Ranting to /dev/null

iTunes reviewed

So Apple's iTunes and associated Music Store is released for the PC on Thursday. I'd have said something about it already, but having driven over 2000 miles in the past 5 days, I haven't really had the time. But I sat down with it this morning to give it a good look. My conclusions follow.

Until iTunes, my mp3 player of choice has been MusicMatch, a program with which I have been growing increasingly dissatisfied, but the only one on the market that does the things I want to do. My music library is currently 10125 tracks taking up 47.7GB, so winamp just ain't cutting it anymore. I need something to manage that. MusicMatch does this, and does a pretty decent job of it too.

However, MusicMatch is bloatware by any definition of the word. Moving from track to track on a playlist can take an entire second - not ideal for listening through an album - and updating track information takes longer than it has any right to take. Oddly enough, later versions of MusicMatch (8.0 and onward) perform significantly worse than 7.5. There are three possible reasons for this. The first is that none of my music is actually on my computer. It's all on my fileserver, and I stream it across a 100Mb network. It might not like doing this. The second is that it could be trying to update the entire list every time I make a change to one track and/or searching through the entire list every time it wants to play a different track. With a list as big as mine, that could take a while even with my hardware. But third, and I think this is most likely: the software just isn't written that well. MusicMatch can and frequently does take up 100% of my CPU, and I'm running an AMD Athlon 2600+ for pity's sake. There's just no excuse for that.

All of this by way of saying that the first thing I noticed about iTunes was the speed. Lightning fast. I can re-sort, edit track info, reorder, anything, and it's all instantaneous. I'm not sure how they do it, but it's good. This is one well-written piece of code. I haven't used it all that much yet, but it hasn't crashed yet, and MusicMatch probably would have by now. So from a sheer engineering standpoint, I'm really impressed.

The second thing I noticed was the interface. It's far more like Windows Media Player than MusicMatch. I despise WMP, and not just because of it's evil DRM bullshit. I like dealing with my music as a library rather than as a series of playlists. iTunes may force me to change this. But as the lack of playlist integration in MusicMatch is something I've always kind of disliked, this may not be a bad thing.

What is a bad thing is that for the life of me I can't find a way of viewing my collection by album. This is a real problem, as it means that at the moment I have to look at an entire album at once, every single track, with no way of collapsing the view for efficiency's sake. The tracks are all grouped together by album, and they're in the right order, but I want to be able to view just album titles rather than track titles, and I can't. The other thing it means is that albums with multiple artists have their tracks scattered throughout the library as you can't sort by album. With MusicMatch I would organize by album and sort by artist so that on the left column I would have a list of albums grouped together by artist. If I wanted to see the tracks in an album, I could expand the album in question. This is bigtime negative points, especially with large collections. I'm really hoping that Apple patches this fast, because this is really annoying.

Now for functionality. iTunes just shines. Playback is smooth and rapid, and you can even select "Crossfade" to blend one track into the other. Burning is a lot easier and more efficient than with MusicMatch, and the speed is comparable. As a bonus, iTunes preserves playlist order on mp3 discs by automatically renaming files "x trackname" where x is the playlist order. This is a good thing. 10 of 10 here: iTunes does everything you want it to and more.

But what about the vaunted Music Store? First off, it's better than it's competitors, if only because it isn't using WMA as it's standard. AAC is just as proprietary, but it sounds better and will work on the sexy, sexy iPod (I gotta get me one of these!). As far as restrictions on usage go, Apple's Music Store is at least comparable to other offerings and better than most. You can play a track as many times as you want, burn a unique playlist 10 times (easily circumvented by adding or subtracting tracks), play a track on up to three different computers, and transfer tracks to your iPod. Currently only the iPod works, as no one else supports AAC, but that isn't a huge negative as the iPod is the mp3 player to have. Pricing is standard (99 cents a track, $10 an album). As a real bonus, you can listen to a 30 second preview of any track you want for free, just to make sure it's the one you're looking for.

Finding and purchasing music is pretty painless. This morning I downloaded a collection of organ compositions by J. S. Bach (classical albums are priced differently than pop, so it only cost $7.92; some are less, some are more, depending on the number of tracks and length of the album). You find what you want through either browsing or searching, both of which are fast and efficient, and hit "Buy Track"/"Buy Album" and it downloads. Fast. 40MB in under 5 minutes, and Covenant has metered bandwidth, so I don't want to think about how fast it'd be with a real broadband connection like Comcast.

Regardless of the structure of the Store, no one will go there if you can't get what you want. It's here that it falls down a bit. If you're looking for the best in modern shit-pop/rock, you're in luck. They've got Christina Aguilera, Missy Elliot, and more alternashit than you can shake a stick at. If, however, you're looking for classics, whether it be Baroque, Romantic, or rock, you may run into trouble. The iTunes music store has no, and I mean no Led Zeppelin available for download. Nor does it have AC/DC. This is inexcusible. Other rock 'n roll greats were present, but the collection was not complete. Definite negative points there, though as the store has only been open for 6 months, I'd give it a bit of time. They're adding music every day, and it's only a matter of time before they get to the good stuff.

Overall, I'm really liking iTunes. The non-collapsing albums are really annoying, but given the massive performance differential, I'll deal with it, at least for a while. I'm sold. Go download it today.

Posted by ryan at October 22, 2003 11:41 AM | TrackBack