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iTunes Windows - First Impressions

My Findings

I installed iTunes for Windows on three different machines. The first install was on my Mac... Huh? Yes, I installed it on Virtual PC 6 running Windows 2000 Pro. I just couldn't wait until I got home (My computer at work is a G4) I was plesantly surprised how well it worked. Right away it saw my shared iTunes library on the Mac side. Performance was on par with all the other windows apps I run on VPC. When I got home I installed it on 2 machines. The first one is a PIII 800mHz with 512mb of pc133 Ram. This machine is not exactly a screamer. iTunes ran perfectly. Launching iTunes was a tad slow but no biggy at all. The second machine at home I installed it on is a Athlon XP 2.1gHz, 1gb DDR pc2700 ram, 80gb ATA100 8mb cache HDD. iTunes was scorching fast. Noticably faster than my dual 1.25 G4 at work. Everything works exactly the same. No details were comprimised. As a software engineer I am very impressed. iTunes for Windows is a huge success already as far as I am concerned. And remember this is the very first release for Windows. Pretty impressive that the bugs are few at this point.
 
Re: Who cares

Originally posted by dekator
The only good thing for corporate America is to get as rich as possible.
Click to expand...

4 out of 5 of the biggest record labels are foreign (to the US) owned.
 
while i am really glad that apple released iTunes for Windoz can they now sort out this US BASED CRAP AND GET IT GLOBAL BECAUSE I CAN USE MEDIA PLAYER FOR MUSIC AND THAT DOSE THE JOB JUST LIKE WINAMP I WANT A STORE TO SHOP IN WITHOUT HAVING TO GO TO HMV OR ANY OTHER LARGE STORE THAT OVER CHARGES FOR ITS CDS ...

and now that iTunes is here are there plans for iPhoto Movie DVD iCal etc etc

Hope so then i can get rid of windows software when iam working
 
Well, well: XP ss on Apple Homepage

itunesscreen10162003.jpg


www.apple.com
 
Another toy for well-to-do (this time) Windows users. As a European, why should I care?

I'm sick and tired that 'available to all' means just the US.

Ah well, and downloading songs illegally is 'bad karma' ? Right Mr Guru Steve, and how are you in a position to say so. That's a little simplistic isn't it ? Well, anyway, I disagree mostly but then I'm not a member of the Steve jobs school of marketing (sorry, 'thought'). Yes, I'm also tired of religious terminology being trivialized for marketing ends.

'Illegal' downloads are the only option for most of us and I don't think it's a bad thing.
The only good thing for corporate America is to get as rich as possible. Well, it may surprise you to hear but I don't think that's good, indeed, I don't even think it's legitimate and unhealthy if one looks at the big picture and not just one Ego.
It's good karma to share what should be available to all. It's only bad if you're praying to the god of 'infinite accumulation of material wealth' but certainly not in any spiritual sense.

I have to admit though that signing up Indie-labels is a great thing. I'd gladly pay for those songs and I think it's good. Still, I can't and, seeing how Sherlock is still US only, I don't expect to be able to in the next couple o' years. But then, there will be alternatives.

I believe what we over here in Europe are hoping for is a good non-american OS some time, which is most dersirable, both politically and economically.
Click to expand...

I love how it's America's fault for everything. It's like the Internet is some *magical* place where copyrights and all sorts of things don't exist. We've been down this road before and we've come to this conclusion: Tough. I've had to wait for Japanese games and European games to hit American shelves too, but you don't see me saying that the Brits are too worried about their economy and just drinking tea, do you? No. I agree that there should be some sharing of wealth, but what makes you think this *isn't* happening? Look at even Bill Gates, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity.
 
Looks funny with that title bar. I wish they would've had a giant Apple logo on there with a troll leaning over it sticking his tongue out or something.
 
Re: Who cares

Originally posted by dekator
<snip>
'Illegal' downloads are the only option for most of us and I don't think it's a bad thing. <snip>
Click to expand...

you're kidding right??

only option? how about buy the cd to begin with.
not a bad thing? how do you justify that?

and as for non-us, yeah, that kinda sucks, but there's reasons for it. we don't know all of them. we can speculate though, like if you look at macbytes just a day or two ago, microsoft got sued for doing music outside the us, because of a patent violation.

matt
 
as you know i have both a beautiful godlike Mac and a pchit.

well, itunes really works great on the pchit.

At last i have something that i like on her, heheheheh
 
See post with graphic attachment

I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and repost what I just posted in the previous thread. Suffice it to say I do believe there are some issues with the UI and CPU utilization.

1. shrinking expanding the window eats 80%-100% CPU. Just "grabbing" the corner and holding it there eats 80%-100% and that's without moving anything! 😱

2. Initial RAM usage for itunes.exe hovers around 30MB. If you minimize the application and then restore it the size shrinks to 6-8MB in size.

I believe both of these problems can be traced back to however Apple implemented the UI in the iTfW app. I've confirmed this behavior on 4 systems. Three running 2K and 1 running (God help me) XP. The thing is that only people really paying attention to their system performance is going to notice these problems. iTunes works perfectly fine as is. With most PC's showing up with 512MB of RAM and CPU's well into the 2+ GHZ range this shouldn't be to much of an issue. Ick that’s a bad notion. The “We don’t need to worry about tight code because the system can handle it.” I expect this out of Microsoft not Apple 🙁 I hope they fix this.

I guess I am going to reinvent the wheel 😉
 
I have a p3 1.0ghz w/ 1GB of RAM and a 64mb ATI Video Card.

Itunes is the worst running app I have ever had on my computer...without question.
 
euh...well wrong example, but you are right

Originally posted by the_mole1314
Look at even Bill Gates, he has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity.
Click to expand...

I am pretty sure he did that not based on any philanthropic behavior... more image/marketing point of view.... probably for his soul, maybe he can convince himself that he is the good guy and those who disagree with him are the bad guys... the typical simplistic way of Mr Bush...(I say Mr Bush and Co, and not American in general... please note the difference... I really think that a majority of the American are suffering of his general behavior, but hey, in US you can be elected without having the majority of the American votes...)
I am happy that iTunes PC is so good, and I am really missing a Europe version, against what has been mentioned before, no iTMS in Europe has nothing to do with Apple, so stop blaming Steve, it has to go with Record Labels policies... NOW the big stupid thing is that , as mentioned before, 4 of the five larger Regard Labels are NOT US based (example Universal music is french (aka Vivendi Universal but remains under Universal brand name for marketing reason in the US)) and this does not yield to a pay-to-download system in Europe….
So, yes it is bad that the system is limited to the US for iTMS; but no it is not only US fault , definitely not.
 
Re: euh...well wrong example, but you are right

Originally posted by eric67
I am pretty sure he did that not based on any philanthropic behavior... more image/marketing point of view....
Click to expand...

Um, no. Gates' philanthropic behavior is..well, philanthropic. By itself, his world health giving shows that [and we're talking billions of dollars here.....].

Take a look at the distribution of his gifts and grants...might be surprised by where they go...and how many of them are out there.
 
a little thin

Originally posted by geerlingguy
Yeah, I wish they had some of that, too. I like most of the other music selection, especially classical, but Apple is still slow in attracting labels like Sparrow records, et all (which carry most Christian artists).
Click to expand...
Yeah, missing good heavy metal stuff too. Seems to be music that SJ likes, and the current Top 40 junk. 🙁

Originally posted by eric67
I am pretty sure he did that not based on any philanthropic behavior... more image/marketing point of view.... probably for his soul, maybe he can convince himself that he is the good guy and those who disagree with him are the bad guys... the typical simplistic way of Mr Bush...(I say Mr Bush and Co, and not American in general... please note the difference... I really think that a majority of the American are suffering of his general behavior, but hey, in US you can be elected without having the majority of the American votes...)
I am happy that iTunes PC is so good, and I am really missing a Europe version, against what has been mentioned before, no iTMS in Europe has nothing to do with Apple, so stop blaming Steve, it has to go with Record Labels policies... NOW the big stupid thing is that , as mentioned before, 4 of the five larger Regard Labels are NOT US based (example Universal music is french (aka Vivendi Universal but remains under Universal brand name for marketing reason in the US)) and this does not yield to a pay-to-download system in Europe….
So, yes it is bad that the system is limited to the US for iTMS; but no it is not only US fault , definitely not.
Click to expand...
You do know Bill is married to a good woman, right? His philanthropic activites jumped massively after he got married. And his donations are in the billions now. http://gatesfoundation.org/default.htm Most are to places outside of the USA. As to politicians; they are all scum, regardless of nationality. 😉 The EU is to blame for the lack of iTMS for Europe. Got a nice mix of EU laws, country specific laws, and of course generic international trade laws.
 
Has anyone else had any trouble with the quicktime plugin in the music store?
I tried a few different videos (i.e. the eagles/REM) but the play button doesn't change to pause and the progress ball doesn't move.
I also tried Mozilla Firebird and IE and they both worked fine

any ideas?
 
My Experience

I am using iTunes on a Pentium 3 550MHz with 192MB RAM. It is currently playing music shared from my Mac (approximately 300 Songs). It is shuffling the playlist. It is averaging 10% CPU usage and using 26MB RAM while the Main Large window is active. It resizes great and very responsive. Never skips even when using multiple other apps.
 
Sound Enhancer?

I installed iTunes on my work PC yesterday, and I've been streaming music from my powerbook and from a few other Macs on my office subnet. It works great!

But has anybody noticed that when you turn Sound Enhancer on, it kind of dampens the vocals of a lot of songs? The higher the amount of enhancement, the less vocals you hear. This doesn't happen on my Mac. I've turned Sound Enhancer off because I can't hear the vocals.

Let me know if you experience the same thing.

-Alex
 
Re: Re: iTunes for PC is mediocre

Originally posted by Stella
How much memory do you have in your machine?

Also processor speed?

I've had absolutely no problems in running Itunes at work, 1.6Ghz, 512meg ram.

Haven't tried it at home on my 1gig athlon yet, shall try it tonight.

As far as I'm concerned, iTunes for Windows is excellent, first class piece of software. All as good as the mac version.
Click to expand...

My problems are on a 1GHz PIII with 512 ram. iTunes is sluggish even when it is the only app running. Other apps are RARELY as sluggish as iTunes is unless I am doing some serious computing or disk operations.
 
I've been playing with iTunes in Virtual PC and it looks great. The design just looks so much less cluttered than the rest of Windows.
 
Re: Re: Re: iTunes for PC is mediocre

Originally posted by Oats
My problems are on a 1GHz PIII with 512 ram. iTunes is sluggish even when it is the only app running. Other apps are RARELY as sluggish as iTunes is unless I am doing some serious computing or disk operations.
Click to expand...

iTunes on my PIII 800mHz with 512mb pc133 ram runs very nice (Win2k Server) I wonder what the deal is?
 
Re: iTunes PCversion

Originally posted by Shadey
My friend made that plug-in when he was in school here.

He now is being paid by Nullsoft 😉
Click to expand...

Geiss is a damn good plugin. The ver2 option to make the visualization the wallpaper was just amazing. I was really impressed with this. Plus there is always Drempel (aka the vominator 😀 )


No if he'll just make an iTunes version (Wintel & OSX).


* art *
 
Re: Re: Re: Hmmm, iSmile

Originally posted by MasterMac
I really wonder why people don't want [X] support in iTunes... I personally would like to see iTunes have support for WMA, Real, Ogg, etc just so I don't have to either A) have other apps do it for me or B) waste my time trying to convert it to MP3 or whatever..
Click to expand...

The iRiver HP120 is one reason why. I suppose I understand why Apple doesn't want to support WMA. Not just from a music store perspective, but iTunes is the best Jukebox/Music Library Management/Audio CD Burning/Music ARchiving software/interface available.

By allowing it to work with WMA, iTunes would benefit all portable audio hardware and would not be a major marketing item for the iPod. If the HP120 could manage it's music with free iTunes, it would give iPod sales to PC owners a run for it's money which it may do anyway.

To be honest, if not for iTunes Windows, I'd probably switch. I planned on getting and HP120 for Christmas, but iTunes+iPod is just too good. I have to be loyal even in the absence of WMA playback.

As a matter of fact, if we can get 192k AAC, I think I'll support it in the face of WMA momentum. Pioneers new optical streaming receiver supports WMA 9 and is advertised as such, but the good news for Apple, in the small print it supports AAC streaming. Bad news, it's in small print. Course the think costs $4k and is only in Japan right now, but it is the wave of the future.

On topic, iTunes performs great, get 34+ frames per second, and it does use too much memory. However, I'll gladly trade 30MB Ram, for the lightning fast file management of a 1000+ library. WMP and Explorer can't handle it that well. I have to wait days to open My Music in Explorer or WMP.
 
Knowledge base articles?

Sounds strangly familiar. Why is it Windows users have to have a library of knowledge base articles to help use anything? Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that they are getting the chance to use a great Apple app, but I really feel sorry for those poor souls that have to suffer with that OS. Maybe iTunes will help generate more interest in OS X from the Wintel crowd. They just don't know what they are missing.
 
Gift Certificates

If someone in say canada/Europe wanted to use the iTunes Music store could they use gift certificates? say they send money via pay pal to a US citizen and that person sent them a gift certificate. Could they use it? I don't want to abuse the GC program because I think it's very useful but I think they could be a way to buy music in "foreign Lands"
 
Re: Who cares

"'Illegal' downloads are the only option for most of us and I don't think it's a bad thing.
The only good thing for corporate America is to get as rich as possible. Well, it may surprise you to hear but I don't think that's good, indeed, I don't even think it's legitimate and unhealthy if one looks at the big picture and not just one Ego."

Isn't it amazing how much moralistic drivel some people are able to conjure up to justify their own greed? Do I download myself? Hell yes, and I do it because it's:

a) Cheap b) Convinient and c) I'm not likely to get caught.

If you want to convince us that you download in order to fight "Da Man", well heh...
 
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