TheRaven64's Journal: iTunes For Windows

I downloaded a copy of iTunes for Windows yesterday. It seems that Apple released a public beta and called it version 1. This is not a good way of persuading Windows users to switch. The two bugs I found within a minute of installing it were:

1. It can't cope with multiple monitors. If you have a multiple monitor set-up, give focus to something that isn't iTunes, and then click on the iTunes title bar then it will resize itself (to about 80% of my desktop width, i.e. spread right across both monitors).
2. It can't handle SMB shares. All of my music lives on a file server, so I can listen to it whatever OS I am using on my desktop. If I try to play this music (or I rip CDs to that folder, and then play them) it will stutter and then crash.

There are also a few UI glitches, where it fails to redraw things correctly, and some threading issues, such as the fact that importing a large amount of music locks the UI until it's done.

Apart from those problems, I like it (mainly because I know that none of these things will worry me when I get the Mac version in a few days). I love the way I can just pop a CD in the drive and have it look up the CDDB entry, rip it and add it to my music library. The play list management features are very nice, and AAC sounds very nice. Currently most of my music is encoded as 256kbps Ogg Vorbis, and when I recently listened to a few of my CDs I found that I could hear things that I had got used to being absent in the Ogg Vorbis encoding. The 256kbps AAC is noticeably better. I would be interested to see (hear?) what the 128kbps AACs from iTMS sound like.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that it doesn't support the multimedia keys on my Logitech keyboard, so if I press the play / pause button I end up launching a copy of the Windows CD player.

Tried it last night

[ryanr]

Didn't notice any obvious problems.

I bought "Stacy's Mom", just to test. Sounds fine to me, but I'm far from being an audiophile. 128Kbps non-VBR MP3s usually sound fine to me, too.

I doubt I'll be buying a lot of music.. I prefer to have it in a non-proprietary format, and don't care to go to the trouble of putting it on CD and ripping it back off. If I'm going to put it onto CD, I want to buy a lossless format.

Oh, and I'm not impressed with the selection, though to be fair I just glanced at it. They