! and MusicMatch is so confusing…but the Album info that MusicMatch gives is much more detailed with reviews etc.
I love the WINiTunes!!!!
Am
Testing my new drivers a bit more, speed seems to be about 4-5% better than my previous drivers. Still, trying to resize my iTunes Music Store is unusable though. Works “acceptably” only when the window is smaller than 600×400 or so.
“Give it up buddy. Celerons are Pentium-class processors, they are i686s with less cache. Get a clue.”
Celerons are Pentium not allowed to use the Pentium name you mean.
And you don’t think cache would be a factor in media playback?
Microsoft has dropped support for 95/98/Me with Office 2003. I think when a manufacturer whose entire business relies on backward compatibility discontinues support for a product, it is truely antiquated. C’mon people.
Sure it will have! But when Apple says “Pentium-Class” CPU of 500 Mhz and above, that INCLUDES Celerons!
Like I said, Matrox cards have sucky OpenGL support.
Case in point: I can play games that use DirectX and get 50 frames per second.
If I play a game that uses OpenGL, and minimum system requirements of P133, I get literally less than 1 frame per second.
“I think when a manufacturer whose entire business relies on backward compatibility discontinues support for a product, it is truely antiquated.”
Not at all. Because their business doesn’t rely on backward compatibility. Their business relies on forcing people to uprade their OS as often as possible.
“Steve Jobs gave the keynote speech at the launch of Apple’s iTunes for Windows. He referred to the new program as “the best Windows app ever written.”
Whhooo there pilgrim! Its not a bad app?..so far??but come down!
I seem to be having to say that far too often
I don’t know why, but on my 1.1 ghz athlon with 512 mb ram it is unusable. It takes at least 30 seconds for the gui to respond to anything. I have to kill it with the task manager to quit. Most lame.
don’t get me wrong. i love OS X and iTunes running on that, but this one for windows is the worst piece of software apple ever produced. it’s a resourcehog like nothing else. even Photoshop 7 requires LESS memory than this windows version of iTunes. also it is totally unstable. in the last two hours of playing around with it, it crashed like 7 time on me.
this iTunes version for windows is worse than the first alpha of winamp3 and at least the winamp3 alpha was clearly marked as an alpha, so one could expect such problems. but this windows version of itunes is even WORSE. i am pretty confident the marketings monkeys at apple are going to blame windows for this …
It sucked on OSX and by the looks of things, it ain’t any better on Windows. The music selection doesn’t sound so hot either.
Hey,
I think I abandoned a duel 600MHZ Tyan motherboard to the garage a few years ago, would you like me to ship it to you so that you can do your reviews on a little more modern hardware?
I will have to send it COD though.
“This is trolling, right? ”
No i want to buy one for a project i’m working on for which i will need logic audio (no longer available for windows). i like apple. Mine was a serious question. I want to know when they are upgrading the G4 power macs. I assume they won’t dicontinue the mini-towers in favor of G5’s towers only.
See if that helps. I’ve seen Windows software run FASTER after disabling a processor in a 2-processor machine.
Yep, this is pure speculation, but my guess is that Apple will make iChatAV for Windows next. It already has a partnership with AOL and uses the AIM base. It definitely is the next killer app – just ask those who have used it. In fact, I think Apple could make a boatload of money porting all of it’s iApps to Windows. Naturally, the applications won’t run as smoothly for everybody, but I think a lot of people would agree that there simply are no Windows applications that match the simplicity and integration of the iApps suite.
Slow UI? Must be a buggy videocard driver or something. The window is somewhat slow resizing, but I can move the window around on my desktop like it’s on speed :p Seriously, ultra fast here.
Athlon XP 2100+
my guess is that Apple will make iChatAV for Windows
This would be great — it would be especially neat if they could use WIA cameras as well as the iSight, but I don’t know if that will happen.
the iTunes music store (as steve Jobs said) contains only quality music which is why there are only some selected songs. they could have been much more (as he said)
as for general comments : its logical to get the (worst) comments from a guy with a nick WINDOWS USER.
its also logical that some guys will have problems.
but many ppl get good results with iTunes and its processor usage.
from my experience with iTunes on mac, its a fantastic app, and much better than winamp. eventually it will be the same on the PC
for those of u who really want to benefit from it.. im sure ull find urselves using it quite often in the future. but really. id suggest u save up money and buy a Mac 
then ur lifes will become so much easier 
Well, since Metallica sold out, it should be in iTunes, right?
For ogg. Its the only good free lossy audio codec out there. And it also helps to make sure that wma does not become the “standard” for playing multimedia on computers, which I am sure Apple is weary of, even if right now Microsoft may make a codec for Apple. it should be rather trivial to add it. Heck, they could just pay the guys at Xiph to do it. Its BSD licensed, so they can keep their code too. I think, and maybe I am wrong, but the people likely to actualyl know and use Itunes are probably those who would use something like itunes anyway. i.e., will use something other than windows Media player.
I am using about 2-3% of resources on my machine here, a 1.2GHz Duron 512MB of RAM. Memory usage is less than Winamp 2. That is impressive. Same complaints about the slow interface though.
I’ve been waiting for iTunes for Windows for a long time, and it has not disappointed me yet. I’ve got a 2GH P4 w/ 512 MB RAM. Window resizing is a bit sluggish, but scrolling is fine and playback takes only 1% of my CPU.
For those with CPU problems, take note: there’s the SoundCheck thing that can run in the background and eat CPU cycles when you’ve recently imported. There’s also the “Sound Enahcer” feature that can expend extra CPU cycles when playing. The equalizer probably uses some as well.
Far and away the best feature for me, which WinAMP and WMP do not even TOUCH, is iTunes’s Browse mode. I wish they made it more obvious. But when your selection is on the Library, click the little rainbow eye button at the right end of the toolbar. This lets you do really fast queries of your entire library, in like no time. It is very powerful, and a great UI. That and the ID3 tag editor. Marvelous.
iTunes will have bugs on Windows. that is because PCs dont come with standard configuration.
what do i mean ? mac computers are built by apple. they support some specific graphics cards. they have specific setups. as a result the iTunes for mac can be better optimized.
but in the world of PCs where u have so many diff setups of computers, its very logical to have problems, and bugs;)
and this doesnt happen only with iTunes, windows and PCs and their programs are full of flaws and bugs all the time !!!
as i said before, the ppl who really wanna benefit from this program and try to learn it, they eventually will..
but trolls or bashers will only try to find problems and cum in here and ruin it for the rest !!! its logical. i dont blame them . they just need to get a life !!!
Well, since Metallica sold out, it should be in iTunes, right?
hehehe I don’t forsee them on the new Napster too!
the pc users which will really benefit from iTunes are the ones with iPods.
i will say it again, i dont know how good the app is on windows, but from my Mac experience, iTunes makes it SOOOO easy to use my iPod. importing files, updating them automatically, playlists, browsing, encoding mp3s… this app does so many things all together and it does them really well..
it just makes ur life much easier, just like all the iApps, this is why i have a MAC. THIS is why i dont have a Linux box (i dont think i have to mention anythin about WINsucks)
“Altogther, it looks like iTunes was rushed out the door. And it certainly was written by Mac-heads, not Windows programmers.”
The fact that Apple had a job posting on Monster.com a while back looking for Windows logo certified programmers tends to shoot your theory all to bits! The job posting even mentioned iTunes for Windows in particular.
This is amazing, I am truly happy for Apple but more importantly I am happy for Windows user. Windows users are now able to enjoy what we Mac user have enjoyed since April. My iTunes seems to run much faster for me on the Windows side than on my Mac; if Apple keeps writing efficient software like this for the Windows platform they might make it hard for them selves to sale their own hardware. On second though if they write a wintel version of Mac OS X, we will soon be saying “Micro who?” or “Windows what?” My hat is off to Apple for a job well done and to new Windows users welcome to The Music Store.
I downloaded iTune to my notebook, a P4 1.6G with 512M RAM, running XP Pro. My PC should be at lower end by today’s standard. iTune runs perfectly. It normally takes 10% CPU and it’s snappy and responsive. I didn’t see any problems Eugenia described. While I’m typing this post, I’m listening to MostlyClassic.com’s 128K radio stream through iTune, again, no buffer interrupt.
For a version 1 application (on Windows), I don’t expect iTune to be problem-free. But from my own experience, I’m sure those complaints on Eugenia’s list are because of the testing hardware’s problem.
Well, iTunes seems to be working pretty nice on my system (Duron 900 mobile, 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility M1). CPU use is constantly below 25% (ranges mostly from 5% to 20%).
I guess sometimes it is a matter of luck and the system configuration. Eugenia’s problems with Mozilla and now iTunes tells me she is not that lucky sometimes (no offense intended)
I just have a question though. Is there any way to change the fonts? I am not a fan of Tahoma, and I would like to see Lucida Sans (system font) in something else than the menus if possible.
It keeps crashing on both my laptop and my PC whenever I try to import any folders with MP3’s. Anyone have the same problem? I’m pretty bummed about this since I wanted to get away from Wmp to another full featured MP3 player, let along for the cool ITunes Store.
I sent a note to Apple support, but of course it’s not like they are going to respond to me.
A few possibilities. Some people seem to be trying to do this across high traffic network or are doing it with folders that contain thousands and thousands of tracks within folders. If you have sub folders, try selecting smaller groupings of these folders to import music. And turn off sound check before doing so.
It is dual 533 Mhz. Dual.
Saying ‘dual’ twice and making the word bold in your review does nothing but lamely try to drive home the point that you think 2 533MHz processors are in some way going to help you in this situation.
Is iTunes multithreaded? It probably is. But, 2 processors are NOT going to help you with UI responsiveness. They might allow you to rip a CD and still have full responiveness from the rest of the program, much like Premiere can compress a video and still allow you to edit if you are on a dual processor machine.
Your dual dual 533s are not the same as 1 1066, obviously. Taken singly, since iTunes isn’t splitting itself between both CPUs evenly, your processor is only 6.6% faster than Apple’s recommendation. Processor recommendations usually reflect the bare minimum needed to even run the program. It’s no wonder that you’re feeling is that the application is slow, as you are barely above the necessary horsepower to even get the app to run at any level of useability.
It appears that iTunes is using a custom widget/theme set—forgoing Window’s MFC/GDI/GDI+ calls. Given that assumption the app probably isn’t making use of any accelerated Windows drawing ability of video cards. Therefore it is entirely dependant on the CPU to assist it with refreshing itself. A processor that is barely above the lowest spec is going to have a hard time keeping up. Unless Apple coded iTunes for Windows to offload all UI drawing systems to a second processor in a dual CPU setup (which I highly doubt they did) then your second processor is, more than likely, just sitting idle while iTunes is running.
Eugenia, post some snapshots of from the Performance tab in your Task Manager. Show us the CPU utilization of Processors 0 and 1 while iTunes is loaded and you are dragging/resizing the UI. I just did it on my single CPU box and the CPU utilization *does* go up. I’m interested to see if it is spread evenly across both processors on a dual system, though. My guess is that it isn’t, and your second processor doesn’t matter one whit towards the performance of the app.
Apple users are used to this slightly slower UI speeds because it is the same in OSX with all windows resizing ect.
I eagerly downloaded iTunes to my workplace 1GHz PIII machine. The sound stutters whether I’m playing directly from a CD or from an AAC file.
I can play CDs and MP3 on the machine with multiple other programs. As a Mac user, I’ll wait for Apple to work out the bugs. If I were just a curious Windows user, I would toss it.
guys. whenever u buy a game it says :recomended and required hardware.
but in reality, the required processors will barely run the game, and with the recomended processors the game will simply play ok at normal details. so pls, dont waste so much time on what apple said about requirements. the app plays at 500mhz right ? it runs, it encodes, it resizes, etc… right ? if its not blazingly fast. than tough luck
iTunes on the Mac & PC has a feature that calculates the sound level of each file added into the library so that would require a certain amount of CPU cycles. (It can be turned off under Preferences->Effects->Sound Check).
Also other features can be turned off to decrease CPU usage (esp. Sound Enhancer under Preferences->Effects).
Finally under Preferences->Advanced there is an option NOT to copy files to your iTunes Music Folder when adding them to the library.
(Note: I haven’t used the PC version so I don’t know if it works the same or has the same options, I thought I would just provide some pointers to decreasing CPU usage I know work on my Mac).
You folks need to get a grip.
Apple did not set out to write you a nice, free music player. Stop imagining that this is their purpose. iTunes for Windows:
– is something that Apple had to provide to sell music to Windows users.
– frees Apple from MusicMatch software when selling iPods to Windows users.
– is a demonstration of the sort of enjoyment you will find on MacOS X
It is not a Windows app. Apple has zero incentive to help the Windows platform by writing cool apps for it. In fact, the more Mac apps they port to Windows, the less likely anybody will buy a Mac. What Apple wants is for Windows users to buy iPods and music and ultimately, Macs. If you’re not the type of person who would buy an iPod, or music, or a Mac, don’t download iTunes and quit whining.
Now, nobody appears to actually know why iTunes doesn’t run on anything except Windows 2000 and XP, but consider the intersection between people content with Win98/ME and the people who will spend $300 to $500 on an iPod.
Apple is not your personal free software developer. If what you want out of iTunes doesn’t match what Apple wants, remember that you’re not exactly paying for it. From some of the more clueless responses, I hope this post will save you 20 MB of downloading.
Considering the strange lack of Metal section, are they actually meaning to say that Metal as a genre doesn’t contain quality music (as opposed to any other genre that’s listed in iTunes?). Doesn’t seem too nice to me.
Come on… tsizkeik said it poorly, but Jobs’ point was that the store isn’t going to have… say… three or four different recompilations of an artist just to bump up the music offering numbers. That was his true point anyway.
As far as your complaints about the offerings being small, try to find what you want somewhere else and then try to explore whether the offering is good or not. There are still alot of artists who refuse to offer their music. I believe Metallica is still one of them… at least as of July, 2003:
http://www.macminute.com/2003/07/02/itunes
What you might come to find is that Apple has a lot of really good stuff no one else has, all of the stuff most everyone has, and quite a few things you wouldn’t expect.
For all the complaints about performance and compatibility and the quality of the iTunes for Windows: What do you expect from the Wintel platform? You have practically an infinite number of combinations of video cards, motherboards, processors, CD drives, network cards, sound cards and even the bloody operating system! Do you actually expect ANY software developer to be able to write an app, especially in the first release, to be able to properly support every possible configuration that might be out there? It has to be Apple’s fault if it happens to run slowly on your computer! If you hav a problem with Apple choosing not to support Windows 9x, why don’t you pay for an upgrade because you sure didn’t have to pay to download iTunes. Technology moves on and whether you like it or not, every company has to drop support for older versions at some point in time.
And for the doofus who actually wants to complain to Apple Legal because iTunes has supposedly wronged him so much – good luck. One, did you read the EULA before installing? Probably not. Two, did you backup your computer before installing like a wise user would do? Probably not? Three, do you own all those songs in that collection which iTunes messed up on you? Probably not. Might want to delete those before your big day in court.
Oh yeah…sure, Steve Job’s may have exaggerated on the “best Windows app”, but what about Bill Gates “we invented personal computing”. Job’s is no more full of crap than anyone else…
“Hold it! It seems to be doing something…. it is going through all the songs and determining song volume, what ever that means. Hume….all very strange.” – TennesseeStiff
I think you activated “Sound Check” feature (Preferences > Effects, if it is organized the same as iTunes OS X). Enabled, it adjusts the volume of the songs during playback so that their “loudness” is constant. For songs with low volume, it will increase it by a few dB and vice versa. You can see how much the volume is adjusted for each song by getting the Summary Info of the song (select a song, File>Get Info>Summary tab).
If this is the case, it happens only once. Once analyzed and entered in database, it only does it again when you import new CDs and won’t take as long (you may not even notice).
…as someone noted above, there’s a LOT of different PC configurations. And everyone thinks theirs is perfectly standard. In some sense they’re right–but if you’re a PC user, you know full well how many times the same program, particularly anything remotely entertainment-related, works wildly differently on two machines that are both “compatible” with it. Three friends of mine with almost identical PCs — all with 2+ GHz P4 CPUs — tried to install TRON 2.0 recently. One of them had no problems at all, one of them had persistent graphics problems, one of them couldn’t get it to install at all. This isn’t a sign that TRON’s developers didn’t know what they were doing; it’s a sign that they didn’t test it in all possible configurations. Maybe they didn’t test them in enough… but there will always be wacky things.
A Celeron *is* a Pentium, as Eugenia noted. Her machine is also pretty near the bottom of the barrel for recommended machines, though, and as a former BeOS fan, she probably should know that machines like that are the ones least likely to get attention from the developers. It sucks, but it’s life in the PC world.
And Windows 2000/XP are a different codebase than Windows 98/ME: the latter is the Win32 codebase, not the NT/2000 codebase. There are APIs in 2000 that don’t exist in Win32. If you only have Win32, sucks to be you, but it’s not because Apple hates you. iTunes is not the first program for Win2K+ only, and I can guarantee it sure won’t be the last.
No one seems to care that this is one player that actually devotes most of its user space to displaying relevant information about the task at hand, which is playing music files. WMP 8 and 9 are more annoying in that respect. You open WMP and it takes you to the media guide, which FYI, has never had anything relevant to me. Go to your playlist and you immedately have a huge visualization covering most of the space the player is using. I figured out Itunes in minutes. I have already gone through almost all its functions and I haven’t used it for more than a day. A few hours actually. Happily playing my music now. I must add that I had used a few Itunes clones, rhythmbox and jamboree on Linux, so the interface was not exactly brand new, but Itunes is just way better than those too. No interface overload. Smart playlists are awesome. And resource usage is around 2% CPu and 5MB RAM right now. I haven’t seem it use more than 15 MB.
Perfomance of iTunes doesn’t suck because of “different platforms”. All different hardware components are abstracted by Windows. iTunes doesn’t access devices directly with via its own drivers. Instead, it uses Windows (or OS X) abstractions for various devices.
The thing that makes iTunes slow is dragging an OS X-based graphics library and OS X-based HTML rendering engine to Windows. This is one of the most negligent porting jobs I saw – instread of using interface of target platform, Apple simply hauled all its stuff along. The result looks about as stupid as a classic Windows theme app on OS, and is really slow because Apple reinvents the wheel instead of using built-in Windows facilities. Just how hard is it to redesign the GUI by using Windows-specific or system agnostic tools instead of OS X GUI that was never meant to be ripped out of its base platform? iTunes interface is small and therefore isn’t that hard to redo.
Summary: if your application GUI works slower then Swing and Mozilla, blame your crappy coding skills.
-> The thing that makes iTunes slow is dragging an OS X-based graphics library and OS X-based HTML rendering engine to Windows – Kobold
Umm, iTunes does not use HTML ANYWHERE. It uses a custom XML based solution. One only needs to inspect the results of an HTTP request to the iTunes servers to realise this.
But I agree with you on the first part. However, for a first release Apple did an excellent job, considering it is also FREE software.
there was an app like this called musci box that was gonna be a linux thing, but as many OSS projects go, this one forked early on and there was so much confusion and bad code most people quit playing with it and development has ALMOST ground to a halt. now if apple would release a version for the rest of us
heck i might not mind getting a subscription to their store thing.
I had the exact same thing. UI response was slow on a Pentium III 667 256 meg ram. Nothing else was slow. Window resizing is slow. Scolling is slow but similar to that experienced by owners of i-books.
Therefore it has nothing to do with dual processors as has been suggested.
I think it is because this is their oen widget set. Which makes me wonder if they are going to port other apps to Windows. Like the iApps, and charge for them and also charge for services like the storage.
Wow, iTunes for Windows? Could this be…? Yes it is true.
Very nice (read: awesome!) application!
The only thing I’d like to see on my x86 now is Exposé, seems like neat stuff!
well i just tried in my VERY low end notebook K-6 500 Mhz running windows XP pro! on 128 RAM ! (haha) and it works fast enough for daily use. I dont see the user interface speed issue. I also installed it in my faster 1.2ghz celeron and it works very well.
It’s awful to see that ugly performance on the Windows side of things… Hope they got it right by the next release.
Here, on the Macintosh side the only thing I’ve noticed after upgrading is that QuickTime 6.4 is fast as a daredevil. Previously it dropped frames whenever I was playing more than one movie at the same time, now they play just as well as solo. They also revised the interface: it’s just like the player shown in all the Panther screen shots.
All this on a PowerBook G4 1GHz. Now I’m really waiting for Panther.
I stand corrected (it looked just like a webpage, so I just assumed that it uses HTML. Yes, I shouldn’t have done that). Scrolling in Music Store or playlist is really way too jerky on Duron 800/256 RAM (the fun thing is that horizontal scrolling in playlist and vertical scrolling in iTMS are the worst, and vertical in playlist and horizontal in iTMS are closer to normal – can anyone confirm this?), and resizing perfomance just sucks. Maybe someone in Apple has to learn programming.
Well there’s a sourceforge project that has come up with a quicktime plugin for ogg audio codec (for Mac OS X and 9). Maybe someone can port that to QT Windows?
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Just to point out I did try importing small folders and it worked. Problem is I have like 250 folders not to mention probably a thousand songs not categorized by artist->album->folder. It would take hours for me to add these files one folder at a time. Then there is the upkeep of having to constantly add new folders once I rip them. Keeping the media libray up to date in Itunes seems like a total nightmare. I’m not going to start dumping my files into special small folders just to accomdate ITunes inability to deal with several files either.
Like I said I think Itunes and the store is cool, just too bad unlike WMP you just can’t tell Itunes to monitor a top level folder and be done with it. Bummer
I am on an 867 MHz PowerBook G4 and running iTunes is next to unnoticable when it comes to CPU usage.
According to top(1), iTunes is using anywhere between 5% and 15% of my CPU (within a minute) with visualisations off, playing back an 128kbit AAC file (sorry, I don’t use MP3s!).
With a 500 MHz iBook, I remember I’d used to get 25% to 35% CPU usage, and that slowed things down considerably!
I know that iTunes and QuickTime 6 uses the G4 AltiVec processing unit, so maybe the G4 is getting away with capabilities that the iBook never had… so that 5-15% CPU usage figure seems realistic to me.
As I write this, I’m playing music and the system responsiveness is extremely good regardless.
there is a littel menu option in Help called “provide feadback about iTunes”
click it and let your issues be known.
I must say, I have a laptop with s3 twister in it, and the UI resize and ITMS scrolling does suck.
I noticed the same thing with ‘leveling’ of sound as some of you. First few times I fired up iTunes, it was consuming around 70-80% of the CPU even when no tracks were playing.
I suppose the only people who didnt have this problem were those who had their ‘My Music’ folder empty, OR a bulk of the music files were located in other folders OR those who unchecked the ‘search for music in My Music’ option when you ran the setup. Once I let it run for about 10 mins (leveling the volume), the CPU usage dropped off, and now it takes no more than the original (2.x) WinAmp does … which is impressive considering the pretty UI.
If any of you continue to have this CPU usage problem, I’d recommend stopping the playback & let it do its thing with the volume leveling, and trying again.
I’m a long time iTunes user, although I haven’t installed it on my Dell yet. However, I am not surprised Windows people are having different experiences. Apple’s iLife apps are, overall, really good. But, they are not perfect. If you read sites like MacInTouch and MacFixit, you’ll see plenty of individual Mac users having problems. The same is true of the Apple Discussion Boards. Mostly minor problems but, come to think of it, iMovie 3 was a disastor until Apple came out with a big fix for it.
On Macs, I experience the problem that many do – iPhoto windows being sluggish (even lagging on fast Macs). It sounds pretty much like Eugenia’s problem with iTunes. I don’t think it’s her hardware.
For Windows users, I would take the suggestions some have offered here. Try not to import really big libraries all at once. Play around with the prefs, like Sound Check and Sound Enhancer and the Visualizer and see what your best results are.
I agree with the poster that said iTunes for Windows is made for the iPod. Thet make beautiful music together (no pun intended;-). In fact, Apple released new software for the newer iPods today too with new enhancements. Also, big promotions with companies like Pepsi.
The iTunes Music Store started out with 200,000 tunes from the big five music companies. Since then they’ve signed up about 200 indie labels and have 400,000 tunes available. So, it is a big success, there is no doubt about that.
@ryan – it seems highly unlikely that Apple will come out with upgrades to G4 towers. However, you got me to thinking – I’m surprised how long they’ve been selling the 1.25 GHz older models. Either they’re a success because of their pricing or they’re just trying to get rid of them. I don’t know. If a success, it would be interesting to have the 1.42 MHz models at such prices. But, the current 1.25 MHz models boot OS 9 and that may be why they’re still there – there is still a need for that in some areas.
I suppose the only people who didnt have this problem were those who had their ‘My Music’ folder empty, OR a bulk of the music files were located in other folders OR those who unchecked the ‘search for music in My Music’ option when you ran the setup.
Nope. I selected the “My Music” folder during installation and it all went well. I have 13.9Gigs of 3320 files(a couple of WMA, rest MP3s) spread out on 245 folders.
Haha, Eurodance! I thought that stuff gets only played in Japan nowadays (DDR and stuff)
Eugenia, I don’t get why you had so many problems sharing, I just clicked share my entire library in prefrences on my mac, and instantly on my laptop I saw my library called “Jeremy’s Music” and it plays like it is on my computer. I can even make CDs with the songs remotely.
I don’t understand the comments stating that iTunes for Windows is slow. It runs just fine on my machine…it is actually quite responsive.
P4 1.7 Ghz
256 MB RDRAM PC800
NVidia GeForce 2MX 64MB (have been playing visuals at “full screen)
I have to give Eugenia credit for her/his effort in reviewing stuff on OSNews, but reading through her/his reviews of Panther and now iTunes I really have to say that she/he is a really bad reviewer.
Review requires lot of research and taking care that you post confirmed facts not assumptions about product that you review. This so called review should have been called “first look” or “preview” instead.
are you windoze people always this petty??
there’s a whole other world where you don’t have to deal with this crap.
buy a Mac. smile more
Memory useage is obscene (more than Outlook at 40mb with no songs playing)
No Always On or System Tray Only options
And worse of all, sutomatically stops playing when PC is locked (hence you can’t listen to music from a tamperproof PC running iTunes)
It imported my library fairly quickly (1002 songs), but crashed on a housemate’s PC when he loaded up a network share (5809 songs).
Apple fail it.
Not a bad program. Only complaint I had is that I had to disable my Norton Firewall (version 2004) to use it. It was complaining that it didn’t have enough memory (even though I use 256MB). Speed is not that bad and I run it on a Pentium III 850 with a Nvidia GeForce 4 card.
I was pleased that this application doesn’t run on Win98 or WinME. Makes me glad I upgraded to Windows 2000 a long time ago. I wish more software authors would dump Win98.Even my own projects I’m coding strictly for Windows 2000 and XP and not Win98/ME.
>This so called review should have been called “first look” or “preview” instead.
Yeah, that’s why it is called “First Impressions” and not a review. Get a clue.
Memory useage is obscene (more than Outlook at 40mb with no songs playing)
It’s at 15megs playing Children of the Grave here (XP).
You people should better take care of your systems guys.
Sorry about that Eugenia.Heading skipped my attention.
All of my MP3s are on my Samba server and iTunes picked everything up superbly. I’ve been using WMP9 to put a “Folder.jpg” cover art jpeg into each album folder when I rip a CD. When I download an album from Emusic, I drag the cover art jpeg from the Emusic download manager into the album folder. The Andromeda php script runs on top of my Apache server and I can therefore preview covert art when browsing my collection.
Anyone know how to get iTunes to automatically recognize my cover art jpegs? They’re all called “Folder.jpg,” so that should make the job easier.