iTunes for Windows
Apple released Itunes for Windows today. I loaded it up on my Toshiba Portege 2000 laptop under Windows XP. Once I pointed it to where my music files were, it seems to work just fine.
One of the things I've been looking for is a way to play my m4u files that I've bought through the iTunes music store on my Windows laptop when I travel, and it looks like this will fill the bill. I transferred over one of those files, and then when I went to play it I got a message that this computer is not authorized to play that tune, and it asked for my iTunes music store password, and (I guess) went out and verified that and then played the song. So far, so good!
Hi Oren, my name is Brian McNally – I’m a new hire here in C&C (cci, techsupport) here at the UW. I stumbled across your blog while searching the UW for some information on IMAP (and its integration into Thunderbird). I found a copy of an email you had written about the merits of IMAP, and then I decided to check out your main blog. It looked like not many people were responding to your entries, so I thought I’d stop by and say hi.
I just installed iTunes on my Windows XP machine tonight. So far I’m really enjoying it. Previously, my music management solution was to select a song to play out of a directory and open them individually in Windows Media Player – not an elegant or efficient solution to say the least. I had occasionally made playlists in WMP9, but its interface was a bit lacking to use for much more than minimal music playing.
From my few hours messing around with iTunes thus far, I can see that it has some serious potential (not only for me, but for others looking for a simple music management solution). It has its faults though, like its insistence on making iTunes your default media player. When installing iTunes, it asked me if I wanted to make it my default player – I indicated I did not. Yet, once the program was installed, I found this box checked in preferences. From what I’ve read elsewhere, this has been an issue for other people too. Was this sly trick on Apple’s part? Perhaps. Window resizing is also very laggy, despite the fact that I’m running it on a more than adequate system.
Despite its faults, the overall application is clean and easy to use, following typical Apple design strategy. I’m excited to see how it works out for me in the long term.
Brian -
Thanks for the comments and please to make your (virtual) acquaintance - stop by and say hi sometime!
I agree - not a perfect Windows port, and a few general annoyances with iTunes (like, at least on the Mac, it really wants to have the iTunes library all located on one disk volume, and it deals with tunes on other volumes by copying them into the library, which seems unnecessary to me), but the best jukebox program I've used yet, though Winamp might be a close second (and the plugins for Winamp are very cool)...