Shane Conder's Whateveritis of Nothing

Dislikes:

Memory usage
The memory usage of iTunes is incredibly high. It normally idles at about 28 megabytes of usage. Firefox is the only thing that regularly uses more memory. It often uses up to 140 megabytes. In contrast, Microsoft Dev Studio will use 13 megs when not debugging. Emacs will use around 5 megs. WinAmp will use 17 megs. Outlook uses 7 megs. (See a coming post on the curiosity of memory usage when minimized vs not. These are all not-minimized numbers.)

Performance
While WinAmp will use 1-2% of my CPU while playing an MP3, iTunes will be sitting there using 5-10% of my CPU. (This is on a P3 1.13GHz machine.)

Just audio?
Seriously, how come it's just for audio? I know they do QuickTime for video, but why not integrate it? Given their lack of video on iPods and their lock of video in iTunes, they really do seem to be missing the video boat. (To give them credit, QuickTime for video is great, it's just not a "video manager" or "video store" app.)

Scanned play lists, but didn't actually import them
I had a bunch of play lists from WinAmp. I saw it scanning them, but it didn't actually import them as play lists. Why not?

No snapping?
When in "mini" mode the window doesn't snap to the edges of the screen. It really should. This is a great feature of WinAmp in that it can not only snap to the edges but it can hide itself beyond and edge until you move the cursor to it.

Only iPod support?
I especially like what I've heard about the iPod shuffle support. Namely, that is that it can create a list of songs that will precisely fit onto the device making the best use of the memory. But that fact that it only supports iPods is a little short sited. Even if I had an iPod, I'd still want it to support my memory card player (also known as my cell phone) especially if it could do the feature that it does for the shuffle. I'd probably keep using it if it could do that.

Only one store?
I know that it's really pushing the iTunes store. But if it also supported other stores, either for more independent content or for cheaper content like Walmart 88 cent songs, it might help them sell more iPods. And yes, I do realize this is contradictory for them to the above item. This isn't a big deficiency, either.

Installed QuickTime when I already had QuickTime Pro?
Seriously, what gives?? I already had QuickTime installed. It put QuickTime back at the top of my start menu (I keep it organized, so I did not appreciate that) and put it back in the system tray where I definitely don't want it.

Hoops to modify song info
It's got this great and easy to use rating thing and the song name can easily be changed. But the interface doesn't allow direct editing of other tag information. Why not? Instead, you have to bring up a different dialog completely. Blah. Silly.

No song info lookup
This is a feature in some newer MP3 players where they take a sample of song information and use identity technology to get information for the song and update the ID3 tags. It would be great if it could do this, too.

Only does AAC encoding
This is by design, of course. But it is a limiting feature. I personally use dbPowerAmp for all of my encoding and transcoding so it doesn't much matter to me.

Windowing/graphics poor performance
This has been a big one on my system. I may have only a P3 1.13 GHz machine, but I do have a 64 meg video card in it (it's a Dell Inspiron 8100). However, the screen draw in the app are terrible at times, especially in the shop area. It's so bad that I could hardly scroll some pages.

Refuses to minimize sometimes
It frequently gets into a state where it won't minimize with the normal button. Instead, I have to use winkey-m to minimize everything, including it. This is just a poor bug.

Song Name/Progress area doesn't update sometimes
The area that shows the name of the song and the progress through the song freezes sometimes and won't update even after the song has changed a number of times. It still has functionality though, so I can still click to skip to a specific area.

Play, Next, Back key commands don't work when minimized to system tray
It's very nice that these buttons work when it's minimized normally or still on the screen. However, this feature doesn't work if it's minimized to the task bar. That's quite unfortunate.

Likes:

Sharing
The fact that it's so easy to share out music is great. The fact that they allow it is also great, and somewhat surprising (what, they don't want to force everyone to buy the same songs?). It certainly falls into "fair use" though. In any case, this is a nice feature in an office where someone has taken the time to put a server up with tons of songs.

Easy rating
The ease of rating and the usefulness on the "party shuffle" is great. It's a minor feature, though, overall.

Easy artwork addition
The drag and drop ability of adding artwork to a song is also nice. It's not very useful in that the artwork itself isn't very useful. It would be nicer if it could have gone and downloaded song information and a graphic automagically. Oh well.

Auto sound leveling
The ability to level the sounds between songs without having to individually set sound levels or re-encode all songs with the same levels is great. I have a set of really quiet songs. They were quiet by design, but to hear them around the workplace I'd have to turn the volume up. It does that for me, and fairly well. I like that.

Familiar radio channels
The streaming radio channels have many I'm used to from WinAmp. This is wonderful. It doesn't have nearly the selection, but then nothing does, really.

Supports play, pause, forward, next on my laptop and keyboard OOB

This is one thing WinAmp did not work with. It just works with iTunes. Perfect.

Overall:

It's not a bad player. However, what I can't figure out is why so many people think it's the best music player ever. It's good, no doubt. But there are so many more that are smaller, easier, faster, less buggy, more "featureful", and have baked for longer than the term iPod has been known to anyone.

Bottom Line:

Will I keep using it? I'm not sure yet. I'm going to use it a while longer, but WinAmp still supports more features and more file formats as well as video. I may keep it around if only to access the office music server as well as to have the app everyone else has. Besides, I need to keep it around a little while for some work stuff.