In all honesty, I never used iTunes prior to buying my iPod Touch a few weeks ago. I always had something the interface. But since Apple is proprietary about its applications, I kind of had no choice. This is a good thing, since it allowed me to discover a good media app that I would have overlooked otherwise. In the past, my media organization was quite simple. I used Winamp for all audio formats, Video Lan’s VLC Media Player for video files and Windows Media Player within Windows MCE 2005 in my living room. So, this is an opportunity to compare three media players for the audio aspect, since iTunes doesn’t support video playback.
Winamp has been around for a very long time. I remember when I was first listening to digital music in the late nineties; I was using Winamp and Napster. It has a solid feature set including a very good equalizer, library management tool as well as some nice skins to personalize your experience. Also, as it supports most audio formats natively, Winamp is a good choice for audiophiles. So is the equalizer, which offers a few dozen presets as well as a precise manually adjustable digital EQ. As far as the library manager goes, it’s pretty standard in the way that it lists the contents of your files by artist, album, genre, etc. In my opinion, these libraries are often confusing and as someone who manages my music at the source (on the dedicated hard drive) this feature is often unneeded. One nice thing is the integration into windows which allows to play and queue songs directly from Windows Explorer.
Windows Media Player was always a tool used by necessity as it is the only integrated music player in the Media Center interface that I use in the living room. Therefore I don’t use it much as I am not a fan. I find that the EQ is of lesser quality than Winamp’s and the Library is equally unfriendly but essential as it constitutes the core of the media browser. File format support is very standard even if some of the more exotic formats such as .ogg or looseless are not played back.
iTunes, as my last contender, has me baffled. I honestly don’t use it to play music unless to listen to a track before adding it to a playlist for the iPod Touch. There are several features that I do like and the one that stands out the most is the library manager. I find that it is very neat and well sorted by default, making it very easy and intuitive to find specific items. As far as playback features go, I honestly don’t find the equalizer to be compelling as I believe that to my taste the presets are off. As far as the iPod interface is concerned I will eventually post my insight on iTunes as an entire post in the near future.
The bottom line, I believe, is very simple. As all 3 contenders are free, and have some positive aspects, feel free to explore and find the application that best matches your needs… and your musical personality.
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