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iTunes Use Surges Past QuickTime, RealPlayer
QuatermassX writes "Forget increased sales of Mac computers, think media players. The iPod 'halo effect' shows its true power in recently compiled statistics from Nielsen/NetRatings and Apple. From the report on WebSiteOptimization.com: 'Podcasting is taking off and iPods are seemingly ubiquitous. Unique users of Apple's iTunes player should pass RealPlayer by mid-2006 with nearly 30 million users in the US alone. People are tuning in over twice as long with iTunes than with RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. As broadband penetration increases we are spending more time on our computers.'"
It shows two things:
1. /.'ers are Apple fanboys who are indoctrinated by Apple marketing and;
2. /.'ers don't really give a damn about the actions of others.
Truth must be modded down.
Why should I pay? There are numerous, superiour players that are FREE. Some as in BEER, but some as in SPEACH.
Apple will always look bad in my eyes as long as they seek to lock people in via proprietry formats that they strictly enforce to prevent competition. Why do I need a separate media players just for *.mov files? Why can't I play *.mov files on my mobile; all my other media works just fine. Full screen video came to us via a Weezer track in Windows fucking 98. And Apple still don't do full screen, eight years later?
You're joking right??? Quicktime is a terrible piece of software. It's the first thing I uninstall. When was the last time you saw a QT movie file that required QT to play? You never see them anymore.
Shame QuickTime looks like shit, runs like shit and nobody uses the format...
What??? the iTunes interface is the worst I've ever seen, much, much worse that winamp, worse than musicmatch (ick), and even Real's is less confusing, better looking and more functional, can't say I've ever used quicktimes for a music library but...
The only reason I'm posting this is b/c I've noticed other people, lots, using iTunes as their music player and it flumoxes me, maybe I'm missing something, trying to force it to work a certain way rather than learning to work with it the way it wants to work, but doesn't anyone else out there find it so maddening that you'd rather stick a spoon in your eye than use it? And what about the sound? where are my DSPs?
iTunes I put below all but quicktime, since I've never used it and can't compare. LOL even yahoo's musc player is marginally better!
Personally, I use ephpod for my iPod synch, with mp3Tag for organizing, winamp, which while flawed is still miles better than anything else I've ever found, for playing music, and VLC for the video goodness.
closed minded is as closed minded does
I have to agree. I don't have an iPod, but everybody around the office was talkeing about how good iTunes was, so I gave it a try. What a POS. I used it for a couple of months to give it a fair chance, but every day I just hated it more.
I've switched back to WMP, not because WMP is a great player, but because, for the way I play music, it sucks the least. All music players I've used suck. Some suck horribly (Realplayer), some have an average level of suckage (iTunes), and some only kinda-sorta suck (WinAmp, WMP). Yes, I know many people hate WMP and would not put it in the same class as WinAmp, but they have different requirements than I do.
What wouldn't suck?
A player that can handle accessing multiple repositories of music, seamlessly merging seperate repositories (shared network directories, iTunes shares, removable media, etc) into the library it presents to me without listing dupes would not suck.
A player that is smart enough that when a repository of music is not available, does not complain or list resources from that repository, but keeps checking to see if it is available and quietly merges it into my available library when it does would not suck.
A player that will let me very easily downsample music to another format, regardless of DRM protections, and copy the new files to removable media (so I can put it on a flash card and play it on my portable player) would not suck.
A Player that can handle a library of 15,000 tracks and do a random shuffle from them without requiring many 10's of megs of ram would not suck.
A player that can work with MusicBrainz (or something similar) to identify tracks that are misidentified and fix the information as it is presented to me (repositories may be read-only, but I still want to have the right names for the tracks contained in them) would not suck.
A player that I can click 'Play' or 'Pause' on without having to click to focus the window first would not suck.
A player that comes with a skin that fits the selected OS look-n-feel would not suck.