They've actually done something of value.
by AC - permalink
I was so bored yesterday that I actually decided to pop in one of those AOL CDs I get in the mail every few weeks, instead of chucking it under a passing car on the way back from the mailbox like I usually do. I'd gotten one months ago that had some "War of the Worlds" crap on it, so I decided to have a look at a vanilla AOL CD. I didn't autorun it or launch the setup app, but buried in a subfolder I found an installer for iTunes. I've never wanted to sit through an iTunes download because I don't really have any use for the iTunes Music Store, but I decided to go ahead and install it.
It ain't bad. I have a decent amount of music on my hard drives, considering it all came from my CD collection. It's between 500 and 600 tracks, more than thirty, maybe forty hours. With mostly complete albums and only a handful of individual tracks, mostly from compilation CDs I burned years and years ago, I've been a devout believer in musikCube. It has a really robust interface and fantastic virtual playlist generation. Plus it's open-source and extensible.
iTunes also indexes music to create virtual playlists, but you have to do more of the work yourself than you do with musikCube. But it's generally less buggy, and the equalizer is a lot easier to work with. Visualization is average. As you would expect from an Apple product, the interface is much, much better than Microsoft's competing Windows Media Player. I have Windows Media Center edition, and I still like the Media Center music player, but it's so limited from a power-user perspective that I have pretty much no use for it. If my PC were hooked up to my TV, it would be a different story.
So from a purely offline, non-iTMS perspective, I like iTunes. In fact, I killed a couple hours this afternoon digging up nearly 70 album covers online (cheers, Amazon) and attaching them to my music collection. Just because. But is iTunes good enough to give up on musikCube? I don't think so, but I'll keep tinkering with it.
by AC - permalink
I was so bored yesterday that I actually decided to pop in one of those AOL CDs I get in the mail every few weeks, instead of chucking it under a passing car on the way back from the mailbox like I usually do. I'd gotten one months ago that had some "War of the Worlds" crap on it, so I decided to have a look at a vanilla AOL CD. I didn't autorun it or launch the setup app, but buried in a subfolder I found an installer for iTunes. I've never wanted to sit through an iTunes download because I don't really have any use for the iTunes Music Store, but I decided to go ahead and install it.
It ain't bad. I have a decent amount of music on my hard drives, considering it all came from my CD collection. It's between 500 and 600 tracks, more than thirty, maybe forty hours. With mostly complete albums and only a handful of individual tracks, mostly from compilation CDs I burned years and years ago, I've been a devout believer in musikCube. It has a really robust interface and fantastic virtual playlist generation. Plus it's open-source and extensible.
iTunes also indexes music to create virtual playlists, but you have to do more of the work yourself than you do with musikCube. But it's generally less buggy, and the equalizer is a lot easier to work with. Visualization is average. As you would expect from an Apple product, the interface is much, much better than Microsoft's competing Windows Media Player. I have Windows Media Center edition, and I still like the Media Center music player, but it's so limited from a power-user perspective that I have pretty much no use for it. If my PC were hooked up to my TV, it would be a different story.
So from a purely offline, non-iTMS perspective, I like iTunes. In fact, I killed a couple hours this afternoon digging up nearly 70 album covers online (cheers, Amazon) and attaching them to my music collection. Just because. But is iTunes good enough to give up on musikCube? I don't think so, but I'll keep tinkering with it.
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