There's a lot of buzz on here about iTunes, and how popular it is. I'm struggling to see why. I just looked it up, and apparently it's a piece of software that does the following:

Plays music and CDs and allows playlists and visualisation
— so what? Winamp does all this.

Allows databasing of your music collection
— why not just use your OS to browse/search your music?

Copy music to CD/external devices
— surely it's just as easy to use your OS for this?

Lets you rip music
— virtually useless since it won't use LAME encoding

Lets you buy music online
— convenient, but in my opinion, a toy should not be able to go online and spend your money. Maybe I'm too wary of my money?

Radio streaming
— possibly the only useful feature as far as I can see, but surely there are much better dedicated radio streaming programs available?

I'm not trying to "attack" iTunes. I'm just wondering why it's so popular when all its features can be done with alternative methods which are quite possibly better. If we have any iTunes fans here, I'd be interested to know why you like it so much.

Erm... it's meant to be an alternative to Winamp



Only one example among several: Your OS can't search inside tags.



Depending on the device, no.

Also, consider you want to send an entire playlist to the device. If you do it though your OS, you need to go to each folder and send the tracks there to the device. On iTunes, it's a few clicks away.



But it'll use Apple AAC encoder, which is the best AAC encoder (at least at 128kbps)

And on MacOS, you can make it use Lame.



Maybe you don't understand the way it works :B

It's not iTunes that goes online to spend your money. It's you that commands iTunes to go to the iTMS, and there you choose what to buy.



It's a player. It plays back shoutcast streams, among others. That's it. What else do you want?

I use ITunes 4.6 on daily basis and i like it a lot !

Pros : clean interface, no bloat, tagging system, make you dreaming about a ipod everyday

Cons: may take some cpu ressources, 2 little program running in background

Usually i use eac + lame 3.90.3 to encode my songs then use iTunes to manage my library...Curiously enough i have one cd (The Vines - WInning Days) who's protected and eac is unable to rip it properly, itunes did a prefect rip of it ! don't ask my why i don't know

Soren

Edit : Oops, i forgot the extensive search function, and awesome playlist management

Good answers rjamorim!

Okay, you've cleared up most of my issues with iTunes and I can see why it would be useful to a lot of people — especially the ability to database mp3s including the contents of their tags. That way, you could search your music by genre.

Although personally I don't use genres in the tags (there are so many genres not in the list that I would want, and you can't cross-categorise songs into multiple genres), so I'm happy to use my OS to search through my music collection.

And thanks Soran!

Because you can't tell your OS to create a playlist with only music you've imported in the last month, haven't yet listened to more than one time, and is 160kbps or less, and then have it continuously update that playlist and sync it to your portable whenever it's connected.

Whoa. My head is spinning, now! Let's take these features one at a time...

First of all, the ability to find songs you've added within the last month is something you can quite easily do with your OS. Just search and view by date.

However, everything else you said could definitely not be done in the OS:

So... it counts how many times you've listened to each track? That's quite useful. I'd say that feature alone is more important than most of the other "features" that are normally listed as selling points.

Again, the ability to filter songs by bitrate is another worthy feature (although useless to me personally as I only use VBR, and everything is encoded at the same setting).

Thirdly, the ability to continuously update a playlist based on custom parameters (and sync that to a specified external player) is a really great feature. Why these features are not regarded as "main features" is beyond me.

These two features alone (play counter and dynamic playlists) mean that I will be giving iTunes a try. So thanks, negritot, you've made a very good case for iTunes!

Just out of interest... does iTunes have any of these? (you never know)...

FEATURES OF MY "DREAM MUSIC PLAYER":

1. Ability to assign each track with a "rating" that affects how likely it is to be played. More popular tunes with higher ratings will occur more frequently in random playlists (when told to). Or you could search songs based on rating?

2. Or how about the ability to assign certain songs as "favourites"?

3. Ability to create custom "genres", and cross-categorise tracks into several genres. So, for example, one song could come under "electronica" and "dance" and "drum n bass" and "upbeat" and "party" and "instrumental". This would make searching for songs and creating playlists really easy!

4. Ability to assign a "chart position" field to each track, which you could then use to filter a search (for example: play only songs that are top 5, or unassigned).

5. Ability to assign a "tempo" field to each track (or an automatic tempo counter). This would make it very easy to create playlists that flowed smoothly from one song to the next, and it would also let you search songs by tempo, and make it easy to find upbeat/downbeat songs quickly.

6. Ability to batch edit tags within the music player.

Sounds like you need foobar2000. It can do all that stuff. Custm tags fields is a big plus foobar has, as well as being able to play many more formats than iTunes. And you can use it to stream music, and just about anything else you'd want it to do. I've got nothing against iTunes, but IMO foobar2000 blows it out of the water in functionality.

Foo-bar! Foo-bar! Foo-bar here I come! Who-hoo!

Thanks, Duble!

The Party Mix in iTunes lets you do just that..



Make a smart playlist with your most played or/and highest rated songs.



You can make your own custom genres in iTunes as well, and have as many as you'd like for each song.



Ratings?



BPM field for each song is there



No prob to do that in iTunes either, just select a group of songs and hit "get info"

So to answer your question, yes, most of the things you want are already in iTunes. Both Foobar and iTunes are great (yet VERY different) players so I'd check them out and see who you prefer.

To play devil's advocate, why would I install iTunes when WMP is already on my machine and does all of these things?

Because it's not really painful to install iTunes on your PC (YMMV), and the bigger the amount of options you know about, the more informed is your decision.

You can? I know you can create your own customised genres. But wasn't aware that you could asign multiple genres to a song. How do you do this?

The last time I used iTunes I found it very CPU intensive. But, IMO, it still has the best navigation when used to manage tags like 'Genre'. HOWEVER, I stopped using it because I found that I couldn't turn the SoundCheck off ( Yes, it said it was off, but wasn't! ), and SoundCheck used the Comment tag to store it's gibberish and messed up my existing Comment tags by 'hiding' it from other players. I managed to correct this with a lot of help from TagScanner 4.9 and the developer thereof. I like the ideas and usability behind iTunes and I think I'm going to look into it again with 4.7. But I'm going to tread slowly and carefully, scrutinising every tag it creates thoroughly! I'm not sure I'll use it for playback purposes as it is a bit of a hog, but I'll see how it goes.

Foobar2000 is also very good, but way too complex and fiddley for most people - it requires a lot of tweaking to get it working the way you want it to. It's far more flexible and powerful than iTunes if you're willing to get your hands dirty. Not for the faint hearted. I've resorted to using it exclusively for ReplayGain'ing and Transcoding ( I guess I have a faint heart! ).

I currently use WinAmp 5.04 in classic skin mode for all playback. I have a very well organised folder / file system which makes it easy for me to queue what I want, when I want. And, it's pretty light on the resources, I'm familiar with it etc.

You misunderstood. He cares where his music falls within the "Top 40" or other such useless rankings that seem to play such a high importance in disposable pop culture.

excellent. user. interface.

for features go foobar.

How is a program complex when all you have to do is drag-and-drop just about any fileformat and hit play? I guess you have to tweaking of your mind to understand how simple foobar is.

Sure, if all you want to do is play files. But then why use Foobar? There's plenty of other aplications out there that'll play files. It's not the slickest looking program and it's UI leaves much to be desired. Be honest, are you trying to tell me that the Preferences window isn't complex? You have to really know a lot about a lot of things to make sense of it all. There's a lot of 'unfriendly' terms and 'programmer speak'. That's pretty complex in my book. Hey, I get around fine, but there's tons I haven't explored or fully understood. I can't imagine I'm alone in that respect. In fact, I wouldn't even recommend it to most of my peers. But what can you expect? It was written because nothing like it existed, and it does things other don't have a prayer of doing. Tweak that.

I will definitely install and try both iTunes and Foobar. They both sound f*cking excellent and I'm so glad I started this thread! (I'm glad I ask so many pointless questions — sometimes it pays off!)

From what is being said here I suspect that I will almost certainly prefer Foobar, for the very same reasons I prefer PCs to Macs: I'm mad about features/preferences. The more features, the happier I am. I also hate Apple's design of interfaces and I like a nice plain, functional non-graphical interface that looks like it uses 1k of memory.

Jebus,

Because WMP is a pile of rubbish and you need to uninstall it immediately. Replace it with Media Player Classic (by far the best video player available) and one of the two excellent music players mentioned here.


Kode54,

How can you call the chart rankings useless? Chart rankings are like a great big rating system. When people like a song so much that they go out and spend their money on it, there is no doubt that they would rate that song highly and recommend it. Looking at the charts is just a way of finding out the songs that everyone would recommend. Are you calling the population of your country a liar?

The higher a song's position within the top 40, the better the song is. This rule doesn't really apply to songs outside of the charts (since they are not promoted the same, and good songs may not make the charts), but the vast majority of music I own is chart music. Because it's really all I listen to. Non-chart music is not easy to hear in my society, let along to buy. Every radio station plays chart music (not that I listen to radio) and every compilation album realeased is almost exclusively chart music.

Whether or not chart music is "any good", I find it important because I am a nostalgic, and it is chart music that evokes memories of a particular year-gone-by since that is the music that is publicly played over and over at the time of its release (in shops, on TV etc.) so that is the music I associate with that year (and the higher the chart position, the more familiar the song). If I didn't buy chart music then I couldn't experience any nostalgia over music since I would be listening to songs that were not specific to a certain time in my life.

But chart music is just so accessible, and non-chart music so inaccessible. I would have absolutely no idea what music to buy without the charts. Sure, I could type in "is a great song" in Google and see what comes up, but there are too many opinions out there. I only have so much time for listening to new music, and I need to know it is approved by a consensus. If you have any suggestions, I would be interested to hear them.

I don't always agree with what is number 1 (how Eric Prydz's "Call On Me" got so popular is beyond me, and lately the charts have been way too American for my tastes). But on the whole, the charts have introduced me to some amazing songs that I'm so glad I didn't miss out on.

Ummm...because it plays files? Because it's simple? I guess simple UI and a low memory footprint aren't desirable when:

I wouldn't call "excellent" a player which can't play gaplessly two files. It's an elementary feature, and I can't see it in iTunes.

Yep, iTunes' gapless support is basically non-existent.

I think iTunes' main strengths are ease of use and easy integration with an iPod. But most people on this board will bump into its limitations and be bothered by them. On the other hand, your "average" consumer may bump into its limitations but won't really care. Of course, they also won't know about half its features, and they won't even know foobar exists.