Aqua-Soft ForumsJust because stupid people can use it doesnt mean its superior, it just means that stupid people use it.....heheh (evil grin). If you want a media player other than wmp9, use winamp and get an itunes skin. If you want something that will do anything you want whenever you want it to, use wmp and get an itunes skin.
Itunes Or Wmp9
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 22 2003, 04:55 PMIf you want a media player other than wmp9, use winamp and get an itunes skin.
There has not been a decient theme for Winamp in the style of the Mac. The only Media Players that have nice skins to look like iTunes is QCD by Duckie, and WMP by StevieB and Binary.
then use one of those skins. the point is itunes isnt nearly as nice as other media players
alredy switched!!
itunes rocks (Y) i used to play on musicmatch, but now whit itunes, i am enjoying it a lot
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 22 2003, 05:29 PMthen use one of those skins. the point is itunes isnt nearly as nice as other media players
Yes it is.
Forget WMP 7, 8, or 9. I'm tired of waiting for it to load the damned Media guide, just give me my music! (Yes, I know I can turn it off, but why should I have to?) Does it organize your music for you? No.
Winamp 2, 3...why can't I resize the damned window? This is addressed in the Beta 5, but where are the music organization options? There aren't any.
The music organization is really nice. I didn't think I'd use it before I tried iTunes because I thought I could organize my music just fine and I didn't need iTunes to do it for me. Well, I gave iTunes a shot and let it handle the music organization and you know what? I love it. I came to find out that I only thought I liked organizing my own stuff. I don't, I hate it and now it's one less thing I have to worry about now. I just drag my files onto iTunes and forget about it (after deleting the original files of course because iTunes doesn't move the files, it copies them).
If I want to watch a video, I'll use WMP 9, if it supports it. If I want to listen to music, I'll use iTunes, thanks.
My music is organized in wmp9, dunno about you. Go under options and click on the media library tag and its on the bottom. That just further proves that itunes is nothing special. And why are you even talking about old version of wmp. Duh its going to suck if its a couple years old.
Gesh, what ever happened to free will and having your own opinion. Now we have to have people telling us how to think, what is this the American goverment?
I was on a iTunes craze when it first came out for windows, but, I slowly went back to Windows Media Player 9. But, that happens with alot of things for me. Take web browsers... I used Opera and Mozilla for a while, but, then slowly moved back the Microsoft's IE.
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 22 2003, 08:25 PMMy music is organized in wmp9, dunno about you. Go under options and click on the media library tag and its on the bottom. That just further proves that itunes is nothing special. And why are you even talking about old version of wmp. Duh its going to suck if its a couple years old.
Okay, so WMP has organizational skills.
One thing I forgot though. WMP also has something built into it called Digital Rights Management. This scares the hell out of me.
I am all for artists getting paid for their work, but I am NOT for someone else knowing or having a say in what I put or don't put on my computer.
iTunes does not have this.
have something to hide? 
get zonealarm if youre so worried about security. And it says right in the wmp9 privacy statement that no personal identifieable information is collected by wmp. and if you dont trust microsofts word, theres no reason you should trust apples word that theyre not handing out the information that they could easily collect from itunes when it sorts all your music. Im not bashing apple, just saying, theyre both companies out for money. we, the consumers provide that, if either company was pinned down with proof that they do this then either company would miss out on a lot of business.
The two complaints i have about wmp is the lack of drag and drop and how long it takes to burn music to cd without a plug in. Other than that, i couldnt be more satisfied... Id like some more visualizations though like winamp...
Personally, I think that iTunes is the best music player for me...
Yes, I made the (in)famous WMP skin, yes, I think WMP9 is very good, but, for me, iTunes just seems so much more... Natural, I guess.
I won't be going back to WMP9 in any hurry (at least not for music)...
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 23 2003, 02:22 AMhave something to hide?
It's not a question of security. Besides, I hate Zone Alarm.
...And no, I have nothing to hide. The DRM 'features' in WMP won't let anyone 'hack' my computer, it's more like there's the chance that a 'big brother' type situation can happen with these features installed on everyone's computer. I'm not worried about it on my end, but what about everyone elses? I don't care if it collects personal information or not, it shouldn't be collecting ANY information.
Besides all the paranoia crap, let's say a friend wants you to hear a song he brought over that he ripped with WMP. Load that bad boy into your WMP and you can't play it. Why? The DRM.
DRM is good, it keeps naughty people from playing music they dont own. just like itunes will only let you burn playlists like 10 times or whatever.
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 23 2003, 05:27 PMDRM is good, it keeps naughty people from playing music they dont own. just like itunes will only let you burn playlists like 10 times or whatever.
Actually no. iTunes only lets you burn music you bought from the Apple Music Store 10 times. It could care less about your other music.
Anyway, so you are trying to tell me that if a friend brought over a song he wanted you to hear (not copy, steal, whatever), you would rather not hear it?
Vanilla
DRM does NOT affect your other music, just like itunes doesnt affect your other music. DRM only affects the music files that are encoded in WMA DRM just like itunes only controls the media that you purchased through itunes.
the point of drm is to protect the artist, not to make it difficult for you to "share" your friends music. if your friend plans on "sharing" music with his friends then he should have ripped the music into mp3 format or just clicked the little box that say do not protect this music. Its not that hard.
WMA DRM is used so you will be forced to buy the license. The ONLY time i have ever come across one of these files is on wmp website and i downloaded a timebombed ozzy osbourne song. So its not that prominent or that problematic. Its a good idea even if your friend cant "share" his music with you. Its a way of being safe because theres no way people can tell if you will just listen to the music on your computer or simply capture the music being played. Fair is fair. Artists dont like their music being "shared". 
iTunes has a few things over other media players as far as im concerned; ease of use, a built in music store, and design. Do these features make it better? Not unless those are top priorities. Not unless theyre more important than overall usability, compatibility, customization, flexibility, system strain and the many other benefits other more prominant media players have.
Dont get me wrong, itunes does what it does fine, it excels in making it easy to purchase music cheaply over the internet. Thumbs up for that! (Y) I just dont think its the best choice for playing music or media in general. Ive used itunes and i found nothing so limiting that i couldnt use it. I might use it again when theres more music to chose from. I just didnt see anything real ground breaking about it or truly innovative that couldnt find in most other prominent media players.
And to answer your questions, my friends wouldnt encode their music into that format, so i wouldnt have that problem. Otherwise they would burn it to cd. Unlike me, my friends dont spend a lot of time around their computer. And most of my more geeky friends use winamp, so they could care less about windows media format. 
Actually its not just the wma format. I've had issues come up with mp3s as well.
Either way, it doesn't matter. As someone else (and you) said, it's a choice. What you choose to use is up to you. I'm not saying your aren't valid for using WMP. I have never said that, but I do think that iTunes isn't getting a fair shake in some of these arguments (not necessarily your arguments).
Personally, I have yet to experience any poor performance from iTunes that wasn't expected (sure it's gonna take it a second for it to return to the front when I'm working on a large Photoshop job, or doing some other memory intensive work). Overall iTunes has performed like a champ.
I like iTunes for it's ease of use (among other things). Sure, it may not have some of the more advanced features and customizability (yet), but I don't need that crap. I can't be arsed to mess with it all the time. I want to listen to music.
Besides, iTunes does one thing I need it to do that I haven't seen in any other player yet. It shows the BPM of my songs, which I need.
I didnt know it did that. Neat. I use windows media player for practicing my music (im in an orchestra) because I can slow down the music or speed it up. I do that because I cant usually practice on my instrument do to the fact its thousands of dollars and i dont have access to all the instruments I play. Im a percussionist btw. BPM would be nice for me too.
One thing is windows media player is a cpu hog on slower machines. I make enough money to be able to have a real nice computer but on my older machines I was having real issues, so i used winamp for a long time. But i guess you have to sacrifice the fast performance if you dont want your music to skip. And i HATE it when that happens because i catch myself singing sometimes and if it stops i end up feeling dumb.
and heres the codecs that support DRM... you shouldnt have recvd a DRM alert if you were using mp3's
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...drm/codecs.aspx
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 24 2003, 04:55 AMand heres the codecs that support DRM... you shouldnt have recvd a DRM alert if you were using mp3's
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...drm/codecs.aspx
That's weird. Maybe it was a WMA file. It was a while ago when it happened so I can easily be mistaken.
I do have to make a note about the BPM shown in iTunes. It doesn't count the beats for you. I have another program that does that, but when it does it sticks the BPM count in the idv3 tag of the mp3. iTunes just has that idv3 category to show, none of the other players I've used does.
I like iTunes for it's media organisation and elegant lines, and all-in-one ability. And as a computer geek, I never thought I'd reach for the all-in-one solution - having previously been an advocate of EAC and LAME (there's a new version 4 alpha, BTW) for MP3 production.
In terms of playlist management, I just can't get into the Winamp version.....(and I've been using Winamp for YEARS).
I think this is all like discussing which car is better....there are lots of models, and each has it's plusses and minuses. It all depends on what you wanna do with it, and how stylishly, and how much money (=CPU, RAM etc!) you've got to burn!!
It makes me laugh 
when people complain that iTunes uses 11MB of RAM compared with Winamp's 5MB (or whatever). THis at a time when most people are running P4's with 512 MB!! Unless you're playing Battlefield:1942 or Doom III at the same time as listening to songs, this is NOT an issue!! A quick check of the performance tab (CTRL-ALT-DEL) will reveal many, many spare MB's the majority of the time, regardless of which media player you have (an exception to this is Real Player )
CJW
The thing itunes doesnt do right is that it does skip. I dont know what it is about it, but if I'm running like some bloatware program from adobe while im running an antivirus and doing some other things, itunes will skip. I have never had this problem with media player, i think its because it takes cpu priority over other programs, just a guess though.
Originally posted by Chi Chi Rodriguez@Nov 24 2003, 06:14 PMThe thing itunes doesnt do right is that it does skip. I dont know what it is about it, but if I'm running like some bloatware program from adobe while im running an antivirus and doing some other things, itunes will skip. I have never had this problem with media player, i think its because it takes cpu priority over other programs, just a guess though.
That's weird. I have had iTunes skip on me before, but that was because there were problems accessing the hard drive the music was on. It turned out that the drive had a lot of bad sectors. I cleaned it out, and did a repair on it and put everything back and it hasn't skipped since.
I would suggest a defrag or testing for bad sectors. It may not help, but it's worth a shot if you had that trouble.
My computer defrags weekly and my computer is practically new still and all my hard drives are very fast. Its very unlikely it was caused by bad sectors or file fragmentation. I was doing a lot of things at once including encoding some video, working in photoshop, listening to music (of course), running a filesharing app (not for music mind you or warez) which was putting a bit of stress on my computer. I'm running a very fast computer with dual p4's so I shouldnt have had that much of a problem and i often do things like that at once and wmp never skips.
You can't compare WMP with iTunes. WMP is an all-in-one multimedia player (audio, video, dvd), while iTunes is a music player, jukebox and online store... and its accompanying app, QuickTime, is far from being one of the best apps for Windows.
Compared with apps of its kind (MusicMatch Jukebox, Napster maybe) iTunes makes the others look like amateurs' work.