The strangest thing is happening. I keep thinking that iTunes is missing basic functionality. What's strange is that I never thought that before, in fact I thought it was pretty near spot on for what I needed. That was before Media Player 11 came along, and now I just miss basic functionality in iTunes.
Don't get me wrong, iTunes is still a great music player but the music library features are really basic. A month ago I thought they were really advanced, but apparently I was wrong. Where's my list of albums? Where's my list of genres? How do I play all of my ambient music and avoid the rest of my music? I have to create a playlist, which I'm beginning to realise is why I've been using my iPod for most of my music listening recently as it lets me select music by album, genre or artist. I don't want to have to create playlists for every choice I want to make. I want a nice list of choices that I'm likely to make depending on my mood and zero effort. What's more I don't want a UI that limits me to a flat list of playlists that I end up having to scroll through after I've added 20 or so because there's no intelligence behind the list.
The library in media player 10 was awful. It was slow and the search was next to useless because of this. iTunes redefined how fast searches should be; if I want to hear a specific song it should come up the second I type it in. Media Player now has this speed, if not the reliability (I'll let it off for now as it's still a beta). On top of that it has all of the features of iTunes that I can see. You can share your library on the network, it has smart playlists (called Auto Playlists) and it's always done video much better than iTunes does now. The only thing missing is the store (the usual MS store integrations don't count, they feel tacked on) and podcasts, but the store is coming with something called Urge involving MTV which makes me think half jokingly that MS sat down and said "iTunes has podcasts, which are part created by Adam Curry. Wasn't he an MTV guy? Let's go one better and get all of MTV!". It remains to be seen how the RSS features of Vista can be integrated with Media Player to provide the podcasting side, but I suspect that it's going to be really simple to implement.
Now I have a problem. My Mac was being used for two things: music and downloading things. My PC is doing the music again now, so my Mac is just a download machine. Maybe I should install Front Row on it (why isn't that a free upgrade? Why does it only come with certain machines?). Actually maybe that's a bad idea, I've used Media Center and since Steve Jobbs came up with the "It doesn't do as much as media center. Look, the remote only has six buttons!" argument I've not considered it a serious contender.
I'm Mac bashing again, aren't I? Don't worry, there's lots of Vista bashing to come but I don't feel that it's fair moaning about how often Explorer crashes on a beta. Or how annoying the folder selection dialog is nowadays. And don't get me started on the new start menu when you view the installed applications. What was wrong with the menu? Why can I only use such a small amount of screen space to view it all?
UPDATE: Of course just after I wrote this my media player library broke and now media player crashes every time I try to start it. I hereby declare my love of the best media library. There are lots of silver disks in it and it makes use of the ultimate in shelf technology.
posted @ Sunday, January 08, 2006 1:11 AM