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.
Check out http://www.livejournal.com/users/onejdc/50802.html
for what happened with me. Seems as though I’m not alone. lol. Which is sad, I was really looking forward to iTunes. Ah well. Winamp Beta 5 released today…i’ll try that.
Celeron 533 is still adequate for all tasks except gaming and CPU hog apps (rendering, media editing). If a music player cannot redraw scrolled content in sensible time on that kind of machine, it can’t be a fault of software. More or less smooth scrolling is quite possible on P1, and unless the programmers suffer from permanent brain damage due to exposure to Steve Jobs distortion field, scrolling should be completely smooth on Celeron 533. If horizontal scrolling of a table or resizing stutters on machine of that level, someone made a mistake equivalent to using bubble sort in a database app.
You can check out Apple’s Music Event at this link:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/musicevent03/
You can experience Steve Job’s reality distortion effect. It’s really quite amazing. Well, it’s interesting, at least. The event, that is.
Anyone know if and when Apple will roll-out the store for non-US customers?
well, lets see.
the gui os rendered in Open GL, so if you run a GFX card with BAD OpenGL performance, then you will get a sluggish gui no matter what frequency your CPU is running.
the HTML rendering in the store is rendered by webobjects. it has been ported to Windows, so you can expect some bad performance from it until it gets better optimized for Windows.
there is no brain deadness, just the cost of porting a program to another platform. but if you only program in windows, you would not really have experience in that. try talking to some Open source folks to get an idea of how hard tehy think it was to port iTunes to x86 and windows.
Look at everyone here… “I’ve got 2.4 ghz P4 with 2 gb ram and it takes up 40 mb of ram. UNACCEPTABLE!” Sheesh… so what if it takes up ram… that’s what programs are supposed to do. this ain’t your run of the mill mp3 playing software like winamp. Anyways, RAM is cheap, CPU processes are cheap. If you have a 2.4 Ghz processor and you’re complaining that it’s using 17% of it. What are you going to do with the rest of the CPU processing? What are you going to do with the 1.5 gb ram left over? get over it. resources are cheap.
Something must be completely f**cked up with this reviewers machine.
Installed in on a 2ghz celron Dell portable, and the UI is extremely snappy! Know others who’ve installed in on even slower boxes, and no problems there either… In terms of perfomance it absolutely smokes WMP and MusicMatch (the latter is very sluggish on low end machines).
It doesn’t seem to be very professional to post a review, negative on performance without testing on different machines! Anyway – for me it works better than any other player I’ve EVER tried, and that goes both for performance and ui responsiveness.
i have a duron 1ghz with 300 some odd megs of ram and a geforce 4 64mb card, i also have a g4 with a radeon 32mb card and 1 gig of ram, and i actually think the windows app is much snappyer and more responsive than my mac one, im amazed at the exact replica
If it seems bloated to old or even new crap Wintel/Amd ‘puters that’s because the computers probably use some weird graphics, mainboard, etc. stuff…
I somehow doubt it, but I’ll be looking when I get home to be sure. This system’s a Dell, so the components, though not the best, are definitely not obscure. Intel CPU, ATI graphics, which would be on the top of the line for any x86 PC, though I wouldn’t call either component in this PC top of the line itself. It’s definitely better than most of the average users’ computers out there.
Simple fact, with WMP running playing music and a handful of other apps running, I have CPU Usage between 0 and 10%, with occasional spikes as high as 15%. I run iTunes without playing any music and it stays pretty much the same. I resize iTunes (still not playing music) and it goes to 100% and stays there for a moment after I release it.
I have issues with WMP as well, there’s no doubt there, but that’s not the item being discussed. Apple’s only real hold on any market on x86 machines has come from what they can deliver that no one else can. The app itself isn’t going to be the draw for the product, it’s going to be exclusive content in the store, just like the QuickTime player draws people that need it to see the latest trailer for movie X. If they really want people to like their apps in Windows, they need to make them behave in a manner more consistent with the environment and make sure that they don’t sacrifice usability for looks (if using the brushed metal theme could even be considered sacrificing anything for looks, since it looks like crap imo).
the gui os rendered in Open GL, so if you run a GFX card with BAD OpenGL performance, then you will get a sluggish gui no matter what frequency your CPU is running.
the HTML rendering in the store is rendered by webobjects. it has been ported to Windows, so you can expect some bad performance from it until it gets better optimized for Windows.
there is no brain deadness, just the cost of porting a program to another platform. but if you only program in windows, you would not really have experience in that. try talking to some Open source folks to get an idea of how hard tehy think it was to port iTunes to x86 and windows.
If you want to port something quickly, I guess you would do it this way. You make some simple emulation layer to translate the calls the original app makes to different calls on another OS.
If you want to port something correctly, you make a native port. You don’t call OpenGL if the default desktop doesn’t use OpenGL, you call default window calls. You don’t port some webobjects over to Windows to render HTML, you use IE. If you want hardware acceleration of the window, you could use OpenGL, or DirectX, but either way it should perform better than this seems to be performing. This looks more like they left the OpenGL calls in and put in a layer that talks to Windows instead of going straight to the OpenGL drivers.
Just because resources are abundant doesn’t mean you write bloated code. People are abundant, everywhere even. That’s not an excuse to waste them.
Apple, IMO, could have done a better job with the coding. I feel like they grabbed 4 or 5 of the orginal iTunes developers, handed them “Windows Programming for Dummies” and said “Have fun.”
Mind, I *do* think it will be an excellent application once it is more finely tuned! I *LOVE* iTunes for the Mac, and spent several months trying to emulate it on the pc.
I guess I think Apple felt pressured into releasing an application by a deadline, not based on the product’s readiness.
Pro’s
-nice clean interface
-good sounding
-cool search feature
-library organized things wonderfully
-radio steaming interface is niiiiice
-supposedly normalizes volume levels in library (if true)
Con’s
-slow/choppy resizing and dragging
-19M download
-refresh buffer every 5 minutes when streaming radio
-lil heavy on the cpu
-quirky interface (no maximize)
Conclusion: Leave it on to normalize songs in the background. It’s definitely the best all-in-One package I’ve seen for windows (I hate musicmatch). However, I don’t see it as a killer app, and other then the normalizing feature, nothing offered here that would make me choose using it for mp3 listening, ripping or burning instead of other programs like winamp, cdex, or nero. Lets hope there’s a couple updates.
Notes: Online store wasn’t available in Canada.
Computer specs dual amd 1500 on tyan k7 with 512 ecc ram, GF3 ti500
To me, for a 1.0 release they did an incredible job. Media player, CD/DVD Burning, Music Store, …..
On my 1ghz Athlon with a Geforce2 440MX it works like a charm.
On that same machine he latest version of MusicMatch is nearly unusable with their gui responsiveness. And that is a program that’s been windows native for years and through many versions. Similar issues came up when I tried WinAmp3 so I went back to use WinAmp 2.x.
To this day there probably isn’t a windows program that runs perfectly on every possible PC hard/software configuration, not even the OS itself, so for a company coming out with an app that performs as ITunes for windows as their 1.o release, it is just impressive and I am sure that subsequent releases will improve the user experience.
Apple seems to be one of the few companies that actually achieves better performance in new releases, where as for most other companies their apps just become bigger, slower and their solution is always “oh, just get a newer, faster computer, then the app will run appropriately”
Will it replace WinAmp, WMP or any other player out there? No, but it others great features worth using for and for me it at least replaces MusicMatch and WinAmp3 for now.
So, great job Apple and keep up the good work
“Anyone know if and when Apple will roll-out the store for non-US customers?”
I’d like to double that– Europe seems to be forgotton once again
yes, I can confirm this. I do not mind it spiking to 70% when loading something (every application does something similar) and I do not mind the idle CPU time, but I do get 100% usage when clicking n the GUI to move it. this is a Open GL problem. I don’t know what Apple will do to fix tis except to perhaps render the GUI in DX9 which is better supported on cheap cards and renders better in windows if it needs to use software rendering. we will see, but for right now, I do not have a problem with the program because I can minimize it with out a sluggishness issue, I can shrink it to mini player with out an issue, and the windows size is the right size for managing my music. I did however submit a UI problem report about it, and I suggest you all do the same….it is under the help menu.
as far as memory, big deal.
Windows Memory management sucks anyhow and causes way to much swap because it tries to minimize the memory foot print of all applications running. well, hello, what good is it if you have 2 or 3 apps running but only use 30% of your memory? you end up swapping out a lot more than you need to. and don’t say that it allows you to run more programs because it doesn’t, it just under utilizes resources and slow down the user experience because of swapping.
now, of course, this is not under the control of iTunes for windows, it is the Operating system’s decision on how to manage the memory, but iTunes can tweak this by telling windows it requires a bit more ram, so when the system is not running a lot of programs it gets the resources it likes for a good User Experience.
to all the Europeans out there……Hello!!! there are licensing issues to be dealt with for god sakes.
Apple does use OpenGL with almost all it’s app’s so if your graphics card doesn’t support all OpendGL thats going to be problem.
Also some sluggish performance could be due to the fact that only ATI and Invidia make full fledge Mac counterparts meaning Apple did not probably optimize iTunes 4.1 for other graphic cards which didn’t give full driver support. Apple has already released a knowledge base on iTunes and how fix 90% of issues. Apple is working on update to fix issues some folks are having while others are not. Remember Apple iTunes was fix platform and worked in pretty fixed set of hardware varibles and now going to 2 more platforms and unfixed set of hardware varibles means it could have some coding issues in the first verison release for certain users.
Main reason for not releasing on later verison was because of security issues and MS doesn’t put full support on the older OS’s anymore. Another is that all new competition that they are currently looking at are designed for XP and 2000.
I *think* its time you get a new system. SMP doesn’t really give as much of a performance boost you are expecting.
Just my 0.02
May 2004 will be the release date for Apples Music Store Europe and it will include more Euro label exclusives just for the European customers.
Not sure if this will include Korea or Japan but it could.
Why is is such a surprise that people with hundreds of different system configurations all have different experiences with the same piece of software?
Either that or you all downloaded a different version of iTunes Windows.
Current Knowledge Base from Apple as of today.
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/itunes/windows/
Savoy Label Group Announces Over 3000 New and Classic Tracks Through Apple iTunes Music Store
10/17/2003
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct 17, 2003 (BUSINESS WIRE) — The Savoy Label Group is pleased to announce the availability of its heralded catalog through Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Home to a who’s who of jazz such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, John Coltrane, Jimmy Scott and many others, as well as current luminaries such as Hubert Laws, James Moody, Lou Rawls and Andy Bey, SLG now offers over 3000 classic and contemporary tracks from the extensive catalog.
If it needs a card with good OpenGL perfomance, why isn’t that little fact mentioned in system requirements? Relying on something and not mentioning it is braindead.
Futhermore, one doesn’t use OpenGL for drawing user interface under Windows. It’s a different OS with its own widget set and UI behaviour. The rendering system of Windows is not based on PDF and OpenGL. Hauling all this stuff on Windows is braindead. Since the interface of iTunes is rather spartan, it would be easier to make a new Windows-friendly UI with Windows-based tools. Then it would at least be consistent with other applications, and my desktop won’t look like a dumpster full of different stuff (just imagine how Mac users would cry if MS Office came with Windows theme, and you’ll understand me).
I am sitting here on a mac accessing the music store. Window resizing is suddenly very slow. It was not like this before.
Bandwidth?
I have used iTunes on my iBook since I got it. I didn’t like the interface at first, but it grew on me over time.
Just installed it on my dual P3 1.1Ghz desktop box (512 Mb RAM). I had it scan my [network drive] shared music folder from my file server (13713 files / 37.2 days / 68.55 Gb) It took about half an hour, but not too much bandwidth. I have noticed the resizing problem, but it doesn’t concern me because, well, I don’t resize that often
It plays really smoothly and the interface is nicely ported.
I’m really happy with iTunes… I’m going to uninstall Winamp shortly. And now I don’t have to write that MP3 database that I’ve been putting off building
KOMPRESSOR
Ok – the reviewer is doing this for free. Ok, I’ve missed that one in the first place – so it’s obviously more of a personal impression than a “review”.
But still, that hardware IS old, and the Matrox card is not top of the line. And dual processors does NOT help. So i STILL think it would have been the most responsible thing for Eugenia to do to test this software on another machine before posting this “first impression”…
And some other good points other reviewers pointed out:
1. Apple is giving this away for FREE (stop whining)
2. Apple is ONLY doing this to sell more iPods (and to get Windows users interested in Macs)
3. The ONLY reason for the music store is to sell more iPods
4. The target area for this application is people who are likely to spend 300$ on an iPod. So just FORGET win9x and old machines.
And above all (even if you DONT want to buy an iPod or listen to old Rod Stewart songs on the music store haha):
iTunes has the best designed interface for organizing songs ever built into ANY player. This is what is so truely amazing about iTunes. It’s so simple and just does everything you need it to do extremely well. Sooooo easy and fast to use. Nothing even comes close.
– Searching for songs is just soo cool! type in a few words and the songs are filtered INSTANTLY.
– The browse button is unique
– The ID tag maker rocks
– So easy to make playlists
– So easy to import songs
– Smart playlists so cool
Just wait till you get accustomed to the way it works, and you’ll see what makes this app such a textbook example of Good Clean Usability Design (and family entertainment… )
Yes, i’ve been using iTunes on Mac for a long time, but spend most of my time working on Windows XP.
as far as memory, big deal.
Windows Memory management sucks anyhow and causes way to much swap because it tries to minimize the memory foot print of all applications running. well, hello, what good is it if you have 2 or 3 apps running but only use 30% of your memory? you end up swapping out a lot more than you need to. and don’t say that it allows you to run more programs because it doesn’t, it just under utilizes resources and slow down the user experience because of swapping.
You can change a lot of Windows’ file management behavior, especially if you use a fixed swap file. I have very little swapping on my machine, and it’s currently using a bit over half of the available RAM (one of my complaints about this particular system is that it only has 256MB of RAM, as I can often get it to max out and start swapping, though it’s still not heavy on swapping even when it actually is paging to disk because of application requirements).
now, of course, this is not under the control of iTunes for windows, it is the Operating system’s decision on how to manage the memory, but iTunes can tweak this by telling windows it requires a bit more ram, so when the system is not running a lot of programs it gets the resources it likes for a good User Experience.
The question, though, is why iTunes needs so much RAM in the first place. WMP is a little heavy when I’ve got it running at ~9.5MB. WinAmp tends to vary a bit more based on the playlist. iTunes blows them both out of the water. The feature difference between WMP and iTunes is minimal, if any, but the resource usage is very different.
umm…have you looked at other Jukeboxes? how many of them “fit” with the windows UI?
as far as OGL for the GUI….
how long do you think it would have taken them to rewrite iTunes for windows if they did not port their widgets and make a compatibility layer so that it can talk directly to the GFX card with out using the windows apis?
answer…A LOOOONNGGG time. not to mention they would have 2 code bases to maintain and would have to debug all the new code.
iTunes 4 is a mature code base, to NOT reuse it would have been “brain dead”
I am beginning to doubt just how much experience you have in the area Apple is playing in. I am not saying you are an inexperience programmer, but you know windows programming. that is a totally different beast than cross platform programming while running a business that pays for its software development from its hardware sales.
if they had 2 code bases, that would mean they would have to fund a new project that is not brining in much secondary revenue (the iPod sales and that is about it, the Music store makes them very few pennies on the dollar, they operate at a little more than break even)
so the project would be costing them money and not be benefiting their revenue stream much at all. by keeping the code base the same, they save in development time, debugging time, and deployment time. all they needed to do was to make some drivers for zero-conf to work and the iPod to work with the new features, build a layer that will talk to the GFX card(which would not affect performance if you have good OGL support) and port the needed widgets.
so stop complaining and start thinking.
I have it on a 300MHz PII
Resizing is slow, but playing over Network just works fine with ca. 30% of processor usage. I can’t say what happen with a lot of songs local because I have all on the mac.
as I can often get it to max out and start swapping, though it’s still not heavy on swapping even when it actually is paging to disk because of application requirements).
are you trying to say something different here? you are saying “it is not heavy on swapping even when it is [swapping]”
paging IS swapping. a page fault requires you to go out to the drive to get data that is not in the memory. sure. you are not removing something, but the CPU is waiting for the new memory so the fact that it is not in memory is what take so long, nit the sending the replaced data to the hard drive.
as far as the RAM requirements, that is because they needed to make a computability layer that would allow them to talk directly to the GFX card(sort of like what a game does). the layer was necessary so they could use the main code base for iTunes. this means that windows version is basically free to them, no company resources are going out to develop an application that doe snot bring in any revenue (the music revenue is almost nothing after everyone else takes their share) and it allows them to deploy new features for both platforms AT THE SAME TIME.
how pissed would you be if the mac users got a cool new feature and you had to wait?
also look at it from this perspective, they would have to wait to update the music store features until both code bases were in parity.
so it was smart business sense for a small price.
I’m on my Inspiron 4100 laptop here at work, 1 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM, XP. iTunes uses 2-10% of CPU while playing an MP3, averaging about 4-5%. There are occasional blips up to 20%, but I don’t know why.
UI speed is slower than for an Explorer window, but certainly not debilitating. I’m thinking that something is wrong with the reviewer’s system or installation.
sorry..I should have said “the CU is waiting for the new DATA” no the new memory.
silly me :-p
arrgggg….that should be CPU not CU
I didn’t read all 328 messages from this thread, but just in case this has not been mentioned yet, I have noticed today that iTunes does indeed consume 70% CPU time on a 800MHz PIII after having imported a 2000 mp3 library and then selected the Sound Check option in the preferences.
In this case, iTunes had to analyse the 2000 songs which takes some times (about 20-30 minutes) and does consume 70% CPU time.
But once the analysis is done, the CPU usage goes back to a normal value.
so, itunes uses the CPU a lot when it is doing a lot of work.
who-da thunk it.
Right, but I have to add that even while analysing the 2000 songs, I was able to listen to my music or use other features without any problem.
iTunes for Windows is indeed a wonderful application and the few glitch should not hide the amazing features it offers.
You really can only chuckle when you read many of the PC reviews that knock iTMS for Windows. A fair comparison would be to have a Mac setup with the usual stuff and a PC with little or no stuff loaded. Since there are 1000’s, maybe millions of variations in how someone can set up their PC, it is almost useless to compare the speeds of two completely different apps on two completely different OS’.
My PC using friends (almost all are criminal types) tend to have some stupid “mouse pointer enhancing crap” running, their machine is usually under constant attack if it is hooked up to the ‘net and their CPU is spending a lot of time doing overhead or background work. I realize that this may be “real-world PC” situations but blaming iTMS for being slow (on a dual 550?) seems silly. You can be certain Apple didn’t release Windows software only to be shredded apart, you can sleep at night knowing that they spent every extra dollar to make sure that the Mac experience (you gotta love it) was very much a part of using iTMS on a PC.
Blame the PC architecure that lets almost any hack to write code that will trip up almost any other software, regardless of how well it is written. Knowing that I can now get Mac software for a PC might make me want to switch……… < /end dream sequence > < /wake the hell up! >
And what’s up with the articles author using the machine she is using? My expecation for an Industry Writer and alledged expert is that she would have the pimpest PC a manufacturer made. Dual 550’s? Maybe I should yank out my old G3 266 and see how iTMS works…..hold on…. I have that already. No it isn’t perfect but HELLO McFly, it is 5 years old. Doesn’t that make it almost 35 years old in computer time….like a dual 550 would be?
ANYWAY, Welcome to Mac experience PC people. Don’t fight it, love it! You are finally getting to use software written by people that care about your user experience. And like Martha says, “That’s a good thing.”
umm…have you looked at other Jukeboxes? how many of them “fit” with the windows UI?
Very few, but most of them try to keep some consistency with Windows. This app, on the other hand, barely makes any attempts to look like anything but an Apple metal-themed app. Instead of red, green, and yellow gum-drops we get an X Square, and Line. Most players at least give you some choices, and WMP gives you the option to enable the Windows border.
as far as OGL for the GUI….
how long do you think it would have taken them to rewrite iTunes for windows if they did not port their widgets and make a compatibility layer so that it can talk directly to the GFX card with out using the windows apis?
Probably the same time or less, as their main application code should be isolated from the UI code, and it doesn’t take very long to build the UI code for a Windows application. Or they could’ve pulled the UI code from the QuickTime player (which is almost what it looks like they did anyway), though that has problems of it’s own.
answer…A LOOOONNGGG time. not to mention they would have 2 code bases to maintain and would have to debug all the new code.
They still have 2 code bases to maintain and still have to debug all of the new code. The difference is where the code is, and we really have no idea how much of the code they maintained from the Mac OS X code base.
iTunes 4 is a mature code base, to NOT reuse it would have been “brain dead”
To not reuse the core functionality would’ve been brain-dead, but reusing GUI code when the two operating systems clearly use different UIs and different methods for producing those UIs is brain-dead. Mozilla/Firebird even suffers from problems related to not using a native UI, but at least their UI toolkit is more mature on Windows.
I am beginning to doubt just how much experience you have in the area Apple is playing in. I am not saying you are an inexperience programmer, but you know windows programming. that is a totally different beast than cross platform programming while running a business that pays for its software development from its hardware sales.
Apple makes plenty of money from selling iPods, which is the primary area of income for this particular application. They also make plenty of money from selling OS X upgrades, which is another area of income for this application. If they’re trying to sell Macs or iPods to Windows users with this software, they’re alienating some amount of their potential user base. They’re also selling their online music store service, which could make them a very nice income if they can get a wide user base on Windows.
if they had 2 code bases, that would mean they would have to fund a new project that is not brining in much secondary revenue (the iPod sales and that is about it, the Music store makes them very few pennies on the dollar, they operate at a little more than break even)
If they operate the store at little more than break even, they’re getting screwed by the record companies. It costs almost as much on a per-song basis to buy music from them as it does to go out and buy CDs. Most estimates for how the money is distributed in online sales put most of the money in the software developers’ pockets. With a good piece of software, it’s likely that they could dramatically increase iPod sales, which is certainly not chump change. Even with what they have we could see an increase, as I’ve seen people around the office talking about getting an iPod now that it supports Windows without even having tried the software.
so the project would be costing them money and not be benefiting their revenue stream much at all. by keeping the code base the same, they save in development time, debugging time, and deployment time. all they needed to do was to make some drivers for zero-conf to work and the iPod to work with the new features, build a layer that will talk to the GFX card(which would not affect performance if you have good OGL support) and port the needed widgets.
Yet OpenGL support isn’t even mentioned in the requirements, as someone else already pointed out. The interface has some concessions to the Windows UI, yet doesn’t bother with others, showing that they did make some modifications, though at what level is hard to tell. This obviously was neither a complete port nor a simple translation-layer approach, and so it falls short of either near-complete code portability or perfect performance.
so stop complaining and start thinking.
I’m trying to think of ways that this could be worse, and I’ve thought of many, but then I can think of many that would make it better, too. Interesting, this thinking thing, it feels much like what I do most of the time, yet how do I know I’m actually thinking? hmmm… I must ponder this now.
are you trying to say something different here? you are saying “it is not heavy on swapping even when it is [swapping]”
paging IS swapping. a page fault requires you to go out to the drive to get data that is not in the memory. sure. you are not removing something, but the CPU is waiting for the new memory so the fact that it is not in memory is what take so long, nit the sending the replaced data to the hard drive.
I was using swapping in terms of actively swapping to the page file, whereas paging would mean that the applications loaded require more memory than is physically available, therefore the page file is being used for some applications. It is possible to have the page file in use without actively using it, because many applications may have large amounts of memory allocated but not in use. Ideally you will swap data out of RAM into the page file that is not being used heavily, so most of the time that your system has that much RAM allocated you won’t actually be using all of it. Similarly, iTunes could be allocating 40MB of RAM and only actually using it when you’re caching large video streams, and it will be reported as using 40MB regardless of whether or not it’s actually being used.
as far as the RAM requirements, that is because they needed to make a computability layer that would allow them to talk directly to the GFX card(sort of like what a game does). the layer was necessary so they could use the main code base for iTunes. this means that windows version is basically free to them, no company resources are going out to develop an application that doe snot bring in any revenue (the music revenue is almost nothing after everyone else takes their share) and it allows them to deploy new features for both platforms AT THE SAME TIME.
Optimally, the UI would be isolated from the code that implements the functionality and you could attach a new UI with little effort, even adding new features. They had to put in resources to develop a compatibility layer if this is in fact what they did, though the lack of any notification of DirectX or OpenGL requirements makes it questionable (and isn’t OpenGL supposed to be fairly portable anyway? OpenGL multi-platform games rarely have a large discrephancy in graphics code between versions).
how pissed would you be if the mac users got a cool new feature and you had to wait?
Considering how long iTunes has been available for Mac OS, does this really matter?
also look at it from this perspective, they would have to wait to update the music store features until both code bases were in parity.
If the music store is using an HTML-based content delivery system then you shouldn’t even need updates to the client.
so it was smart business sense for a small price.
Yet it took them 4 versions to deliver and still left a bad taste in some users’ mouths. I just wonder how long they waited to start porting, because if they’ve been working with even a small team for the entire time they’ve thrown a lot of money into this.
If it needs a card with good OpenGL perfomance, why isn’t that little fact mentioned in system requirements?
Why would you have a card with bad OpenGL performance? Why would you have any hardware without good support for open standards? No comprendo.
Running Win2k Professional
– 1.6Ghz Laptop with nVidia Graphics Card (Toshiba Tecra “Wannabe” Corporate machine)
I was excited by the recent release of iTunes for Windows and have not been disappointed. The UI issues Eugenia is having are not occuring on my Win2K machine. I am very happy with the Visualizer component – just like the Mac version, very nice. After reading many of the messages here, looks to me like Apple didn’t test it out very well on WinXP.
But hey this is the first release!
Thanks.
To me, I notice in the Music store, all of the cover art and links change the mouse cursor to the Mac hand icon, not the Windows one. I’ve seen the same behavior in QuickTime that’s embedded in webpages. QuickTime for me has always shown lackluster performance when rendered in HTML. My guess is that the bulk of the Music Store is QuickTime embedded objects and that’s slowing it down.
I have loads of music in Microsoft format (WMA) and it seem that iTune can’t load them in the Library and can’t play them…
This is a big missing feature. Hope it will be there in 4.2 !
Not a CPU hog here, it work great, mabe a bit slow on the GUI but that’s all. On a P4HT/3.2 Ghz.
No, WMA support will not be there in 4.2, nor in 4.3 or 5.0.
You have to consider that the Online Music War has just started April 28th when Apple release the iTMS. And there is a lot of money to win.
To the right side David: Apple / iTune / AAC / iPod
To the left side Goliath: Windows / MusciMatch / BuyMusic.com / Rhapsody / WMA / WMA Compatible Players.
And the winner is… well, you know the story.
how the hell are they gonna know what cards have good OGL and the ones that don’t? if it is a 3d accelerated gfx card, it has OGL.
all that needs to be done is to tweak the compatibility layer to make it perform better.
I am not going to keep arguing this. it is a difference of opinion on how best to implement it. I am sure apple did a cost benefit analysis before they decided to build it the way they did. only a stupid company would pick a more costly rout.
Re: Ron Smith
Hmmm… maybe because I don’t do any 3D work and don’t care about speed of 3D rendering?
Re: debman
Just how long would it take to recreate a functionally similiar GUI in any visual interface design tool? I don’t think it is longer then porting all those mac-specific low-level rendering libraries. I’d say, a week of work of a qualified programmer.
Real cross-platform programming is done with libraries that are designed to work on several systems, such as QT. What Apple did was *not* cross-platform programming, since they dragged their entire platform with them to another OS. And dragging something that was never designed to leave OS X results in really bad perfomance.
There are several native music players for Windows, for example (now deceased) Apollo and foobar2000. Even WMP sometimes tries to behave like a Windows app (it doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens more often then with iTunes).
Feels wired. Apple has new software out and I can’t use it on my MAC. PC users are so luck.
Windows 98 Entering Non-Supported phase January 16, ’04, then end of life a year later ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.mspx ). That might be part of the reason Apple chose not to support it.
how the hell are they gonna know what cards have good OGL and the ones that don’t? if it is a 3d accelerated gfx card, it has OGL.
The cards used on Macs aren’t very different from the best-selling cards for x86 PCs. The OpenGL support of the drivers can vary, though.
all that needs to be done is to tweak the compatibility layer to make it perform better.
I am not going to keep arguing this. it is a difference of opinion on how best to implement it. I am sure apple did a cost benefit analysis before they decided to build it the way they did. only a stupid company would pick a more costly rout.
Interesting enough, when I installed iTunes on my XP machine (about 10 minutes ago, it’s adding my MP3 files at the moment), the QuickTime options were slightly different (when I went to disable it from my system tray). QuickTime’s UI has DirectDraw acceleration (the proper way to do 2D rendering with DirectX pre-9, and more compatible in Windows than OpenGL in most cases, especially given that most card vendors have proprietary OpenGL extensions and implementations). iTunes itself, however, is missing these options (QuickTime lets you choose between GDI and DirectDraw).
My home computer (WinXP, P4 2GHz, 512MB RAM, GF4 Ti4200) has the exact same latency issue with resizing the iTunes window, and still maxes out the CPU usage while doing so (despite having a larger CPU and a better video card). If it was using OpenGL for the interface and for resizing, there should be little to no CPU use on this system, OpenGL performance in games is excellent, to say the least.
Does anyone know how can I change/choose the visualizations (visual effects)? Is that possible. I am a Windows XP user
…for itunes of course!
Being a Mac user i find this all very intriguing. Sounds like a typical 1.0 iApp from Apple. No iApp was very refined on there intial release, but have become very nice with each new update.
I love all the UI complaints. Good stuff.
It’s an Apple app and that’s apparently how it will stay. Windows Media Player doesn’t look like it belongs on my Mac either and I hate how it quits when i close it (not really a Mac behavior).
I can say that it would have been interesting to see them translate things appropriately to the native Windows UI. Even in functionality, i mean, even on the Mac I never really thought the “Maximize” plus sign widget was of much use. Still, it would have been cool if they honored the default behavior of that being a Windows port and all.
Beyond that all, it is interesting to look at the bigger picture here and that’s a DRM war. It’s brewing and all the players are lining up. I’d really like to see a standard light DRM format for ALL digital music stores. Come on, I mean, this is like walking into one music store and buying a CD that you can only use with a particular CD Player. These DRM-managed digital audio files should just work everywhere. In other words, I can move between stores and players with a single file type. And I’m not talking just about Apple. Apple’s is by far the best, least-invasive DRM option at the moment.
Something will rise to the top, just spewing…
(There’s a lot of posts in this topic – yeesh.)
No problems here…since people are putting up numbers for comparison:
P4 2.8c, 1gb DDR400 RAM (running dual-channel), Radeom 9500 Pro video card, 1,700+ files in library
No issues with scrolling…very slight pause before resizing, but seriously…so what? How many of us resize windows so much where that really matters? =)
Runs great. Organizes great. Music store is top-notch. Quick and easy, and the quality of the files is superb…sounds great on the PC and the iPod.
Memory usage is fine…around 18mb, much less than Netscape, for example. Besides, if you’re running a computer where 18mb of memeory usage is a problem with how cheap RAM is nowadays, that’s your own fault. =)
Processor usage during normal is is negligible.
I give it a solid A…would’ve gotten an A+ had it included an option to run it solely from the system tray. *shrug* No biggie.
Very good review, Eugenia. I think Itunes is great. I didn’t have any problems at all. It was very responsive to me. I also like that you have a choice of what bit, I always like 320 because it has the best sound.
> The store: Took me a while to figure out how to get a listing for PJ. >There’s no form box to search in, only a drop down menu for genre. >Then I noticed “power search” in what looks like the embedded web >page, and I click it and am rewarded by….
Did you notice the “Search Music Store” form in the upper right of the window…..?
test
My wife’s Compaq is the minimum configuration required: Pentium 500MHz 128MB and Win XP (Disk grinds on all apps due to low memory, for some reason when I put in another 128MB module the PC starts crashing unpredictably.)
Well iTunes is a great Jukebox and compared to Windows Media 9 it is a heck of a lot easier to use. My Wife gave up on media player a while ago, she gets so frustrated with it. She is like most people, scared of computers and thinks their impossible for her to learn. I showed her iTunes and she was apprehensive at first afraid of looking stupid. She started using it and immediately got it down. Very easy to use and even ripping and burning came easy to her. I showed her the Store, well the rest is history, the new Artist Playlists are awesome, and researching and getting to music blew her away.
In addition, we played around with sharing via rendezvous and were streaming from my Mac Library. It works beautifully. As far as CPU utilization, After subtracting the Performance Monitors usage, it comes it ranges between 11 and 15%. That is really awesome for a Pentium 500MHz Pc with no SIMD unit to speak of and limited memory. It also seems that Apple did a lot of tuning of QT 6.4 for Windows, it is a lot snappier. (The Mac upgrade is awesome fast as well.)
Hope this helps.
Reading Eugenia comment’s is somewhat reminds of me Dvorak years ago. Boosting about Apple and then OS/2 and then M$. Whatta way to make living.
Eugenia make some good point that the UI is slow and takes up too much CPU cycles. But the comment is somewhat have negative aura. Have bad experience with Apple that you now hate it so much Eugenia?
The problem itself is in Apple. The day Apple communicate effectively with their customers back in the Kawasaki days are long gone. Apple keep playing “misteryous way” in communicating their vision with their customers. Seems likely Steve still enjoy surprises, when most of people are old enough to get more surprises.
So Steve are you going to sell iPod for the rest of yourlife or you want to make history? Putting one software to windows to create an extra boost for your hardware sales is just not going to cut it. It’s good, but not good enough by your standard Steve. Do you think people will ever have to buy an iPod just by playing with iTunes? You forgot how people want choices. iPod is the great stuff today, but without any hassles Sony sells more hardware than you do it with iPod.
I suggest Apple to communicate effectively with their customers and play a bigger league today. Port the OSX to x86 standard box, Steve or you will missed the chance again. Most business users are don’t give a damn on what good technology is, they just want something that works. You said once “Computer for the rest of us” now the really computer for the rest of us is a windows machine. Macs is great but it doesn’t matter. Most people doesn’t even aware what Apple is. Make them say something about Microsoft they will nod. Myself was an avid Apple users but my last Apple purchase is back then in 1994-1996. I spent hundreds thousands then for Intel box. Guess what you can imagine people really want choices. Give them Steve. Most of them doesn’t even aware what DRM is. They don’t care, they just eat everything Bill sales.
Most people here are commenting a very good stuff about Apple new iTunes. Some are giving you a very good feedback. The UI, the stuff, just tune it. We hate to see ourself praying for Apple back in the day 1997 was. Success
with PowerMac in 1994 just to find doomed days few years later. And most people are now giving up thinking Apple, they move on Steve. Yes that people can live even without Apple (You proved ONCE back in the day in NeXT day),
but these people are tooo valuable to speak a good word about Apple. They work harder than most of people at Apple and not getting paid.
Now just give the shot. Make my day. Just beat Bill’s ass. Make OSX for Intel today at least pre-announce it! just like Bill always do. Don’t keep people wonder. Make it so or i will beat both of you in you own game. Don’t make me.
Success to you all. Sorry this is not a good mail to write but I getting tire reading all this news while Apple is getting no interest of whatsoever we do for them.
Didn’t take the time to go through all the comments, but…
Has anyone noticed the nasty hissing noise that comes out of your speakers when you start up iTunes?
Also, I noticed, for me, when I start up the visualizations, even in low-res and small size, they are all jerky, however, when I move my mouse around, they go go much more fluently. Very odd behavior if you ask me.
All in all, I find iTunes to be, unfortunately, very sluggish and just another display of Apple’s innability to hire a decent Windows programmer.
Ok, this is the coolest thing to happen to my computer in a long long time. So nice to see that quality applications can be written for Windows.
“Just because resources are abundant doesn’t mean you write bloated code”
.
.
I wouldn’t exactly call XP a non-bloated OS.
it seems that everytime i try to connect to the internet (dial-up), the sound stutters (a bug maybe?). the visualization is a cpu hog also. everything else is great especially for organizing my huge collection of mp3s. if it can retrieve info of my mp3s automatically like WMP and Musicmatch, it would’ve been cooler.
Yep Steve did it again, he keeps surprising us (positive).
In this sluggish IT economics they managed to keep the stocks rising by innovating constantly, hey guys (at Apple) do you have time to sleep?
For all the negative people, you can always uninstall it (who did it?)
For the writer of the story I feel sorry that she needs to write in her free time on ancient hardware, but thanks for the effort.
For the owner of this site, don’t be cheap and give that girl an award for her hard work and buy her a NEW pc.
Keep on rockin’ in a free world
366 comments must be a record. Whatever you think of iTunes it’s generated a lot of conversation (or argument).
The point is, there shouldn’t be one, plain and simple…
David: WMP works perfectly fine on my computer, it is not slow, and features more, yet, iTunes is the one that is sluggish.
Stephen: I wouldn’t call it bloated, especially compred to say, a few gig Linux install.
My Windows directory is 1.5gb, which is not bad in the slightest, considering OSes today are generally much larger.
I play a lot with this and I have mixt feelings. I was hearing a lot of nice comments about iTunes from the Mac users. Now I had the chance to play with this and to see if is really better than most of the Windows similar products.
…
…
Overall I give a indulgent 7 out of 10, and this only because the simplicity can be handy, that it has a nice burning and might be easy to use the Library once you are use with it.
You mey see the complete review at: http://www.spynets.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1906
WMP has more features? you have got to be kidding right?!
name them.
at any rate, the resize is sluggish…so dang what. as for moving windows around, I turn all my visual effects off any how in windows and run classic mode, so when moving the window, I get a nice little outline marker rather than the window contents. it moves nice and snappy. all the features in the program are snappy, I get no such snaps and hisses, something must be wrong with your hardware, but I am running on a 1.1 celery notebook, so the speakers blow anyway…I might just not be hearing it.
but as far as features, it is a no contest. WMP CAN have al the features of iTunes, but you have to pay for them all. and even after than I don’t think you can get network sharing of your music library (never tried it, have a mac and a PC notebook), and you certainly can not use smart playlists in WMP, that is really nice when you have a huge library and you want to burn a cd really quick of music that meats certain criteria.
did you use the network sharing?
did you compare the costs involved with MMJB and WMP to get the SAME features? how about smart playlists!!!
I don’t think you gave it a true run through if you think it is nothing special. (it constantly wins industry awards for best music jukebox!!)
reading the feedback here and other sites from windows users, I finally understand all the posts on mac issues regarding price.
Most of the windows users commenting are running old, underpowered rigs w/minimal ram.
The irony is evident when extapolating those users to the g5 speed threads.ie, the ones slamming apple the most about speed issues are likely to be running celerons w/256 megs of ram.
lol!
Udky – I just tried to read your review, but had to give up a third of the way. May want to re-read some of it.
and you certainly can not use smart playlists in WMP, that is really nice when you have a huge library and you want to burn a cd really quick of music that meats certain criteria.
You may not. However, on MY machine I just select New Playlist and then voila, I can filter my library by Genre, Artist, Album, Video!,whatever or, indeed, any combination of the above.
Like MS Office, I suspect that iTunes and WMP have many features that are overlooked or not required by the majority of users.
Here is Apple’s support page for iTunes for Windows:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/itunes/windows/
To be honest, I was a bit skeptical about this release from Apple. Many windows users were disappointed with Apple’s somewhat hack job of QuickTime. And I don’t even WANT to begin to describe the job they did with iPod Manager (didn’t even work with many PCs) and their choice of MusicMatch Juke Sh*t.
But they have put my concerns aside for iTunes. They have done an excellent job and has now replaced Winamp on my computer. And can I say, iPod is FINALLY a part of my system now, and no longer a burden. Hey Apple, I don’t have to use 3rd party software anymore just to use *your* product!. Thank you Apple.
And for the reviewer’s slowdowns – well… maybe you should replace that Dual-Celery with something that isn’t a vegetable.
Quote: ” I give it a solid A…would’ve gotten an A+ had it included an option to run it solely from the system tray.”
On the Mac version there are three button in the corner. One to expand, one to minimize – the last to close the window entirely. This last option does NOT close down iTunes and as such it is running “from the system tray” (this being a Mac the system tray hence being the dock).
??????I wonder if anyone thought of trying the last button???????
I believe WinAmp closes down if you use that button so a lot of people may intuitively have missed that (is that an oxymoron?) on iTunes.
Anyway, let me know if this solves the system tray issue.
Also – is it possible to enque tracks by right-clicking the track?
I saw this just once on a friends PC, but we were never able to relocate the feature.
Best,
Nick
I do like iTune if I don’t what to be lost in details and just to listen plain music, w/o any fancy stuff. With this, his part in my media life is done. I play a lot with effects and mixing songs and I think you agree that iTunes is not the one for this. If you have a good quality song then it’s okay but if you don’t, that’s it, you cannot change this (no noise reduction, signal leverage, distortion control and so on). I understand that for users that do more than listen or purchase a song, iTunes is not the best option. Even the crossfade is not as it should.
However, I will still keep this as fun and for the times when I simply just want to listen the music or radio (only few of them with the format that can be play) and that’s it. I don’t see it to become my favorite player in any case, unless I stop playing with the digital music.
Share music? Cam be done with a dedicated apps. Besides, all this purchase share stuff don’t work outside US. Also, the streaming, is not even for 100kbps connection. iPod and stuff? Hm, it will be a shame if is not working. This is a must, and is okay.
Peace!
“It’s a problem because there IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRATE for many people. Anyone who upgrades simply for the sake of having the latest operating system is just stupid.”
“I can also buy an airline ticket to Europe for a few hundred dollars. And when I get back, I can turn on my computer running Windows 98, do my college papers, run my statistical calculations, check my email, do research on the Web, just as efficiently as the guy running XP.”
This is almost funny. Gee, you can do everything you want running Win98 EXCEPT THE LATEST APPLICATIONS. How much grey matter does it take to notice a reason to upgrade when it hits you in the face?
To those who still insist that all the latest and greatest apps should support legacy OS with the typical…”even the latest MS app supports win98″ excuse, take a look at the req for MS Photo Story 2 or Movie Maker 2 in the Plus! DME suite:
System Requirements
The following hardware and software are required to use Microsoft® Plus! Digital Media Edition:
Operating system
Requirement: Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Haha! so much for legacy support.
As a developer, i would also abandon win98 because of all the instabilities due to not having protected memory, multi-threading support yadayadayada. Commercially, it would not make sense either. To support such and audience who would expects their 5 year old system (which they could have easily upgraded to a P4 or Athlon for 399) would suggest that one has a target audience that is is stingy as fcuk. You’re not gonna get much returns from that. This is certainly not worth the effort in compatibility testing that is needed to make iTunes (and more importantly QT 6.4) work on a legacy win98 system.
For those who think that suporting a complex app like iTunes (and Quicktime) on both Win32 and NT platforms is an easy task, think again! You don’t know how difficult writing huge programs are until you have done one. This is not some command line VB or Java app that you can develop overnight. This is the whole THING! QT framework, DRM, MP3 Database (criteria in smart playlist).
P.S: Photo Story 2 is such a lame copy of iPhoto 2… right down to the image resize slider. – Innovation for MS is to copy everything good.
Now back to XCode
I just installed iTunes on my P4 laptop (1 GHz, 512 ram) and experienced none of the sluggishness described, at all!
Could it have anything with iTunes being incompatible with certain gfx drivers to do?
I’ve got a Radeon 7500.
Well I tried iTunesWin. I was excited by it at first especially since I do the AquaXP thing.
I like its’ features, I like its’ ease of use, but I do not like the sound quality nor to I like the amount of resources (ie RAM) it uses.
I work in the music industry, so my ear having been professional trained to pick up on sound quality.
For me, right now, QCD Player with it’s default MP3 decoder plugin or the MAD decoder plugin and iZotopes Ozone analog modelling DSP plugin sound way better than iTunesWin and it’s “sound enhancer”.
I find it funny how many people who are “audiophiles” or “professionals” in the music industry makes comments about iTunes lack of sound-enhancing features.
The truth is that iTunes is wonderful at not being in the way, giving almost pristine sound reproduction, which is what a true audiophile would want.
FYI, I’m a professional musician, a former recording studio engineer, and have worked in the music industry since 1986. Is iTunes everything for everyone? Of course not. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s designed to be a music jukebox/filing system/burning utility/music store. I think it does those things well.
How about better plug-in support. Better support for differing services. Oh, and the service that matches your track info, downloads album art, etc…
You can burn CD’s with WMP, no big deal there.
And yes, WMP does support smart playlists… just from the fact that you think it doesn’t shows that you haven’t really used WMP.
How many people do you know that listen to music absolutely flat?
Nobody! The first thing most listeners to will do is at least boost the bass and the treble. Most everyone will adjust the EQ and sound enhancement features to suit their particular taste and sound preception abilties.
Most music professionals have high quality reference systems to listen to music on, the average home user does not.
And iTunesWin and all the other media players out there are targeted at the average home user.
I didn’t say that iTunesWin doesn’t reproduce the sounds well, I said it doesn’t sound “good”. Those are two completely different things. You and I both know that.
I’m running iTunes on a PIII 500, 256mb ram, WinXP Pro and an ATI 64mb Radeon 9000. It runs as well as any other program on my rather old computer. Moving the window around is fine, resizing does take a tiny bit longer than other apps but I’ve had none of the problems this guy talks about.
Well, i got though a few pages of replies here and got bored reading the same thing, so skipped to the end to reply…
iTunes needs XP I would think because of the way it does window managing. Under OSX it uses Quartz (which is OpenGL) but in windows it uses software rendering which is not supported by 98 (the type of software rendering that is, before any one complains). To make it 98 and XP compatible would probably also make it quite unstable.
As for CPU usage, it works pretty well on x86 machines considering it is based on RISC/PPC code. On my G4 800 it uses about 5-15% of the CPU time. 5% when its playing, 15% when it caches some of the track and deals with window movements.
As for WMA support and other online store support, are you people stupid? Thats like saying ‘Why doesn’t WM9 support the apple store or AAC’ – its marketting, you don’t add support to you rivals systems if its going to take away customers from yuor own services. However, ont e Mac side of things, iTunes can playback anything that quicktime supports, so if thats the same on the PC side, all you need is an open source quicktime codec to support WMA or OGG, there is an OGG one for the Mac so it must be portable to PC QT, i would think.
i am using itunes on intel celeron 600 mhz and 64 mb ram
with out any problem.
The smart playlist is the best feature in it .
Well, it installed without problem for me, I told it where I store my mp3’s and I spent a weekend creating dynamic playlists (possibly the best feature of the program) and modifying all my ~5600 mp3’s to have correct genre’s and years as well as adding album art…
The only problems I have with it at the moment is that it will enter some songs in twice (one with the correct tags and another like this “artist – songname”) which tends to be annoying, the other is when highlighting tracks for multiple changes and using the keyboard for it, when you press up it’ll jump to the top of the list and begin highlighting the tracks above where I started, which can also get very annoying.
Aside from those 2 annoying bits, I quite like it… it also helps out a *lot* with my ipod in keeping my playlists fresh (this is where dynamic playlists are a godsend!).
I also tested it out on my win2k laptop at work with regards to locking it and itunes kept pumping out the music… haven’t checked with my xp machine at home to see if it still plays on that.
With regards to complaints about no win9x support, it’s about time those OS’s were put down… it’s like trying to tell w9x’ers that they shouldn’t move onto a 9x os cause win3.11 still works… It’s called progress and development fellas.
Apple could very easily write a WMP plug-in for their music store, it would appear under the ‘services’ tab.
As for AAC… it is not an Apple format, and heck, I wouldn’t mind WMP supporting it, even though I have no AAC files, at least, until I start buying music on iTMS.
Well, while AAC is an open standard, Apple’s Fairplay DRM is not. At least not yet. So while you could play regular AAC files in other players as they start to support the format, those songs purchased from the iTMS will require iTunes for now. I believe QuickTime has it’s hand in allowing AAC Fairplay files to work on authorized computers.
Anyway, if I’m mistaken about any of that so be it, but it would be nice to see this Fairplay DRM either licensed to others or opened up in some way so this format spreads. It certainly is the most fair to legitimate consumers looking for an alternative to piracy.
I have been using Musicmatch for the past year, and while I find the iTunes interface more pleasing in most respects (especially when managing my iPod), there are already a couple of Musicmatch features that I miss:
1)ID3 tag management – Musicmatch is excellent at managing my music’s ID3 tags, going so far as to search for a single tag based on nothing but a filename.
2)Ripping configuration – iTunes does not let me configure the placement and format of the songs that I import off of CDs. Musicmatch lets me specify the folder, filename format etc.
Those are my only gripes thus far, version 4.2 possibly??
It seems to have to do with the “sound check” feature. I experienced a super-slow UI when turned on. Everything is back to snappy when the feature is disabled.
I installed it on Windows 2000 in my laboratory and stream music from a machine in my office. I am experiencing none of the problems described and my machine is only a 1.6 P4, but I do have 512MB RAM. I have about 10000 songs installed and it scrolls through like a charm.
The machine I have has none of the junk that most people use, so perhaps there is something else causing the slowdown. I understand that Apple had trouble working with the Windows interface, so perhaps they would be better to give people the option of the standard windows theme. I know Steve Jobs is all about beauty, but . . . . . . .
I also experienced window resizing problems on my P3 1GHz with 512mb of ram and a 32mb GeForce2 GTS.
No scrolling problems, but then I prefer the scrollwheel over all scrollbar widgets.
Good review.:)
Speaking as a programmer, I would guess that some of the CPU hogging problem is down to iTunes scanning music files on your hard disk. With a bit of luck, that’ll go away after a short time, depending on how much music you have.
The sluggishness when resizing seems worst when displaying the web browser type view of the iTunes store. This has to be the HTML widget, which as someone noted previously, is likely to be the KHTML port. KHTML isn’t the fastest at resizing (relayout) to start with, so after being ported over to OS X and then again to Windows, it’s bound to be a little under optimised right now.
There’s also some sluggishness when resizing if you’re browsing using the multi-paned view where you see Genre, Artist, Album and then a big list at the bottom. This is probably down to Apple’s widget resizing being not quite as fast as it could be. Optimising the drawing of such complicated looking widgets (see the great use of gradients and pixmaps) is a tricky thing. The tricks that have to be pulled to get Keramik (KDE’s default widget style) to render quickly on X11 are many, so perhaps Apple just didn’t get around to that yet.
All in all, I would say that Apple just wanted to get the app out of the door and made some perhaps questionable decisions as to priorities. Personally speaking, I’m not too bothered by the window resize being sluggish – I’ll just leave it at one size or mini mode, and use alt-tab and the taskbar to handle windows, like I usually do. For the five minutes I’m in Windows to see this thing, anyway.
Someone mentioned the UI inconsistency. This is indeed a shame and is something I’ve come to expect after the horror of QuickTime. It seems to me that Apple are the masters of the pretty UI but terrible at consistency, standards compliance, etc. This is sad, considering their past, but doesn’t stop me wanting to a Mac
Rik
This is from a long time Mac user who also uses Windows:
1) Works fine on Windows XP laptop, but CANNOT buy a song! Several interactions with Apple Support have been a waste of time. Cancel that iPod purchase!
2) iTunes crashed my Dell worksation with Win 2000 Pro. Re-start hung up half way through – could not get around it – not even via Safe Mode! Had to reinstall OS.
Very disappointed!