Minimal

I tuned out

You know, after all the hype about iTunes, I was kinda hoping it would make a worthy successor to Winamp. When it appeared for the PC, I took a chance and downloaded it. Now, I’m rather disappointed.

Let’s get the petty annoyances out of the way first. For one, it’s yet another skinned multimedia application. Spare me, for Christ’s sake. Next, it uses what I assume is Apple’s window-sizing methods. In other words, you can resize only from the bottom right of the window. Also, the maximise/minimise/restore functionality is truly messed up. Inexcusable, really, as the interface is ideally suited to being... well... normal. Sigh.

Window management issues aside (and it’s no worse than Media Player), let’s get back to the meat. Upon starting iTunes proper, I imported the My Music folder on my machine, but was disappointed with the presentation of my files once done. Gone were the useful folder hierarchies, although they were still there on the drive. Instead, I now had a massive long list of MP3 files with columns for Artist, Album, Track number, and so on. Unfortunately, this information was taken solely from the files’ ID3 tags rather than, say, folder names. Where my files weren’t tagged, I got no information, resulting in half of my MP3s being untitled tracks, bundled together as the same untitled artist.

That wouldn’t be such a big deal were it not for a key track-filtering mechanism relying on this information. The Browser pane seems like a pretty neat feature, but it sucks ass when every artist has no name. To compound this, there was no fallback — no way within the software to request a folder to be queued. That instantly put a major cramp on iTunes’ usability, for me at least.

Actually, even if I’d been tagged to hell and back, the Browser pane might still have frustrated. While the Genre/Artist/Album filters are a cute way of finding stuff, the Genre column was almost entirely useless. There’s so much bad categorisation around in the various online tag databases (from which tags are taken) that genre is rarely a usable filter. Also, as soon as you close the Browser pane, all filtering is lost. “Can’t I just set up the filter then hide the unnecessary UI again?” I wondered. No, apparently not. It just snaps shut and your filter is lost. Call me a minimalist, UI pedant, but that kind of thing really bugs me.

Finally, as a kick in the teeth for rejecting iTunes, on returning to Winamp, I find that my previously tag-free MP3s have now been tagged... with blankness. So, instead of at least seeing the filename in Winamp’s playlists, I see a not-very-useful hyphen. Swear? You bet I did.

There was a time when I’d considered buying a Mac, as its software gets rave reviews for usability. Now, however, I’m rather disillusioned. The day I make the switch has, at best, been put back.