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Can't disagree with the first point, but the second? Not really. There's at least one other jukebox app that has a substantially better feature set than iTunes and is just as easy to use. I tried iTunes for a day and got frustrated with its limitations. Other than purchasing the occasional track from the iTunes Store, I can't see myself firing it up again. (And no, I'm not one of those people who had stability problems; it worked just fine for me.)

Meanwhile, it's possible to play AAC files without loss in MJ by converting them to raw PCM (burn to a CD-RW if need be) then compressing them with Monkey's Audio or FLAC. Not exactly compact or elegant, but converting from AAC to MP3/OGG probably results in files that don't sound so great. For me that's a bearable process as long as I don't start buying huge numbers of tracks.

Actually, I find that now that I'm using iRate Radio my inclination to purchase music is pretty low -- there's enough good stuff for free out there (legal, even) that unless I want a specific song, I'm happy to let iRate supply me with a steady stream of new music.

There is one you didn't look at - Media Center 9. In my mind, it's actually better than iTunes (although without the iTunes Music Store). It goes for US$40, with a free 30-day demo to try it out. Follow the Interact link to their forums and download the latest 9.1 beta (9.1.271 as of yesterday).

Here's what it supports on the iPod:
* Volume normalization (without modifying the MP3 file) so you're not juggling volume on every song
* Fully supports iPod Ratings, Play Counts, and Last Played information (none of the other Windows iPod software does)
* Smartlists - I can define a playlist that says - "give me 1 hour of U2 songs I've rated as 4/5 stars but I haven't listened to in the past 2 weeks. Sort it by release date of the album" As I do/don't listen to songs, the list will update itself every time I sync to my computer. It also does BPM analysis, so I can say "give me songs with tempos greater than 120".
* It syncs correctly...you won't have 5 copies of the same song on your hard drive or on your iPod.

And, for the non-iPod users, it'll sync your devices too.

Oh well, at least there's a decent media player for Windows now (other than Winamp, that's cool).

I've tried a lot of media player programs for Windows: WinAmp2, WinAmp3, Real, RealOne, Windows Media Player, Musicmatch Jukebox, and for iPod use, MMJ, Ephpod, XPlay.

we rarely play music off the server, but end up streaming it to the server from either of our laptops.

It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music.

It is connected to the stereo and since it is pre-firewire is connected to a great big external drive via USB. we both have itunes running. my gf likes music i'd never allow on my laptop and i have music she will never want. she's in the back room writing an essay but using rendesvous has access to all the music on my mac, all the music on the stereo and her own music.

While I might be feeding a troll here ...

He does compare the user interface of the ipod to the user interface of the zen, comparing it to palmos and wince. I am right there with him/her on this comparison.

And with the ipod, you'd be amazed to discover there are other software solutions for it. While I can't speak for the mac side of the house (and everyone I've talked to about itunes has been fairly happy with it), I know for certain on the PC side, there's EphPod and Media Jukebokx, both of which I've used. Granted, I believe both use the base driver that apple provides ... but that driver seems to work perfectly fine for me.

I've owned a number of creative's portable mp3 products (zen, nomad, etc). I must say, this ipod and its interface have them all beat, hands down (so long as you skirt the cost issue =)

The low cost answer is a program called Media Center. It offers multi zone playback, among other things. You can use this to control/maintain your mp3, video and photo collections, and send out different streams to different zones. If your computer has the components, it will also act as a Tivo. I use this along with an Audiotron & an Ipod, and find it works great.
Media Center feature list.

The low cost answer is a program called Media Center. It offers multi zone playback, among other things. You can use this to control/maintain your mp3, video and photo collections, and send out different streams to different zones. If your computer has the components, it will also act as a Tivo. I use this along with an Audiotron & an Ipod, and find it works great.
Media Center feature list.

I have seen nothing that can touch iTunes in terms of convenience and usability

I have seen nothing that can touch iTunes in terms of convenience and usability

I'm honestly curious what mp3 manager you use that makes iTunes look moderately featured.

Replace
Add (to End)
Add (as Beginning)
Add (as next to play)
Add (play now)
Add (shuffle)
Add (replace)

As I write this I am listening to a stream from my home server, running Media Jukebox. Why is streaming such a big deal for Macs? PCs have had this for years. Shoutcast, Icecast, the list goes on...

I have not used iTunes or an iPod before. I do not understand how easy it would be to set the tags on lots of untagged files.

Personally I'm still looking for a good music db/organizing program for either Linux (preferred) or Windows (thank you samba

For what it's worth, Media Jukebox has had this functionality for a couple of years now. Nice to see Apple finally catching up. :)

When I got a Mac and started using iTunes, I was a much happier person.

That's probably because you never got to play with Media Jukebox. But yeah, most skins for most players seem to have been done by deranged schizophrenics on PCP.

Software for money is held to a higher standard than free software. iTunes is incredible: it's fast, has plenty of features, and works great.

iTunes is surprisingly good for a Mac app, but JRiver's Media Jukebox is better. In fact, it's in a class of its own. And it costs only $25. It seems to me that a lot of the "ihub" software copies best-of-breed innovative shareware from the Windows world and puts an Aqua front on it. Compare iPhoto with the awesome ThumbsPlus, for example. Anyway, I think once Mac people start paying for these applications, they will be better able to judge them on their merits versus similar software on other platforms.

And they were never "free". Their users have already paid a significant price premium for buying Apple's hardware/software combination and accepting the lock-in.

Here's a review of the iPod I posted on Slashdot a while back in a thread about the release of the XPlay software.

A good friend of mine got an iPod as a corporate gift (he works for a major market radio station) and gave it to me since he doesn't own a Mac. Now, I don't have a Mac either, but as a tech-head and a digital audio guy I figured I could probably do something with it. I actually did consider getting a new iMac, but I'd heard about XPod (now XPlay) and figured I could check it out if I got a firewire port somehow.

Some background: I have been running Windows XP for about six months now on my homebuilt Athlon PC (T-Bird 1.33). I have been very happy with the performance and stability of XP, but the Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio sound card I have used for years is only supported under 9x. I could get basic analog audio working by disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but with lousy driver support and no digital I/O, I realized it was time to upgrade. I thought about getting a semi-pro audio card such as those from Terratec, M-Audio, and Event, but since I also use my PC for games and home theater, I ended up getting the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Ex. The last Creative card I had was a SB AWE32 many years ago, and though I wouldn't touch the Live! series (especially since my mobo uses a Via chipset), the Audigy is totally killer. Now, just as posts here have mentioned the possibility of people buying a Mac to complement the iPod, a big part of the reason I picked the Audigy was for the built-in Firewire port.

Okay, time to get to the goods. I downloaded and installed a beta of XPlay and hooked up my virgin iPod. To my surprise, Windows immediately recognized the iPod as an external drive and mapped it through explorer. XPlay seemed to suggest that I should control the iPod primarily through Windows Media Player, but I have generally stayed away from WMP since they introduced v7. I have never been fond of its music library management, especially since it likes to screw with your music files even if you don't want it to--no ID3v2 tags for me, thank you. And the idea that it needs to lock up 30MB of RAM just to play one song is pretty ludicrous. A quick check revealed that WMP8 did indeed see the iPod as a portable device, but I wasn't going to use it to transfer any files.

My mp3 collection is up to about 30GB now (all ripped myself using EAC with LAME), so it was a little difficult to pick out which five gigs of tunes I wanted to take with me. Going through Windows Explorer, I ctrl-clicked the folders of my favorite albums and dragged them into the \Music folder on the mapped iPod drive. Transfer was fast but not blazing, taking about 25 minutes to copy everything over the firewire. Using the Explorer interface meant that no playlists were transferred, but the Artist/Album interface on the iPod is so good that I don't really need them anyway. I suppose that I'm not really using XPlay to its fullest, but at least WMP doesn't muck up my mp3s in the process. I'd love to see plug-in support for the iPod in my player of choice, JRiver's Media Jukebox.

Reactions: While I'm not using any of XPlay's features beyond the support for HFS, I don't really need it to. I'd much rather control things myself anyway, just doing drag 'n drops instead of becoming a slave to the software interface. I also have a first gen Diamond Rio (parallel port connection!) and the original Rio Volt, and the included software has never wowed me enough to use it regularly. Actually, that's why I liked the Volt most of all, since I could just burn my own CD's and be done with it. The iPod is definitely best of all though--the small size makes it much more convenient for the car or carrying in your pocket, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is just awesome. I use it in the car every day (about an hour-round trip) and only have to charge it every other week. The playback interface is the best of any I have seen--very easy to control with one hand and the white backlight works great in the dark. It does seem to skip sometimes, though it seems it's actually blank parts in the mp3 file since it happens in the same part of a song every time. My guess is that there was a blip of some sort during the firewire transfer, since the mp3s play back perfect on the computer.

Overall, XPlay does what it advertises. I can use the iPod on my PC, which would not be possible otherwise. However, there are some other features I'd like to see, such as the ability to upgrade the iPod firmware and synchronization support for programs other than WMP. Combining the huge installed base of the PC/Windows platform with the style and reliabilty of Apple hardware is a winning situation for everyone. I think that MediaFour has done just what Apple had hoped, allowing them to sell more units without getting into the headache of supporting the PC platform. And personally, I am thrilled to be an Apple user again, since my first home computer was a IIGS. Who knows, I still might pick up an iMac after all...

Don't know if anyone will see this post as I caught this thread late in the game, but I though I'd share my experiences with using XPlay to access the iPod in Windows.

A good friend of mine got an iPod as a corporate gift (he works for a major market radio station) and gave it to me since he doesn't own a Mac. Now, I don't have a Mac either, but as a tech-head and a digital audio guy I figured I could probably do something with it. I actually did consider getting a new iMac, but I'd heard about XPod (now XPlay) and figured I could check it out if I got a firewire port somehow.

Some background: I have been running Windows XP for about six months now on my homebuilt Athlon PC (T-Bird 1.33). I have been very happy with the performance and stability of XP, but the Turtle Beach Montego II Home Studio sound card I have used for years is only supported under 9x. I could get basic analog audio working by disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but with lousy driver support and no digital I/O, I realized it was time to upgrade.

I thought about getting a semi-pro audio card such as those from Terratec, M-Audio, and Event, but since I also use my PC for games and home theater, I ended up getting the Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum Ex. The last Creative card I had was a SB AWE32 many years ago, and though I wouldn't touch the Live! series (especially since my mobo uses a Via chipset), the Audigy is totally killer. Now, just as posts here have mentioned the possibility of people buying a Mac to complement the iPod, a big part of the reason I picked the Audigy was for the built-in Firewire port.

Okay, time to get to the goods. I downloaded and installed a beta of XPlay and hooked up my virgin iPod. To my surprise, Windows immediately recognized the iPod as an external drive and mapped it through explorer. XPlay seemed to suggest that I should control the iPod primarily through Windows Media Player, but I have generally stayed away from WMP since they introduced v7. I have never been fond of its music library management, especially since it likes to screw with your music files even if you don't want it to--no ID3v2 tags for me, thank you. And the idea that it needs to lock up 30MB of RAM just to play one song is pretty ludicrous. A quick check revealed that WMP8 did indeed see the iPod as a portable device, but I wasn't going to use it to transfer any files.

My mp3 collection is up to about 30GB now (all ripped myself using EAC with LAME), so it was a little difficult to pick out which five gigs of tunes I wanted to take with me. Going through Windows Explorer, I ctrl-clicked the folders of my favorite albums and dragged them into the \Music folder on the mapped iPod drive. Transfer was fast but not blazing, taking about 25 minutes to copy everything over the firewire. Using the Explorer interface meant that no playlists were transferred, but the Artist/Album interface on the iPod is so good that I don't really need them anyway. I suppose that I'm not really using XPlay to its fullest, but at least WMP doesn't muck up my mp3s in the process. I'd love to see plug-in support for the iPod in my player of choice, JRiver's Media Jukebox.

Reactions: While I'm not using any of XPlay's features beyond the support for HFS, I don't really need it to. I'd much rather control things myself anyway, just doing drag 'n drops instead of becoming a slave to the software interface. I also have a first gen Diamond Rio (parallel port connection!) and the original Rio Volt, and the included software has never wowed me enough to use it regularly. Actually, that's why I liked the Volt most of all, since I could just burn my own CD's and be done with it.

The iPod is definitely best of all though--the small size makes it much more convenient for the car or carrying in your pocket, and the rechargeable lithium-ion battery is just awesome. I use it in the car every day (about an hour-round trip) and only have to charge it every other week. The playback interface is the best of any I have seen--very easy to control with one hand and the white backlight works great in the dark. It does seem to skip sometimes, though it seems it's actually blank parts in the mp3 file since it happens in the same part of a song every time. My guess is that there was a blip of some sort during the firewire transfer, since the mp3s play back perfect on the computer.

Overall, XPlay does what it advertises. I can use the iPod on my PC, which would not be possible otherwise. However, there are some other features I'd like to see, such as the ability to upgrade the iPod firmware and synchronization support for programs other than WMP. Combining the huge installed base of the PC/Windows platform with the style and reliabilty of Apple hardware is a winning situation for everyone. I think that MediaFour has done just what Apple had hoped, allowing them to sell more units without getting into the headache of supporting the PC platform. And personally, I am thrilled to be an Apple user again, since my first home computer was a IIGS. Who knows, I still might pick up an iMac after all...

- Leigh

Sadly, this isn't because the CDDB folks "saw the light," it's because the folks who make Media Jukebox signed a contract.

Still, I think freeDB is a better alternative.