Doesn't this accidentally back up the 'third party frameworks lack quality' argument? iTunes for Windows is generally considered to be a lousy piece of software. Same with Safari for Windows, another piece released under the same approach.
I consider iTunes for Mac to be a lousy piece of software, too. I've found it to be a memory hog with inadequate features on both platforms. I think that most people don't complain about it on Mac because it meets their needs and they don't know any better, as most lay Windows users don't complain against Internet Explorer.
iTunes for Mac is totally adequate. One thing you're missing here is that iTunes is the only way you're able to use an iPod, and so - if we're arguing about general market behaviour - iTunes doesn't appear to be a problem for the millions of iPod users out there.
That said, I agree with OP's point about iTunes's performance in Windows. It is - quite frankly - terrible. So much so that when I switched over to OSX, I opened iTunes and marveled at how quickly it could actually do things.
iTunes for Mac is only adequate for music (a.k.a. yesterday's use case), and plenty of other players work very well for music too. In comparison, most people still don't have hard disks big enough to fit their entire movie collections, which is today's new use case for iTunes, and the only current way to push movies onto new-gen Apple devices.
I have an iPhone and enjoy it, but I've only played a movie on it once or twice in the time I've owned it for this reason. This is true of most people I know with iPhones, and it will similarly be true for iPads. It's a glaring problem that Apple's doesn't seem interested in solving; they'd rather you re-purchase every DVD as a movie from their store, and then be locked in to their platform or else lose your content.
> plenty of other players work very well for music too.
Well they work well for playback, but I've yet to find a comparable alternative to iTune's music library/organization features. You may have a point about movies and such - I tend to play them in VLC, and organize them according to folder in my external HDD.
Amusingly enough a lot of the 'default' linux music players have similar or better library/organisation features (I would prefer to use rhythmbox if it has a mac version).
One problem is what are your criteria for "better"?
As a for instance, I want a music player that handles flac and ogg files and that I can access in a terminal. Low memory usage is important to me also. I use cmus on a Mac, and I like it quite a lot.
Apple's refusal to support FLAC, in favour of their own crappy rip-off (which they refuse to licence to 3rd parties) was, for me personally, the moment they jumped the shark. I feel later developments have borne this out.
I mean you can buy music from Metallica and The Beatles in FLAC format. If Metallica and The Beatles are out ahead of you on some aspect of digital music, it's time for a rethink.
If you only need something to play music/video files, I would suggest VLC Player; I haven't found anything better. However, if you're big into organizing your music (different playlists for different moods, etc.), you might find VLC to be lacking a bit.
One of the reasons I enjoy iTunes is that I'm not big into organizing my music and playlists-- iTunes does it for me. Will VLC move my music into an organized directory and let me play an album, or shuffle through all songs from an artist or genre without me having to create playlists?
Check out Ecoute. A gorgeous UI "designed to be minimal, small and pretty so it doesn't take a lot of space on your screen. Just what you need to play your library."
Perhaps may I suggest using QuickSilver or google quick search box with iTunes? QuickSilver lets you add global keyboard shortcuts and oodles of quick access to iTunes without ever going to iTunes.
This is probably the thing I use Quicksilver for most - controlling iTunes without having to look at iTunes, ever. It's so convenient that I've held off replacing Quicksilver for one of its actively developed successors.
I feel as if Songbird has reached that stage. I guess it's personal preference thing, but I am really impressed with the recent Songbird releases (even though they have been infrequent).
I've noticed people complain about a lot of problems with iTunes on Windows that I just never see. In particular, people with much smaller libraries complaining about search and scroll performance problems. It strikes me that iTunes-on-Windows biggest problem is that it's frail.
FWIW: I've got iTunes running now; it's been up for about four hours, playing music and I did a sync of my iphone and ipad. It's bouncing between 45 and 55MB of memory [1].
Agreed, but any Apple software for a PC is horrendous. iTunes/Safari/Quicktime are all colossal memory hogs but worse of all they have so many hidden programs running behind the scenes that they continuously hog memory. I've seen malware infections less intrusive than a single iTunes instance.
The macs I use daily are admittedly old, G4s, but it's the same problem. When something like winamp runs so very well on old PCs you have to wonder if playing music really needs all that overhead.
All the iTunes developers spend way more time fixing bugs on Windows than on OS X. It's not that it's a lousy piece of software, it's just that, yes, generally speaking having developers writing code for a platform they don't "speak" is bad news.
