Apple's iTunes 4.1.0.52 for Windows was released today. I downloaded it a few hours ago, and so here are my first impressions on the product. Screenshots included.
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it always take about 70% of the CPU (P4).
Other than that: it's great. Rendez-vous thingy works like promised. Now if Apple would hurry up and let us in the Music Store! 
Hmmm... I've got an Athlon XP 2500+ and I would describe it as snappy. I'd even say its faster than on my iBook (800mhz G3)
how to hide the system tray entry for iTunes?
No problems with speed, Rendezvous sharing works great, authorized as one of my three machines and all my iTunes Store music works just fine.
Pretty cool!
That is very weird. It is using no more than 30% of my CPU, during any operations. (except ripping, of course) It is actually quite speedy on my machine. P4 1.8Ghz with 512MB RAM, not a "super" fast machine....
>how to hide the system tray entry for iTunes?
It is on the last tab of the preferences.
>No problems with speed,
Heh, even on your 2.4 P4 is not acceptable to get so much CPU off your system.
So far people have said that windows and any other apps become slow when iTunes is running. I am just wondering if they just ported over the code from the Mac, thus does it show the processing power of the PPC, or is it the special gui and trinkets that are making it slow? Looking for Opinions and maybe Facts. Sorry if this starts a flame war, but It is bound to come up.
Personally I think that this totally rocks but apple forgot one important item (atleast in my book).
I have multiple sound cards (I produce audio tracks and also DJ with Traktor) and generally have my primary audio card set on my headphones audio card. Winamp allows me to select my secondary audio card as its output device but iTunes does not..
Bummer. It's back to Winamp for me as well until they fix this. However, on my 2.4GHZ P4 iTunes runs pretty fast and didn't notice the UI refresh issues that the author speaks of.
Peace.
Back to square one on finding something negative to say.
So far, so good.
Of course and "so much" about the speed issue. It is a block for using it for me! What you want me to write there? A press release? I am a reviwer, not PR.
I dowloaded and install iTunes for windows on my Titanium Powerbook 687 using Virtual PC both for Windows XP and 2000. While XP was typically sluggish, 2000 was quite good. Window resizing was slow but I don't spend a lot of time resizing my window, once I have have it at the size I want I tend to leave it there. So that's not much of an issue for me. Iwas able to establish my account without any trouble and tryout the various features and it was impressively speed for emulation I thought.
People seems to be getting troubles playing Nero encoded AAC files, with iT (or QT 6.3 or QT 6.4) creating losts of hiss and artifacts while other players do not seem to have a problem with them. (Anyone tried)
how to hide the system tray entry for iTunes?
Forget that, how do I show the system tray icon and hide the taskbar entry?
It's mediocre but not painful on this PIII 866/512MB of RAM, but there are definitely some artifacts. I'd also like a more comprehensive options dialog and skinning support, but it seems to work well and hopefully authorized songs/downloads will play using the Quicktime layer.
I am not sure what the problem is with this author's system, but my Toshiba Celeron system runs iTunes GREAT! It is responsive and I don't see any degradation in other apps when open.
So far I like the looks of it. It tops out at around 90% CPU playing back a existing file and also ripping tracks from a CD at around 9x-10x on my 1.5 Pentium-M Laptop. If it played Windows Media files and streams it would become a real contender to become my default media player.
i installed iTunes on Virtual PC windows 2000 as well (on a powerbook Ti G4 1ghz, it works perfectly apart from the window resizing. so im guessing the app should work really good on a normal PC.
congrats Apple once again 
I agree with Eugenia. resizing the window requires a great deal of patience.
1. Het the window handle
2. Drag out slowly.
3. Wait 1 second for some kind of visual feedback.
Pretty bad.
Still it is a great app. Redrawing aside.
I downloaded it for my Athlon XP 2400+ running at ~1500MHz (underclocked) with a GeForce FX and 256MB ram.
I think this might be an issue with iTunes not playing well with certain drivers.
On my machine it is downright snappy, and I have absolutely no problems with speed, resizing windows, scrolling moving windows etc... all are as fast as other Windows-apps.
Any idea how i can ogg-vorbis music files?
Is there a plug-in or so anywhere?
i actually prefer Windows Media Player 9 over iTunes.. it uses 0-2% cpu resources on my XP2000+, while iTunes eats cpu cycles compared. Both apps can do almost the same. Im not after filesharing afterall (i have other apps for that). I'm not interested in using the AAC format. And WMP9 has the same categorization functions as iTunes. Oh, and its also rock solid, and i like the Taskbar Toolbar when minimized. Now loads of Winamp zealots will probably say that its much better, but for organizing approx. 12,000 MP3 files on the HDD - it simply is not. And Winamp3 is even slower and far less feature-rich than WMP9, and more buggy.
the CPU usage as dropped dramatically. It's between 0% and 6%.
I love the MP3 Tag ability. Much better than WiMP9 which I still haven't found the place to enter the year.
whoever said it uses too much cpu is wrong, its uses a mere 10% on my getting-old P3 900MHz running Win2k, the unresponsive UI is not CPU cycles (yes, it does eat up a lot more with the Visualization on, but Apple didn't make those graphics OpenGL or DirectX, so software rendering is crappy
Apple must be taking a page out of Microsoft's game book.
"This software requires Windows 2000 or XP"
Forced operating system upgrades for no good reason. Way to go Apple.
Hell, this is actually worse than Microsoft. Even most of Microsoft's latest software still runs on Windows 98 and ME, including the latest versions of Office.
Yes, it is the way to go. I am glad they decided to skip 9X, NT4 and ME. UPGRADE PEOPLE. You waste money on everything else so why is this a problem?
It's hard to find out why the speed slughish problems without some specs...
In my machine it runs ok with some impaired probs with minimize/maximize... (Athlon XP 1.8, w2k sp2, dx8, 512 ram, nvidea 3, 64mb ram).
I downloaded it just after the end of the keynote, and have been playing with it ever since. No absurd unresponsiveness of the UI here (AMD Duron 1.3 GHZ with 256 MB RAM and a GeForce 2 MX 440 on Win XP). Burned an audio CD just fine (a thing I was never able to do before, my iMac does not have a burner), and it recognized the shared playlist from my Mac. CPU use is about 5 ~ 10% when playing, be it MP3 or AAC.
The only problem I found was some popping and crackling on the audio while I was ripping a CD (AAC, 128 Kbps). Stop the ripping, no noise. Also, the audio stuttered when I tried to play a song from the same CD that is being ripped, something I can do on my 233 MHZ Rev. B iMac with OS X 10.2.8
So tell me. Do you actually program for Windows? If so, please explain to me why Apple could not make this software compatible with Win 98 and ME? I manage to make my software backwards compatible with Windows 98 with no problems.
In a nutshell, it is still far to early to obsolete Win 98 and ME. Millions of people are still running Win 98 and ME (in fact, more people are still running Windows 98 than people who use Macs).
"UPGRADE PEOPLE. You waste money on everything else so why is this a problem?"
It's a problem because there IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRATE for many people. Anyone who upgrades simply for the sake of having the latest operating system is just stupid.
Forget that, how do I show the system tray icon and hide the taskbar entry?
Yeah, sorry, taskbar is what I meant.
Unfortunately I haven't even been able to try iTunes for Windows yet because I don't have a Windows system of my own at work.
I'd be interested to know how iTunes runs when you take away some of the bloat from Windows itself. XP is nice, but it runs a lot smoother on Celerons when you disable its eye candy. Switch from Luna to a Windows Classic theme, disable shadows under the menus, and turn off the fade effect. If you don't think you'll notice the difference you might also switch from 32-bit color to 16-bit color. You might find that iTunes runs more acceptably when given a little more RAM.
Regarding OS requirements in the windows campyard... W2k and XP are indeed Operating Systems... (the previous ones are just application launchers).
(j/k)
I will have to agree with this. Win95/98/ME still has 38% of the global OS market. That's a HUGE market.
However, I am afraid that Apple did that move to only work on 2k/XP because the bad multitasking of Win9x codebase would create support problems to iTunes. If it is already as slow on my XP PRO, I don't even wanna think how it would work on 9x.
too many security holes in 98 that MS didnt bother to patch, it might actually be a safety thing rather than a move to piss people off
"However, I am afraid that Apple did that move to only work on 2k/XP because the bad multitasking of Win9x codebase would create support problems to iTunes."
In otherwords, Apple's programmers don't know how to properly program a multi-threaded Windows application. After all, every other mp3 software under the sun runs fine on Windows 98. Why not Apple?
I really don't understand why anybody that actually USES a computer to do anything other than just email and webbrowesing would still be using win98? upgrade damnit!
i mean really, you can get a fairly decent new computer with over a Ghz of CPU power and over 128/256 MB of ram for several hundred dollars with XP preinstalled.
on the OS side the upgrade is well worth it, win98/ME SUCKS!
win2k and XP are sooooooo much more stable that that 9x crap
on top of that you can run win2000 on a minimum of a p133 (i used to run it on a ibm thinkpad that was a p266 and it worked surpisingly well)...but the cost of the OS is almost the same as a newer low end computer so you might as well go that route.
i mean come on, win98 is so...well 1998...it's 2003 (almost 2004)
Oh yeah... And if Apple can make iTunes run on OS 9, which has worse multitasking than even Windows 3.1 did, I think they should be able to make it run on Windows 98. Windows 98's multi-tasking wasn't the greatest. But it was a hell of a lot better than Mac OS 9.
It's a bit slow here too... And I'm running it on an Athlon XP overclocked to 1.92 Ghz.
So there are some issues in that area... But hopefully they'll be resolved? I'm sure Apple will work on it... This is just the first release for Windows after all.
As for CPU usage, I haven't noticed any problems in that area?? While playing local MP3s and listening to streaming audio it doesn't seem to spike above 15%.
I'm happy to see iTunes on Windows. I can't wait until they speed it up a bit! For now I'll give it a go, it does have a lot of neat features.
"i mean really, you can get a fairly decent new computer with over a Ghz of CPU power and over 128/256 MB of ram for several hundred dollars with XP preinstalled."
I can also buy an airline ticket to Europe for a few hundred dollars. And when I get back, I can turn on my computer running Windows 98, do my college papers, run my statistical calculations, check my email, do research on the Web, just as efficiently as the guy running XP.
> As for CPU usage, I haven't noticed any problems in that area?? While playing local MP3s and listening to streaming audio it doesn't seem to spike above 15%.
As I clearly said before, there is no problem with the playback. It is the *UI* that it's sluggish as hell.
please, take that tiger off your desktop for you own good!
No, it is a great picture (technically and artistically speaking), shot by my husband, whom I adore.
....with much apprehension. I gingerly resized the main window a couple of times and drag the app around the screen a bit expecting everything to grid to a halt.
Ohhhhhh....Pretty.
Ok Eugenia, that machine of yours has a problem. This thing runs fine.
> Ok Eugenia, that machine of yours has a problem. This thing runs fine.
I am sorry, but this is not an acceptable explanation. Every zealot will just give this exact explanation everytime I spot problems. There is nothing wrong with my machine, the problem is with iTunes' UI: it's slow on a SMP machines. Better testing and optimization should have being done by Apple.
this is a great piece of software. I love it! works perfectly on my 700 mhtz pIII running win2k. congrats, apple. I think you have a winner.
Oh yeah... And if Apple can make iTunes run on OS 9, which has worse multitasking than even Windows 3.1 did, I think they should be able to make it run on Windows 98. Windows 98's multi-tasking wasn't the greatest. But it was a hell of a lot better than Mac OS 9.
thing is, the first version of itunes did run on OS9, thats 2 or 3 years ago, and it didnt suck (no, there was no music store back then, and no ipod, but CD burning and CD ripping was there)
Don't forget that it does more than play MP3s.
My guess would be that it was a lot easier to support Win2K/2000 in the areas of CD burning, syncing with the iPod via Firewire, and possibly Rendevous support?
I have a Windows 2000, SP4 machine on a 2 ghz P4 processor, 256 megs of RAM. It's a Compaq Evo.
I launch iTunes, choose a song, minimize the program, and check Task Manager. Task Manager is showing 0-2% CPU usage. Redraw is nice and snappy. When I restore the window, usage goes up briefly to @ 30%, then drops to 10% and a couple of seconds later, settles at 2% again. When I resize a window, CPU goes up to 33%, but it settles very quickly after the resize is done.
iTunes for Windows works fine for me; probably there is some sort of driver issue regarding iTunes' speed, but it seems that I have been lucky.
Funny, iTunes is crashing consistenly when I try to add a folder to my library. I guess they still have to work out some things.
I also noticed that the maximize button will actually minimize the window. Arg, MacOS weirdness on Windows!! I hate not to have my windows in maximized mode.
It seems snappy overall though and much better than the Windows Media player. The ID3 tag editor is really good although I think that Cantus is still the most powerful.
I have to say I have installed it on two of my computers and it actually runs as good, if not better, on my Dual P3 400 256 MB machine than on my Athlon 1Ghz 512 MB machine
on both the total cpu usage during just play never goes above 15%, but of course opening menus and resizing sends it to about 90%
What I like so far:
radio works great
sharing libraries between the two computes
looks nice
>I launch iTunes, choose a song, minimize the program, and check Task Manager.
For God's sake people! Do you actually READ in the article where the crazy CPU consumptions happens? Is in the scrolling/resizing of the app, NOT on the playback or when it is minimized or on mini-mode! It is the UI.
"thing is, the first version of itunes did run on OS9, thats 2 or 3 years ago, and it didnt suck (no, there was no music store back then, and no ipod, but CD burning and CD ripping was there)"
That's my point. It ran (and I think still does run) on OS9. OS9 has horrible multitasking. But iTunes still ran fine on it. So I don't think bad multitasking is an excuse for it not to run on Windows 98.
...I noticed tha..if I switch user and leave iTunes open`, other users will be unable to use iTunes until it is shut down within the original users space.
This is not the case with WMP!
I also miss all the info I get from WMP Bio,related music, reviews....
as far as CPU usage on a 2.4 both WMP and iTunes use about the same amount.Resizing is a visibly more slugish in iTunes.
Any mp3-player I've tried (xmms,juk..) haven't used more than like 2% cpu.
I just installed iTunes on my P3 1Ghz with 512MB of RAM, I find it good , you can encode mp3 up to 320kbps. The speed is not the best but better than RealOnePlayer that I use, and worse than Windows Media Player. Overall I think it's a good application appart from "We could not complete your music store request because of low memory.There is an error in the music store". Are Akamai servers overloaded with that?
What is Apple using anyway? Some kind of custom toolkit that they created for Windows applications to make them look as close as possibly like Mac applications? Clearly they aren't using MFC, or any other standard Windows toolkit.
I think this product is one of the steps from apple to optimize main applications currently included in MacOS X for Intel PC's.
May be someday they'll port this pretty cool OS to x86, and it'll be a WindowS KiLLeR!
iTunex works good on my DUAL P3 Xeon 1.2Ghz.
I really don't think it's fair to judge the quality of code coming out of Apple simply by their lack of Windows 98 support. Porting a complex Carbon application like iTunes to Windows must have posed a monumental challenge, one many others have horribly failed at (e.g. ProTools). There are many aspects of the code for which Apple could have decided to use 2k/XP specific features for, everything from the GUI code to Rendezvous support.
As a Win32 programmer myself, I can certainly attest to the desire to use some platform specific features. Every version of Windows prior to Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 lacks a facility for concurrent, reentrant hostname resolution. This is addressed by getaddrinfo(), which is WinXP/2k3 specific.
Apple has created a codebase which they're now supporting on three different platforms (and wasn't written from the ground up to be portable). If using 2k/XP specific features kept the codebase cleaner, I'm all for it.
I'm not having issues with SMP performance here. It never uses more than 40% of one of the processors and I'm continuously dragging the resize tool. I have the Windows classic theme on, but I didn't notice any other performance issue with the standard XP theme.
On the "using too much processor" issue, I'm not seeing any problem either. This thing works pretty much as well as it does on my Cube.
It is possible that the display drivers on the systems are f'd up and that is causing a software versus hardware rendering of the entire window.
top output:
%CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1.0 1.1 0:29.53 artsd
0.7 2.7 1:03.74 X
0.3 3.0 0:04.45 juk
0.3 2.7 0:04.29 kdeinit
0.3 3.6 0:06.08 k3b
0.3 0.8 0:00.79 cdrecord
I have a Compaq laptop with a crappy S3 Twister graphic card and I have the same problem. Moving iTunes' window is quite OK (for this computer) but scrolling is very slow and resizing the window is just so slow that I almost have to resize it in several times!
Otherwise it is quite good to be able to test iTunes while I am waiting for my PowerBook to ship ;-)
Too bad the Apple store is not available in France. Every time I click on the 'Home' icon I get a message saying: "The iTunes Music Store is not available in your country yet. You will be able to browse music and listen to previews, but you won't be able to purchase music unless your billing address is in the United States".
Oh yeah... And if Apple can make iTunes run on OS 9, which has worse multitasking than even Windows 3.1 did, I think they should be able to make it run on Windows 98. Windows 98's multi-tasking wasn't the greatest. But it was a hell of a lot better than Mac OS 9.
But iTunes 4 will not run on OS 9. The main feature of iTunes 4 is the iTunes Music Store (iTMS). This isn't just another MP3 player, it has a lot more going on behind the scenes to support the music store transactions. I wouldn't want secure transactions going on with a OS that MS doesn't devote their full attention to (Win98).
No, it is not possible. All other apps work fine. It is only iTunes that have the problem, MOSTLY when trying to resize when in Music Store mode.
Yeah it would be cool if Apple would release their cross platform Cocoa/Carbon development environment again a la Rhapsody. I doubt it. We'll have to go with GNUStep to get good Cocoa-like development.
Erp!
Sorry 'bout that. I did read the article, just I got the impression from reading it that iTunes was just constantly slow and CPU-hungry. Re-reading the review after your comment, I see where the CPU usage complaints are centered on the UI, but I still leave the review with the impression that everything about the program is CPU-hungry, even through the article never states that.
I think the spotty attention to detail in the reading of articles may be a side-effect of how a lot of people here read the articles-OSNews in one tab, their companies' intranet on another, *look for boss* *switch to OSNews article* *oh no! BOSS!* *tab back to intranet application*
*whistles*
My graphics card is a Matrox G400 Max 32 MB AGP running on 1600x1200x32bit at 85 Hz. It works like a charm and I use qualified drivers. Matrox is _known_ to have very good 2D drivers and quality, and this is why I put that card inside my celeron setup and got rid of the Voodoo5 64 MB AGP I used to have there, when I bought this 21" SONY E540 monitor.
The UI speed problem is with Apple's iTunes, not with my machine.
Why isn't it possible Eugenia? If they wrote their own GUI widgets and are trying to do a direct rendering on the OpenGL hardware, and your drivers don't have a particular feature enabled, then it would revert to software rendering and thus sucky performance. It is a bug either way, but why wouldn't that be the issue?
By the way, iTunes constantly resizing window takes up 45% of one processor. Excel constantly resizing does the same thing. Since there seems to be a correllation between low end graphics cards and resizing performance, it very well could be the type of issue I just highlighted. Apple should not be using an OpenGL function that isn't more uniformly implemented, if that proves to be the case.
Matrox writes good drivers, not perfect drivers. Likewise, Matrox is better about not putting half-baked features into their drivers, which might mean your current driver set doesn't have a particular feature until it is properly stress tested, whereas my GeForce does. I'm sure the cause of the issue will come out eventually on the various discussion boards.
The fact that people running machines on par with your dual processor unit with different video cards, I would imagine, leads me to believe it isn't directly a hardware issue.
It was a good decision to limit themselves to only XP and 2000. 98 was very buggy and would have been a lot more work to get it running well. Not to mention that Napster, Apple's largest competition, will only be XP and 2000.
They aren't loosing much, except a headache 
> Why isn't it possible Eugenia? If they wrote their own GUI widgets and are trying to do a direct rendering on the OpenGL hardware
You are assuming stuff here. For all we know, biggest possibility here is that iTunes for windows might not be using OpenGL (except the visualization of course)
--That's my point. It ran (and I think still does run) on OS9. OS9 has
--horrible multitasking. But iTunes still ran fine on it. So I don't think
--bad multitasking is an excuse for it not to run on Windows 98.
iTunes 2 works on OS 9, though it is no longer available as a download from Apple. iTunes 3, 3.0.1, 4, 4.1 are all Mac OS X only releases.
Multitasking is a red herring, it surely has nothing to do with the simple case of playing an audio file while performing other tasks, that has been solved on many platforms for many years.
Win 98 device connectivity was still plug & pray. Win 2k is barely better than that. iTunes is more than a simple music player, it has a built in web browser, it has to be able to work seamlessly with various types of peripherals, etc.
Okay i know this is totally off topic but does anyone have any idea if and when apple is planning to upgrade the G4 power mac towers?
No problems here. P3, less than a gig.
Haven't tried burning yet.
Nice s/w.
guys lay off eugenia. shes just tellin us her experiences from her point of view.
the window resizin should take up more cpu power due to the fine appearance of iTunes:) nice brushed metal and aqua bars
anyways. iTunes resizin is slow on macs when in the iTunes store.
i think Apple did a great job with the app... sure there might be room for improvement ... but i think its off to a very good start
first...
<I am sorry, but this is not an acceptable explanation. Every zealot will just give this exact explanation everytime I spot problems. There is nothing wrong with my machine, the problem is with iTunes' UI: it's slow on a SMP machines. Better testing and optimization should have being done by Apple.
says the person with a funky setup. read other people's posts. it is entirely possible that something is funked up on your cpu. don't get all defensive. it could be the case.
--------
for those who are curious about lack of support on 95/98/ME...
is it possible that the DRM stuff is not possible on these machines? that would be my guess. that and i'm sure there is a certain degree of hardware support that apple wanted that was just not available with those systems. in short, pre-windows 2k systems haven't been supported for some time and would probably require extra effort to make the key features work. its a bummer, but not that big of a deal.
-------
i have an idea. why don't we let people use it for a week and then post a review? spectacular! you mean give it a chance? yes! great! i'm slightly dissapointed that we have a review not 4 hours after the announcement. give me a break.
Ok I accept that this is a something that hadn?t occurred to me. A number of programs have had problems with SMP machines and cause problems. But I wasn?t making a big technical observation. I?d just finished installing the app and just wanted to note that the problem (apparently) wasn?t universal.
Having said that and has been pointed out to you numerous times, your reaction was disproportionate and over the top. What kind of a zealot am I? I don?t own a Mac! I?ve NEVER owed a Mac. Hell, I?ve only just recently started messing with Linux!
Some humour is all that is required. Come down.
I am running it on a 750mhz AMD Duron Compaq Presario with 768 mb of RAM and I have no problems with speed. I like it and once the Linux guys get it to run under Wine or Crossover Office I will like it even more. Even on my Athlon XP machine under VMWare it runs pretty good.
Downloaded it.
Performance if fine on my machine. (Win2k, 1 mgz P3)
Sharing all my music with my OSX box. Very nice! Won't use it for anything else.
I'm using an AMD K6-2 450 with 256 of RAM, and I can't get it to work with Wine.
I think Hank might have hit on your problem.
I think that iTunes is using OpenGL for its UI. Although I haven't messed with iTunes, I can tell you that Matrox's OpenGL drivers suck. I have the same video card you do, and other Windows applications that use OpenGL exhibit very sluggish performance on my system.
So ultimately, I think it is a problem with the Matrox OpenGL drivers.
This is trolling, right?
The PowerMac line has moved to G5 chips in case you've been under a rock. The G4 PowerMac tower desktop is effectively end of lifed.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
ummm - couldn't this slowness problem be related to the Music Store just getting HAMMERED in a geographical region? I'm experiencing something similar.
I REALLY think things will smooth out after a couple days. It was like this to a smaller degree when the Music Store was released for Mac ... only on a much smaller scale. Can you imagine millions of Windows users trying to access now? Gotta be bandwith, not Window redraw issues.
My brothers Dual PIII 933 with 768MB ram and Radeon 7500. Resizing and scrolling is fine on it. While cataloging 1.5GB worth of music, CPU is between 4% and 11%. Jumps to 46% while resizing. But it is always smooth.
Good luck trying to find the problem. If I can help let me know.
I've got it running on a P3/700Mhz/512MB RAM and it's running pretty well. It could be just a little snappier, but scrolling is fine.
Haven't tried visualizations yet.
I *AM* having trouble importing a folder with a lot of MP3s on it. The other drive, with 4,000 MP3s loaded fine.
For me, the problem only occurred when "accessing the music store". I think it is bandwidth issues.
Did I read correctly in one comment that this does not include support for their music store? If not, what exactly is the point? Can iTunes play audio files better than Wimamp, rip CDS better than EAC, or burn CDs better than Nero?
More importantly, do we/will we really need this 19MB pig just to access the the music store ?
Its Hovers between 47-70% CPU utilisation (averages about 52%) on my system just playing an MP3!!!
Erhem???..its nice and all???but its back to WinAmp for me!
PS. Athlon 1.8 512 MB RAM
Just installing iTunes for Windows on my P4/3.2. Resizing is pretty slow but not unacceptable. In the store it is damn slow, resizing that is. CPU is about 50% during those activities.
However, I can't play anything because it crashes during import of a folder. Maybe it is related to the fact that it is a network folder? Anyway, it looks nice but we will see...
Did I read correctly in one comment that this does not include support for their music store?
No, it includes support, and you'll always need it to access the music store since otherwise you wouldn't be able to play the files.
iTunes takes up about 1-2% of my CPU when playing music, but around 90% when ripping. Of course, it rips faster than RealOne or Windows Media Player on my notebook and it doesn't make a mad grab for CPU time if other apps need it. Maybe the people are playing the songs with visualizations. iTunes takes up about 75% of processing time with visualizations. Of course, Windows Media Player takes up 60% of processing time with visualizations.
iTunes is heavier on the CPU ripping, but not playing.
Realistically, I moved from J River's Media Center using Ogg Vorbis so my CPU use is WAY DOWN. I love Ogg as a format - it's free and it sounds good, but it uses a lot of processing power.
- by default, "make itunes default audio player" / "make quicktime default video player" is checked. Apps that try to hijack my file associations get a big NO YUO!!!11 from me.
- the installer just spit out about 20 error messages about missing files, while trying to install QcrashTime 6.4 (why?!?!?), and the installer is now hung after I "Igore"'d the errors. Lovely
And judging by the comments here, it looks like it is flawed in one of the same ways as QuickTime Win32 - it seems to act much more like a port than a native, proper windows program. It doesn't use the system codecs for playback, and its look-n-feel is inconsistent - both with the rest of the system and within iTunes itself.
it's gonna settle down. I had the same thing happen to my P4.
Darius, it supports the itunes music store that macs have had access to for a while.
1) Of course it has support for the iTunes Store. That is the whole point.
2) It's 20MBs. It's big. It's really nice though. It does a lot.
3) On my P3 700 512MB RAM usage hovers between 6-12% with pops up to 20-24% on occasion.
4) I'm trying to add directories one at a time, which works. I predict a patch release in the next week to fix this "crashing during import" problem.
Bizarrely, It seems to use the same amount of CPU utilisation even when it?s doing nothing at all!
I pushed the window to the background by opening other apps in front of it, then I closed all other apps and minimized iTunes. No change to the high CPU utilisation. It stayed at the same level as when it was playing MP3s.
Hold it! It seems to be doing something.... it is going through all the songs and determining song volume, what ever that means. Hume....all very strange.
I don't mean this personally. You just hunt for something very negative to say. You seem incapable of just giving a basically good review to an apple product. There's always some huge flaw in YOUR mind. It doesn't matter because what you say will be drowned out.
You insist the problem is iTunes, not your machine. Then why are people with machines no faster than yours saying "I have no problem." Give it up.
Oh, and the yesterday's OSX review was not favorable?? Even this review IS favorable, but it DOES have that UI speed flaw on my PC.
No, the problem is not with my PC. I expect such an application to work correctly, cause I have NO OTHER problems wiht ANY other application.
As IExplorer doesn't seem required to run iTunes on MS Windows, I guess that Apple ported WebCore/KHTML ...
Any ideas about that?
Yes, WebCore is very portable, a guy had a preliminary port already for windows a few months ago. Apple has "freed" the code from Qt toolkit.
Eugenia, I have a Compaq at 500MHz running XP Pro with I only 128MB (it grinds a lot.) Performance wise, iTunes snaps right up and is pretty fast accessing the store. I have no problem expanding it almost to the full size of the LCD (1024x..) though it has no maximize button, instead the maximize turns into a Mac "Zoom" type button.
I believe this is due to the "textured" window. I believe Apple must be using DirectX to handle the windowing and not the typical Win32 primitives. I'm just guessing, but it is running surprisingly well on my setup at 500MHz and limited RAM. If you want me to send you some specs and screenshots I'd be happy to do it. Everyone I chatted with is having an excellent experience and the Rendezvous sharing between PC's and Mac's is pretty cool!
Well if she has Dual 500MHZ celeron and thinks that every new application is going to run perfect on it.. she is dead wrong and needs to come to terms with it. Don't give us any of this "Joe User still runs 500mhz pentium3's." Joe User probably doesn't even know what iTunes is and isn't going to bother trying it out because Joe User can use Kazaa.
It probably came down to this: support Win 95 and up, and release in January (or sometime much later than now); or support only Win2k/XP and release it now. With so many other people jumping in to the market, Apple needed a release now. Maybe they'll release an update later on that supports Win9x, but I doubt it.
IF that is true, i?Tunes using DX and my card can't do what iTunes asks, then my friend, Apple SHOULD HAVE written more comprehensive REQUIREMENTS. Not just that "500 Mhz Pentium class CPU", but also list the graphics cards required to run the application!
>Well if she has Dual 500MHZ celeron
It is dual 533 Mhz. Dual.
The speed issue was a factor for her, and she should report it. She reported plenty of positive stuff as well. I think she should be highlighting issues with the software because that is news. "iTunes works as well as is expected." That statement sums up the good news. Why should she spend fourteen pages talking about every expectation that is met up. "However I noticed the following issues..." That statement requires some backing up. That's exactly what she did. That's exactly what she should have done.
To be honest, I'm not going to use it except for the Music Store. I spend most of my time listening to Sirius Satellite Radio's music streams nowadays. It is far better than any other streaming service, but you have to reset the channel ever 20 minutes if you aren't a service subscriber (which I would wholeheartedly recommend anyway).
Well, since everyone is putting up points:
IBM T23 Laptop (1.13G P3M, 256M, SuperSavage/IXC)
400 mp3 in Library
Playing Mp3, no vis: 3-6%
Shaking resize: 100%
System Idle: 0%
itunes idle: 0-2%
Full Screen Vis: 90%
Resize and scrolling: reasonable. There's a little delay, but nothing that kill the app.
I'm using iTunes on Mac from version 3 on OS9 and 4.1 on OS X and today I did installed Win version on my PC.
Speed of rendering was normal, like any other app with empty Library. When I updated Library with 1159 mp3 files the speed become noticeably slower when rendering and resizing window.
CPU usage when moving or resizing window is close or 50%, CPU usage when playing MP3 file is 1-3%, same goes for playing directly from CD player. When encoding MP3 file CPU usage tops at 90%.
This is on P4 2.8c with 512 RAM and nVidia GeForce 3ti.
I believe there will be speed issues with big Library or with iTunes store on slower machines.
Installed fine on my Toshiba PIII-650 laptop (384mb ram, crappy 8mb S3 video). Runs no prob. Uses 6-7% CPU time while playing mp3s. CPU usage spikes to as much as 100% while resizing the windows, but music keeps playing without missing a beat. Haven't tried burning or the iTunes store yet.
Imported my music no prob. I'm not letting it manage my music, however, as there have been horror stories on the mac side about it getting confused and tossing it's database, misfiling songs into one folder (HUGE issues when duplicate song names by different artists are mixed onto one folder!), so I'll keep my manual organization methods for now. But it did import all 2000+ songs (in 43 folders) without incident, during the initial install. guess I'll have to wait to get more songs before I can see how it does adding more. Nice to share my collection with my iMac and PowerBook. Will be nicer at home, where the bigger collection resides on my main PC, I suspect.
All in all, so far, a great first effort. Never thought I'd see Apple developing products for the Windows platform, but they've done well their first time out. Suspect it will get even better with time. Dunno if I'll ever let go of WinAmp, but am happy to have the option when I want it, now. :-)
Finally, lay off Eugenia. Good article, reporting what she sees. Issues may her her vid card, may not be, but her job to report what happens regardless.
I am using an old PIII 667 with Intel810 graphics. iTunes was dead slow at scrolling/resizing. Also, in the Music Store the bottom half of the window would often not repaint properly. I figured this might be a graphics driver issue, so I installed the latest drivers from Intel. Guess what, it's working great now. Resizing is still not that fast, but is definitely usuable.
iTunes sharing between my G3 iMac and my Windows box (both directions) works fantastically well. Very impressed.
Why would they need more specific REQUIREMENTS if your machine DOES NOT FILL them in the first place?
the multicasting from OS9 worser as W98 ??
did u try OS9 ? I can't believe it ! it's much better !
And yes, I understand why Apple didn't support itunes for win9x. It would need to much support, and there would be to much security problems. Microsoft also doesn't support win9x anymore. And apple didn't programm iTune only for 1 year ... Wait one year, and everythere there will only be XP .
....is now very good. It finished doing whatever it was that it was doing.
It seems that CPU Utilisation has now settled down very nicely. No more than 6% as I type this, with a MP3 playing and a couple of things open in the background.
Resizing and general UI feel is not Ultra fast and I can see how this app would feel somewhat sluggish on a 500 MHz class machine. As it is, it is absolutely fine on my machine....however it doesn't feel as crisp as "normal" windows apps. Of course it is NOT a normal windows app. It has fancy metal textures, funky every thing and animation for everything else. It?s the compromise Eugenia pointed out in her Panther review. If you have funky UI, it costs you something in responsiveness.
Stop being a jerk please. Celeron IS a Pentium-class processor (that Apple asks), it is an i686, it just doesn't have as much cache as the PII/PIII. And I even have more CPU power than the minimum required.
1) iTunes is not a Windows app. It certainly wouldn't get logo certification. No right click. Menus don't work properly. Inconsistent mouse-over help. I'm sure I could find more.
2) Slow screen refresh when sizing main window or scrolling playlist/library. This is pathetic. iTunes is the slowest painting app on my system. What did they do to cripple it? Why? Did we need "Aqua" on Windows? No.
3) No MAXIMIZE button. This is retarded Apple-design at work. In fact, I couldn't even manually get the window to be maximum size. It would stop expanding a few pixels short of the screen edge.
4) Okay, this is even worse. Right Click = Left Click in some areas. However... right click does work on the left "source" items. How inconsistent can Apple's vaunted UI corps be?
5) For music playback, CPU usage runs about 5% to 8% on a 1Ghz P3. Not bad, but not as good as Winamp.
6) iTunes cannot tell if there is a CD in my drive or not. So it shows "Eject Disc" even when there is no disc in the drive. At the least, the labeling for this item should be fixed.
7) "Import Folder" does not function.
8) Drag and drop of a directory full of MP3 files (2593 files) puts iTunes into a locked-up state. Maybe it's working on something, but there is no way to tell. No progess meter, nothing.
9) Overall, Winamp is far superior to iTunes. It certainly doesn't have a store... but it doesn't have unknown and undocumented DRM features either.
Altogther, it looks like iTunes was rushed out the door. And it certainly was written by Mac-heads, not Windows programmers. A stepping stone on the way to the future, but nothing special.
Just installed itunes for windows on my compaq athlon 2200 running windows XP with 640 MB ram, attached to my tv (use it as my multimedia hub; ie recording TV). Download was a snap, install a breeze (didn't even ask for email info or anything). Asked to restart after install- done. Opening it up for the first time runs through the same info as itunes for OS X, offers to look for songs and offers to take straight to itunes music store (I declined both offers). Connected to my libraries on both my airport ibook and my G4 without any problems, started playing songs without any trouble! gotta love rendezvous. Visuals work great (I have a radeon all in wonder 7500- great card, wish they made them for the mac). Havent noticed any problems with window resizing but will keep an eye out. Recognized my burner (havent tried
burning a cd yet but will let you know what happens). Going through the menues and the preferences it seems to be functionally 100% identical to the mac counterpart, and visually it's nearly the same (though there is the quite unattractive menu bar across the top). Havent tried plugging my buddies windows ipod up. It is definitely a huge step up from musicmatch, and with the rendezvous music sharing means I dont have to keep any music on the windows PC (more room for recording video). I would have to say that for a first release it works well.
So I guess I'm the only one who's unable to install it 
The installer fails during the QuickTime 6.4 installation step (yup, I've tried with my default QT installation removed as well). (Error 1722 - something with SuppressRegistrationDialogs)
Not trying to turn this into a support forum, but hey, I'm a bit envious...
I'm glad iTunes was finally ported to windows, but I have a folder with all my albums ripped and ID3'd with CD-EX. Having iTunes installed for only a few ours, it destroyed my system, creating new folders for some tracks on the album and renaming mp3s so my current m3u files no longer work even after i got all the mp3s in the correct folders. I believe this is a result of the "Keep Library organized" "feature" of the program. I more or less like the program, but it has set me back about an hour to re-organize my folders
I have not exactly been happy with the way iTunes has been working. From the install I noticed it reguired Quick Time. I have had my system running with out it for months and I don't like the fact I need it back to run iTunes. It also tried to automatically associate files (I did catch the options however and stopped that). Then it added two MSCONFIG entries (iTunes Music Helper and QTTask). It would be nice if I was told what these are and why I can't throw them out. Next it added a iPod Helper Service. This is unbelievably annoying as I don't even have an iPod (I have a Nomad Jukebox 3). The speed of iTunes is far too slow for me. I understand my 600 Mhz. Pentium III with 256 MB Ram running XP Home is no speed demon. However, every other music ap (like Winamp, XMMS in Linux, and even Windows Media Player) has run much faster. The program has been very slow when resizing the window like the review said. The interface isn't really any nicer then any other programs I have used. I don't exactly see anything compelling in the software other then maybe the Music Store. I also don't like the fact so little technical information is given, like what 3rd party applications can play AAC files. The program has also already crashed on me once. This to me feels like a rushed beta release. I doubt it, but if Apple is purposly crippling the software to make me want a Mac, that plan doesn't work.
Here is the answer to some of the CPU hogging issues:
http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?14@13.xArhalejiZP.0@.599ac9b...
Sorry, it is not that. My SoundCheck is unchecked by default.
I just put it on my athlon XP 1700 with 512MB and it is running very slow as far as resizing goes. I also notced that it seems to be taking up about 70% of the CPU at first but I looked at it's display and it showed that it analyzing the volume levels on all of my music, once it finished that the CPU usage droped to normal (5% - 10%) level. Overall I would say it's nice but defintaly could use some optimizations.
Does everyone here realize that this is version 1.0 of iTunes for windows? Hell its probably closer to .1 as fast as they shoved it out the door. They need it done and something that worked. It works doesn't it? They'll fix the speed/cpu issues now that it works. expect updates. apple does that you know. update their software. and updates actually FIX AND IMPROVES it, instead just adding more features. think about it.
Who else thinks a Celery doesn't qualify as a Pentium?
I've got my hand up!
Who else thinks this message is going to get modded down because Eugenia realizes this also?
I've got my other hand up!
ok, I just upgraded my Matrox drivers to the latest ones (before I used MS' qualified drivers, now I use Matrox's). SAME THING: Resizing the music store window is _imposible_.
>Who else thinks a Celery doesn't qualify as a Pentium?
Give it up buddy. Celerons are Pentium-class processors, they are i686s with less cache. Get a clue.
With the release of iTunes for Windows, I was finally able to check out their selection. Of course, they won't let me buy it because I live in Canada, but at least now I can check what they got.
Blind Guardian - nothing
In Flames - nothing
Nightwish - one song from some obscure multi-artist disk
Dark Tranquillity - nothing
Dimmu Borgir - nothing
Emperor - nothing
Apocalyptica - only the earliest album, nothing else
Children of Bodom - nothing
Norther - nothing
Symphony X - nothing
Green Carnation - nothing
Death - nothing
Therion - nothing
Hmmm, 1 album and one song from all those bands? Wow, that's a great selection. My local A&B Sound got more.
Computer: Sony VAIO PCV-RX850 (2.4 GHz P4, 768MB RAM)
iTunes Library: 3,782 songs
iTunes idle: 0%
iTunes playing: 4%
iTunes w/Large Visual affects: 64%
Window Resizing (w/o effects): 69%
Window Resizing (w/ effects): 91%
Window resizing is slightly less responsive than other installed applications. Noticeable, but not to the extent that it's bothersome.
Note: Other than those applications which came with the computer from OEM, I only have three applications on this computer; two stock/options trading applications and now iTunes. Not scientifc by any means, but not disppointed at all with this software package.
Apple has introduced a malware app for the PC. Apple changed my files and folders without my permission. Without even telling me.
Time for a nice letter to Apple Legal.
And time to delete this crap from my system.
Apple's braindead monoculture is just not appropriate for the PC environment.
For some reason, right click just started working, though.
No KMFDM. No Metallica. No Cradle of Filth.
Apple Music doesn't contain metal (black or death) music. It contains mostly commercial stuff.
As for not supporting anything before 2000, Apple does not have iTunes for anything under OS 9. The more OSes they support the more that can be problematic. Plus it could mean more bloat to the program. If you havent paid for an upgrade since 98 perhaps you wont be buying music? That is the reason apple extended iTunes to the window product base ... to sell music and iPods.
You're one of those great big idiots, aren't you?
Did you Notice that box about Organizing your Music Library? And the one about being the default player for media types? You didn't, you clicked right through them, and now you aren't whining about Apple, you are whining about your own idiocy.
Apple has introduced a malware app for the PC. Apple changed my files and folders without my permission. Without even telling me.
Time for a nice letter to Apple Legal.
And time to delete this crap from my system.
Apple's braindead monoculture is just not appropriate for the PC environment.
For some reason, right click just started working, though.
Funny. It didn't change anything on "My Music" folder. WMP9 used to do that (ie Broke my AC/DC folder in half, AC and DC!!!)
What did it do to change your folders? I am curious.
P3-700 Compaq Laptop!
This is the most clean Windows app I have ever seen. WinAmp is an jarring nightmare! and MusicMatch is so confusing...but the Album info that MusicMatch gives is much more detailed with reviews etc.
I love the WINiTunes!!!!
Am
Testing my new drivers a bit more, speed seems to be about 4-5% better than my previous drivers. Still, trying to resize my iTunes Music Store is unusable though. Works "acceptably" only when the window is smaller than 600x400 or so.
"Give it up buddy. Celerons are Pentium-class processors, they are i686s with less cache. Get a clue."
Celerons are Pentium not allowed to use the Pentium name you mean.
And you don't think cache would be a factor in media playback?
Microsoft has dropped support for 95/98/Me with Office 2003. I think when a manufacturer whose entire business relies on backward compatibility discontinues support for a product, it is truely antiquated. C'mon people.
Sure it will have! But when Apple says "Pentium-Class" CPU of 500 Mhz and above, that INCLUDES Celerons!
Like I said, Matrox cards have sucky OpenGL support.
Case in point: I can play games that use DirectX and get 50 frames per second.
If I play a game that uses OpenGL, and minimum system requirements of P133, I get literally less than 1 frame per second.
"I think when a manufacturer whose entire business relies on backward compatibility discontinues support for a product, it is truely antiquated."
Not at all. Because their business doesn't rely on backward compatibility. Their business relies on forcing people to uprade their OS as often as possible.
"Steve Jobs gave the keynote speech at the launch of Apple's iTunes for Windows. He referred to the new program as "the best Windows app ever written."
Whhooo there pilgrim! Its not a bad app?..so far??but come down!
I seem to be having to say that far too often
I don't know why, but on my 1.1 ghz athlon with 512 mb ram it is unusable. It takes at least 30 seconds for the gui to respond to anything. I have to kill it with the task manager to quit. Most lame.
don't get me wrong. i love OS X and iTunes running on that, but this one for windows is the worst piece of software apple ever produced. it's a resourcehog like nothing else. even Photoshop 7 requires LESS memory than this windows version of iTunes. also it is totally unstable. in the last two hours of playing around with it, it crashed like 7 time on me.
this iTunes version for windows is worse than the first alpha of winamp3 and at least the winamp3 alpha was clearly marked as an alpha, so one could expect such problems. but this windows version of itunes is even WORSE. i am pretty confident the marketings monkeys at apple are going to blame windows for this ...
It sucked on OSX and by the looks of things, it ain't any better on Windows. The music selection doesn't sound so hot either.
Hey,
I think I abandoned a duel 600MHZ Tyan motherboard to the garage a few years ago, would you like me to ship it to you so that you can do your reviews on a little more modern hardware?
I will have to send it COD though.
"This is trolling, right? "
No i want to buy one for a project i'm working on for which i will need logic audio (no longer available for windows). i like apple. Mine was a serious question. I want to know when they are upgrading the G4 power macs. I assume they won't dicontinue the mini-towers in favor of G5's towers only.
See if that helps. I've seen Windows software run FASTER after disabling a processor in a 2-processor machine.
Yep, this is pure speculation, but my guess is that Apple will make iChatAV for Windows next. It already has a partnership with AOL and uses the AIM base. It definitely is the next killer app - just ask those who have used it. In fact, I think Apple could make a boatload of money porting all of it's iApps to Windows. Naturally, the applications won't run as smoothly for everybody, but I think a lot of people would agree that there simply are no Windows applications that match the simplicity and integration of the iApps suite.
Slow UI? Must be a buggy videocard driver or something. The window is somewhat slow resizing, but I can move the window around on my desktop like it's on speed :p Seriously, ultra fast here.
Athlon XP 2100+
my guess is that Apple will make iChatAV for Windows
This would be great -- it would be especially neat if they could use WIA cameras as well as the iSight, but I don't know if that will happen.
the iTunes music store (as steve Jobs said) contains only quality music which is why there are only some selected songs. they could have been much more (as he said)
as for general comments : its logical to get the (worst) comments from a guy with a nick WINDOWS USER.
its also logical that some guys will have problems.
but many ppl get good results with iTunes and its processor usage.
from my experience with iTunes on mac, its a fantastic app, and much better than winamp. eventually it will be the same on the PC for those of u who really want to benefit from it.. im sure ull find urselves using it quite often in the future. but really. id suggest u save up money and buy a Mac then ur lifes will become so much easier
Well, since Metallica sold out, it should be in iTunes, right?
For ogg. Its the only good free lossy audio codec out there. And it also helps to make sure that wma does not become the "standard" for playing multimedia on computers, which I am sure Apple is weary of, even if right now Microsoft may make a codec for Apple. it should be rather trivial to add it. Heck, they could just pay the guys at Xiph to do it. Its BSD licensed, so they can keep their code too. I think, and maybe I am wrong, but the people likely to actualyl know and use Itunes are probably those who would use something like itunes anyway. i.e., will use something other than windows Media player.
I am using about 2-3% of resources on my machine here, a 1.2GHz Duron 512MB of RAM. Memory usage is less than Winamp 2. That is impressive. Same complaints about the slow interface though.
I've been waiting for iTunes for Windows for a long time, and it has not disappointed me yet. I've got a 2GH P4 w/ 512 MB RAM. Window resizing is a bit sluggish, but scrolling is fine and playback takes only 1% of my CPU.
For those with CPU problems, take note: there's the SoundCheck thing that can run in the background and eat CPU cycles when you've recently imported. There's also the "Sound Enahcer" feature that can expend extra CPU cycles when playing. The equalizer probably uses some as well.
Far and away the best feature for me, which WinAMP and WMP do not even TOUCH, is iTunes's Browse mode. I wish they made it more obvious. But when your selection is on the Library, click the little rainbow eye button at the right end of the toolbar. This lets you do really fast queries of your entire library, in like no time. It is very powerful, and a great UI. That and the ID3 tag editor. Marvelous.
iTunes will have bugs on Windows. that is because PCs dont come with standard configuration.
what do i mean ? mac computers are built by apple. they support some specific graphics cards. they have specific setups. as a result the iTunes for mac can be better optimized.
but in the world of PCs where u have so many diff setups of computers, its very logical to have problems, and bugs;)
and this doesnt happen only with iTunes, windows and PCs and their programs are full of flaws and bugs all the time !!!
as i said before, the ppl who really wanna benefit from this program and try to learn it, they eventually will..
but trolls or bashers will only try to find problems and cum in here and ruin it for the rest !!! its logical. i dont blame them . they just need to get a life !!!
Well, since Metallica sold out, it should be in iTunes, right?
hehehe I don't forsee them on the new Napster too!
the pc users which will really benefit from iTunes are the ones with iPods.
i will say it again, i dont know how good the app is on windows, but from my Mac experience, iTunes makes it SOOOO easy to use my iPod. importing files, updating them automatically, playlists, browsing, encoding mp3s... this app does so many things all together and it does them really well..
it just makes ur life much easier, just like all the iApps, this is why i have a MAC. THIS is why i dont have a Linux box (i dont think i have to mention anythin about WINsucks)
"Altogther, it looks like iTunes was rushed out the door. And it certainly was written by Mac-heads, not Windows programmers."
The fact that Apple had a job posting on Monster.com a while back looking for Windows logo certified programmers tends to shoot your theory all to bits! The job posting even mentioned iTunes for Windows in particular.
This is amazing, I am truly happy for Apple but more importantly I am happy for Windows user. Windows users are now able to enjoy what we Mac user have enjoyed since April. My iTunes seems to run much faster for me on the Windows side than on my Mac; if Apple keeps writing efficient software like this for the Windows platform they might make it hard for them selves to sale their own hardware. On second though if they write a wintel version of Mac OS X, we will soon be saying “Micro who?” or “Windows what?” My hat is off to Apple for a job well done and to new Windows users welcome to The Music Store.
I downloaded iTune to my notebook, a P4 1.6G with 512M RAM, running XP Pro. My PC should be at lower end by today's standard. iTune runs perfectly. It normally takes 10% CPU and it's snappy and responsive. I didn't see any problems Eugenia described. While I'm typing this post, I'm listening to MostlyClassic.com's 128K radio stream through iTune, again, no buffer interrupt.
For a version 1 application (on Windows), I don't expect iTune to be problem-free. But from my own experience, I'm sure those complaints on Eugenia's list are because of the testing hardware's problem.
Well, iTunes seems to be working pretty nice on my system (Duron 900 mobile, 512MB RAM, ATI Mobility M1). CPU use is constantly below 25% (ranges mostly from 5% to 20%).
I guess sometimes it is a matter of luck and the system configuration. Eugenia's problems with Mozilla and now iTunes tells me she is not that lucky sometimes (no offense intended)
I just have a question though. Is there any way to change the fonts? I am not a fan of Tahoma, and I would like to see Lucida Sans (system font) in something else than the menus if possible.
It keeps crashing on both my laptop and my PC whenever I try to import any folders with MP3's. Anyone have the same problem? I'm pretty bummed about this since I wanted to get away from Wmp to another full featured MP3 player, let along for the cool ITunes Store.
I sent a note to Apple support, but of course it's not like they are going to respond to me.
A few possibilities. Some people seem to be trying to do this across high traffic network or are doing it with folders that contain thousands and thousands of tracks within folders. If you have sub folders, try selecting smaller groupings of these folders to import music. And turn off sound check before doing so.
It is dual 533 Mhz. Dual.
Saying 'dual' twice and making the word bold in your review does nothing but lamely try to drive home the point that you think 2 533MHz processors are in some way going to help you in this situation.
Is iTunes multithreaded? It probably is. But, 2 processors are NOT going to help you with UI responsiveness. They might allow you to rip a CD and still have full responiveness from the rest of the program, much like Premiere can compress a video and still allow you to edit if you are on a dual processor machine.
Your dual dual 533s are not the same as 1 1066, obviously. Taken singly, since iTunes isn't splitting itself between both CPUs evenly, your processor is only 6.6% faster than Apple's recommendation. Processor recommendations usually reflect the bare minimum needed to even run the program. It's no wonder that you're feeling is that the application is slow, as you are barely above the necessary horsepower to even get the app to run at any level of useability.
It appears that iTunes is using a custom widget/theme set---forgoing Window's MFC/GDI/GDI+ calls. Given that assumption the app probably isn't making use of any accelerated Windows drawing ability of video cards. Therefore it is entirely dependant on the CPU to assist it with refreshing itself. A processor that is barely above the lowest spec is going to have a hard time keeping up. Unless Apple coded iTunes for Windows to offload all UI drawing systems to a second processor in a dual CPU setup (which I highly doubt they did) then your second processor is, more than likely, just sitting idle while iTunes is running.
Eugenia, post some snapshots of from the Performance tab in your Task Manager. Show us the CPU utilization of Processors 0 and 1 while iTunes is loaded and you are dragging/resizing the UI. I just did it on my single CPU box and the CPU utilization *does* go up. I'm interested to see if it is spread evenly across both processors on a dual system, though. My guess is that it isn't, and your second processor doesn't matter one whit towards the performance of the app.
Apple users are used to this slightly slower UI speeds because it is the same in OSX with all windows resizing ect.
I eagerly downloaded iTunes to my workplace 1GHz PIII machine. The sound stutters whether I'm playing directly from a CD or from an AAC file.
I can play CDs and MP3 on the machine with multiple other programs. As a Mac user, I'll wait for Apple to work out the bugs. If I were just a curious Windows user, I would toss it.
guys. whenever u buy a game it says :recomended and required hardware.
but in reality, the required processors will barely run the game, and with the recomended processors the game will simply play ok at normal details. so pls, dont waste so much time on what apple said about requirements. the app plays at 500mhz right ? it runs, it encodes, it resizes, etc... right ? if its not blazingly fast. than tough luck
iTunes on the Mac & PC has a feature that calculates the sound level of each file added into the library so that would require a certain amount of CPU cycles. (It can be turned off under Preferences->Effects->Sound Check).
Also other features can be turned off to decrease CPU usage (esp. Sound Enhancer under Preferences->Effects).
Finally under Preferences->Advanced there is an option NOT to copy files to your iTunes Music Folder when adding them to the library.
(Note: I haven't used the PC version so I don't know if it works the same or has the same options, I thought I would just provide some pointers to decreasing CPU usage I know work on my Mac).
You folks need to get a grip.
Apple did not set out to write you a nice, free music player. Stop imagining that this is their purpose. iTunes for Windows:
- is something that Apple had to provide to sell music to Windows users.
- frees Apple from MusicMatch software when selling iPods to Windows users.
- is a demonstration of the sort of enjoyment you will find on MacOS X
It is not a Windows app. Apple has zero incentive to help the Windows platform by writing cool apps for it. In fact, the more Mac apps they port to Windows, the less likely anybody will buy a Mac. What Apple wants is for Windows users to buy iPods and music and ultimately, Macs. If you're not the type of person who would buy an iPod, or music, or a Mac, don't download iTunes and quit whining.
Now, nobody appears to actually know why iTunes doesn't run on anything except Windows 2000 and XP, but consider the intersection between people content with Win98/ME and the people who will spend $300 to $500 on an iPod.
Apple is not your personal free software developer. If what you want out of iTunes doesn't match what Apple wants, remember that you're not exactly paying for it. From some of the more clueless responses, I hope this post will save you 20 MB of downloading.
Considering the strange lack of Metal section, are they actually meaning to say that Metal as a genre doesn't contain quality music (as opposed to any other genre that's listed in iTunes?). Doesn't seem too nice to me.
Come on... tsizkeik said it poorly, but Jobs' point was that the store isn't going to have... say... three or four different recompilations of an artist just to bump up the music offering numbers. That was his true point anyway.
As far as your complaints about the offerings being small, try to find what you want somewhere else and then try to explore whether the offering is good or not. There are still alot of artists who refuse to offer their music. I believe Metallica is still one of them... at least as of July, 2003:
http://www.macminute.com/2003/07/02/itunes
What you might come to find is that Apple has a lot of really good stuff no one else has, all of the stuff most everyone has, and quite a few things you wouldn't expect.
For all the complaints about performance and compatibility and the quality of the iTunes for Windows: What do you expect from the Wintel platform? You have practically an infinite number of combinations of video cards, motherboards, processors, CD drives, network cards, sound cards and even the bloody operating system! Do you actually expect ANY software developer to be able to write an app, especially in the first release, to be able to properly support every possible configuration that might be out there? It has to be Apple's fault if it happens to run slowly on your computer! If you hav a problem with Apple choosing not to support Windows 9x, why don't you pay for an upgrade because you sure didn't have to pay to download iTunes. Technology moves on and whether you like it or not, every company has to drop support for older versions at some point in time.
And for the doofus who actually wants to complain to Apple Legal because iTunes has supposedly wronged him so much - good luck. One, did you read the EULA before installing? Probably not. Two, did you backup your computer before installing like a wise user would do? Probably not? Three, do you own all those songs in that collection which iTunes messed up on you? Probably not. Might want to delete those before your big day in court.
Oh yeah...sure, Steve Job's may have exaggerated on the "best Windows app", but what about Bill Gates "we invented personal computing". Job's is no more full of crap than anyone else...
"Hold it! It seems to be doing something.... it is going through all the songs and determining song volume, what ever that means. Hume....all very strange." - TennesseeStiff
I think you activated "Sound Check" feature (Preferences > Effects, if it is organized the same as iTunes OS X). Enabled, it adjusts the volume of the songs during playback so that their "loudness" is constant. For songs with low volume, it will increase it by a few dB and vice versa. You can see how much the volume is adjusted for each song by getting the Summary Info of the song (select a song, File>Get Info>Summary tab).
If this is the case, it happens only once. Once analyzed and entered in database, it only does it again when you import new CDs and won't take as long (you may not even notice).
...as someone noted above, there's a LOT of different PC configurations. And everyone thinks theirs is perfectly standard. In some sense they're right--but if you're a PC user, you know full well how many times the same program, particularly anything remotely entertainment-related, works wildly differently on two machines that are both "compatible" with it. Three friends of mine with almost identical PCs -- all with 2+ GHz P4 CPUs -- tried to install TRON 2.0 recently. One of them had no problems at all, one of them had persistent graphics problems, one of them couldn't get it to install at all. This isn't a sign that TRON's developers didn't know what they were doing; it's a sign that they didn't test it in all possible configurations. Maybe they didn't test them in enough... but there will always be wacky things.
A Celeron *is* a Pentium, as Eugenia noted. Her machine is also pretty near the bottom of the barrel for recommended machines, though, and as a former BeOS fan, she probably should know that machines like that are the ones least likely to get attention from the developers. It sucks, but it's life in the PC world.
And Windows 2000/XP are a different codebase than Windows 98/ME: the latter is the Win32 codebase, not the NT/2000 codebase. There are APIs in 2000 that don't exist in Win32. If you only have Win32, sucks to be you, but it's not because Apple hates you. iTunes is not the first program for Win2K+ only, and I can guarantee it sure won't be the last.
No one seems to care that this is one player that actually devotes most of its user space to displaying relevant information about the task at hand, which is playing music files. WMP 8 and 9 are more annoying in that respect. You open WMP and it takes you to the media guide, which FYI, has never had anything relevant to me. Go to your playlist and you immedately have a huge visualization covering most of the space the player is using. I figured out Itunes in minutes. I have already gone through almost all its functions and I haven't used it for more than a day. A few hours actually. Happily playing my music now. I must add that I had used a few Itunes clones, rhythmbox and jamboree on Linux, so the interface was not exactly brand new, but Itunes is just way better than those too. No interface overload. Smart playlists are awesome. And resource usage is around 2% CPu and 5MB RAM right now. I haven't seem it use more than 15 MB.
Perfomance of iTunes doesn't suck because of "different platforms". All different hardware components are abstracted by Windows. iTunes doesn't access devices directly with via its own drivers. Instead, it uses Windows (or OS X) abstractions for various devices.
The thing that makes iTunes slow is dragging an OS X-based graphics library and OS X-based HTML rendering engine to Windows. This is one of the most negligent porting jobs I saw - instread of using interface of target platform, Apple simply hauled all its stuff along. The result looks about as stupid as a classic Windows theme app on OS, and is really slow because Apple reinvents the wheel instead of using built-in Windows facilities. Just how hard is it to redesign the GUI by using Windows-specific or system agnostic tools instead of OS X GUI that was never meant to be ripped out of its base platform? iTunes interface is small and therefore isn't that hard to redo.
Summary: if your application GUI works slower then Swing and Mozilla, blame your crappy coding skills.
-> The thing that makes iTunes slow is dragging an OS X-based graphics library and OS X-based HTML rendering engine to Windows - Kobold
Umm, iTunes does not use HTML ANYWHERE. It uses a custom XML based solution. One only needs to inspect the results of an HTTP request to the iTunes servers to realise this.
But I agree with you on the first part. However, for a first release Apple did an excellent job, considering it is also FREE software.
there was an app like this called musci box that was gonna be a linux thing, but as many OSS projects go, this one forked early on and there was so much confusion and bad code most people quit playing with it and development has ALMOST ground to a halt. now if apple would release a version for the rest of us heck i might not mind getting a subscription to their store thing.
I had the exact same thing. UI response was slow on a Pentium III 667 256 meg ram. Nothing else was slow. Window resizing is slow. Scolling is slow but similar to that experienced by owners of i-books.
Therefore it has nothing to do with dual processors as has been suggested.
I think it is because this is their oen widget set. Which makes me wonder if they are going to port other apps to Windows. Like the iApps, and charge for them and also charge for services like the storage.
Wow, iTunes for Windows? Could this be...? Yes it is true.
Very nice (read: awesome!) application!
The only thing I'd like to see on my x86 now is Exposé, seems like neat stuff!
well i just tried in my VERY low end notebook K-6 500 Mhz running windows XP pro! on 128 RAM ! (haha) and it works fast enough for daily use. I dont see the user interface speed issue. I also installed it in my faster 1.2ghz celeron and it works very well.
It's awful to see that ugly performance on the Windows side of things... Hope they got it right by the next release.
Here, on the Macintosh side the only thing I've noticed after upgrading is that QuickTime 6.4 is fast as a daredevil. Previously it dropped frames whenever I was playing more than one movie at the same time, now they play just as well as solo. They also revised the interface: it's just like the player shown in all the Panther screen shots.
All this on a PowerBook G4 1GHz. Now I'm really waiting for Panther.
I stand corrected (it looked just like a webpage, so I just assumed that it uses HTML. Yes, I shouldn't have done that). Scrolling in Music Store or playlist is really way too jerky on Duron 800/256 RAM (the fun thing is that horizontal scrolling in playlist and vertical scrolling in iTMS are the worst, and vertical in playlist and horizontal in iTMS are closer to normal - can anyone confirm this?), and resizing perfomance just sucks. Maybe someone in Apple has to learn programming.
Well there's a sourceforge project that has come up with a quicktime plugin for ogg audio codec (for Mac OS X and 9). Maybe someone can port that to QT Windows?
http://qtcomponents.sourceforge.net/
Just to point out I did try importing small folders and it worked. Problem is I have like 250 folders not to mention probably a thousand songs not categorized by artist->album->folder. It would take hours for me to add these files one folder at a time. Then there is the upkeep of having to constantly add new folders once I rip them. Keeping the media libray up to date in Itunes seems like a total nightmare. I'm not going to start dumping my files into special small folders just to accomdate ITunes inability to deal with several files either.
Like I said I think Itunes and the store is cool, just too bad unlike WMP you just can't tell Itunes to monitor a top level folder and be done with it. Bummer
I am on an 867 MHz PowerBook G4 and running iTunes is next to unnoticable when it comes to CPU usage.
According to top(1), iTunes is using anywhere between 5% and 15% of my CPU (within a minute) with visualisations off, playing back an 128kbit AAC file (sorry, I don't use MP3s!).
With a 500 MHz iBook, I remember I'd used to get 25% to 35% CPU usage, and that slowed things down considerably!
I know that iTunes and QuickTime 6 uses the G4 AltiVec processing unit, so maybe the G4 is getting away with capabilities that the iBook never had... so that 5-15% CPU usage figure seems realistic to me.
As I write this, I'm playing music and the system responsiveness is extremely good regardless.
there is a littel menu option in Help called "provide feadback about iTunes"
click it and let your issues be known.
I must say, I have a laptop with s3 twister in it, and the UI resize and ITMS scrolling does suck.
I noticed the same thing with 'leveling' of sound as some of you. First few times I fired up iTunes, it was consuming around 70-80% of the CPU even when no tracks were playing.
I suppose the only people who didnt have this problem were those who had their 'My Music' folder empty, OR a bulk of the music files were located in other folders OR those who unchecked the 'search for music in My Music' option when you ran the setup. Once I let it run for about 10 mins (leveling the volume), the CPU usage dropped off, and now it takes no more than the original (2.x) WinAmp does ... which is impressive considering the pretty UI.
If any of you continue to have this CPU usage problem, I'd recommend stopping the playback & let it do its thing with the volume leveling, and trying again.
I'm a long time iTunes user, although I haven't installed it on my Dell yet. However, I am not surprised Windows people are having different experiences. Apple's iLife apps are, overall, really good. But, they are not perfect. If you read sites like MacInTouch and MacFixit, you'll see plenty of individual Mac users having problems. The same is true of the Apple Discussion Boards. Mostly minor problems but, come to think of it, iMovie 3 was a disastor until Apple came out with a big fix for it.
On Macs, I experience the problem that many do - iPhoto windows being sluggish (even lagging on fast Macs). It sounds pretty much like Eugenia's problem with iTunes. I don't think it's her hardware.
For Windows users, I would take the suggestions some have offered here. Try not to import really big libraries all at once. Play around with the prefs, like Sound Check and Sound Enhancer and the Visualizer and see what your best results are.
I agree with the poster that said iTunes for Windows is made for the iPod. Thet make beautiful music together (no pun intended;-). In fact, Apple released new software for the newer iPods today too with new enhancements. Also, big promotions with companies like Pepsi.
The iTunes Music Store started out with 200,000 tunes from the big five music companies. Since then they've signed up about 200 indie labels and have 400,000 tunes available. So, it is a big success, there is no doubt about that.
@ryan - it seems highly unlikely that Apple will come out with upgrades to G4 towers. However, you got me to thinking - I'm surprised how long they've been selling the 1.25 GHz older models. Either they're a success because of their pricing or they're just trying to get rid of them. I don't know. If a success, it would be interesting to have the 1.42 MHz models at such prices. But, the current 1.25 MHz models boot OS 9 and that may be why they're still there - there is still a need for that in some areas.
I suppose the only people who didnt have this problem were those who had their 'My Music' folder empty, OR a bulk of the music files were located in other folders OR those who unchecked the 'search for music in My Music' option when you ran the setup.
Nope. I selected the "My Music" folder during installation and it all went well. I have 13.9Gigs of 3320 files(a couple of WMA, rest MP3s) spread out on 245 folders.
Haha, Eurodance! I thought that stuff gets only played in Japan nowadays (DDR and stuff)
Eugenia, I don't get why you had so many problems sharing, I just clicked share my entire library in prefrences on my mac, and instantly on my laptop I saw my library called "Jeremy's Music" and it plays like it is on my computer. I can even make CDs with the songs remotely.
I don't understand the comments stating that iTunes for Windows is slow. It runs just fine on my machine...it is actually quite responsive.
P4 1.7 Ghz
256 MB RDRAM PC800
NVidia GeForce 2MX 64MB (have been playing visuals at "full screen)
I have to give Eugenia credit for her/his effort in reviewing stuff on OSNews, but reading through her/his reviews of Panther and now iTunes I really have to say that she/he is a really bad reviewer.
Review requires lot of research and taking care that you post confirmed facts not assumptions about product that you review. This so called review should have been called "first look" or "preview" instead.
are you windoze people always this petty??
there's a whole other world where you don't have to deal with this crap.
buy a Mac. smile more
Memory useage is obscene (more than Outlook at 40mb with no songs playing)
No Always On or System Tray Only options
And worse of all, sutomatically stops playing when PC is locked (hence you can't listen to music from a tamperproof PC running iTunes)
It imported my library fairly quickly (1002 songs), but crashed on a housemate's PC when he loaded up a network share (5809 songs).
Apple fail it.
Not a bad program. Only complaint I had is that I had to disable my Norton Firewall (version 2004) to use it. It was complaining that it didn't have enough memory (even though I use 256MB). Speed is not that bad and I run it on a Pentium III 850 with a Nvidia GeForce 4 card.
I was pleased that this application doesn't run on Win98 or WinME. Makes me glad I upgraded to Windows 2000 a long time ago. I wish more software authors would dump Win98.Even my own projects I'm coding strictly for Windows 2000 and XP and not Win98/ME.
>This so called review should have been called "first look" or "preview" instead.
Yeah, that's why it is called "First Impressions" and not a review. Get a clue.
Memory useage is obscene (more than Outlook at 40mb with no songs playing)
It's at 15megs playing Children of the Grave here (XP).
You people should better take care of your systems guys.
Sorry about that Eugenia.Heading skipped my attention.
All of my MP3s are on my Samba server and iTunes picked everything up superbly. I've been using WMP9 to put a "Folder.jpg" cover art jpeg into each album folder when I rip a CD. When I download an album from Emusic, I drag the cover art jpeg from the Emusic download manager into the album folder. The Andromeda php script runs on top of my Apache server and I can therefore preview covert art when browsing my collection.
Anyone know how to get iTunes to automatically recognize my cover art jpegs? They're all called "Folder.jpg," so that should make the job easier.
Maybe apple didn't bother to port to 98/ME because those they have reached their EOL (end of life) or are very close to it. This is the same reason iTunes 4.x won't work on OS 9. Why support and a unsupported OS?
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;%5BLN%5D;...
"Microsoft will offer paid-incident support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition (SE) through January 16, 2004. Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE downloads for existing security issues will continue to be available through regular assisted-support channels at no charge during this time. Customers can request Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE fixes for new security issues, and these requests will be reviewed. Fixes for any new security issues can be specifically requested through regular assisted-support channels. Web-based self-help support will be available for at least one year after assisted support ends. Mainstream support for Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE ended on June 30, 2002. No-charge incident support and extended hotfix support end on June 30, 2003."
lots of other people are having far less trouble.
you are not the barometer of success or failure.
Just in case any one else wants to hear an opinion of speed...
I have a 450MHz PIII with 288Mb RAM and an nVidia Vanta video card from around the year 2000, running XP Pro.
iTunes was snappy in changing groups, scrolling and playback etc. Very usable. Even when using a shared library from my Mac. The only thing that was sluggish but not at all unusable was the live window resizing. However on my 733MHz G4 with much later series hardware on board it was really no faster! Live window resizing IS demanding but when I moved my mouse quickly, so the system didn't have to redraw the window during the drag, I could resize very quickly. Even if I did do it slowly it was still quick to refresh, it just redrew less frequently i.e. in bigger hops.
There is undoubtedly a type of video card and/or processor combination which may help or hinder redrawing of this kind. Those with the right combo don't have problems.
One last thing... the screen effects are also slower, by a long way, than the G4 when configured the same way. There is a considerable difference however in video cards with the G4 sporting a Radeon 9000. In this scenario the video card will undoubtedly help.
Cheers
Todd
it uses it!!!
on a mac, it will keep as much stuff in memory as it can until some other app needs it. why have memory if you never use it?
this allows for a faster user experience, less swap (unless you have a lot of apps open, but that would be true of any machines that had a lot of apps open) and it even keeps programs that were just exeted, cached in ram incase you open it again soon.
now, it will free stuff up very quickly if the need for ram arises for another process, but having under utilised resources is just silly.
I don't know if iTunes for windows uses this theory, but I don't think windows uses the same philosophy as Apple, and Most Unix based OSs. I think windows is a save as much as you can and swap more if need be OS.
Installed it on my dell at work. Worked like a charm. Flawless and wonderful. Bought a song at the store. Imported a CD. Flawless. Wonderful app. Love it. No performance problem. Only problem will be if I move my music library from my home machine or import CD's at 192 mps AAC--will run out of disk space for my work .
- Celeron 533 was based on the .25 micron "Mendocino" P6 core with an integrated 128KB L2 cache - essentially the same as a PII (both based on Deschutes core)
- and of course it has NO SSE instructions unless you have a 3rd gen. Celeron with the Coppermine-128K core (533A Mhz at .18 micron)
However:
- Intel does NOT allow OEMS/resellers/integrators to call a Celeron a Pentium.
- It has an 66Mhz FSB (sans-overclocking) which is quite slow compared to current 866Mhz FSBs on P4P.
- The small cache and a SMP Celeron config will kill performance in certain applications.
------------------
From Intels Website at http://www.intel.com/support/processors/celeron/intro.htm
All of the Intel processors utilize the Intel P6 micro architecture's multi-transaction system bus. The Intel Celeron processors at 300A MHz and above incorporate an internal full speed L2 cache interface supporting the Dual Independent Bus architecture of the Pentium® II processor. Having two separate buses allows simultaneous access to both the L2 cache bus and the system bus.
The combination of the L2 cache bus and the processor-to-main-memory system bus increases peak overall bandwidth availability and performance over single-bus processors.
"Memory useage is obscene (more than Outlook at 40mb with no songs playing) "
Hmm...that is odd...I am playing songs and it is at 34 Mb....less than you claim. Granted it is not a huge difference, but it is different and I am apparently doing more.
Further, it is only 40 Mb of ram. Daily we use applications that require far more and most people don't think I thing of it (Photoshop or Word as examples). Further, if you are using a Win2K or XP system (as you should), it is very likely that 40 mb is a small amount of ram to your machine.
Also, iTunes is making use of graphical widgets that are not present in Windows so it does require extra memory to load the interface.
"No Always On or System Tray Only options"
So?
"And worse of all, sutomatically stops playing when PC is locked (hence you can't listen to music from a tamperproof PC running iTunes) "
How many people really lock there computer and then listen to music on it?
"It imported my library fairly quickly (1002 songs), but crashed on a housemate's PC when he loaded up a network share (5809 songs)."
Yes, it grabbed my library rapidly as well. I am a little surprised by the network glitch you ran into. I wonder how much of it was Windows vs. iTunes since I have had Windows drop the ball with network shares before (some have reported system crashes with idle shares).
I'll grant that your complaints may indicate minor annoyances, but keep in mind that it was just released today. Give them a chance to take in feedback.
I've kept playing with my Compaq Pentium at 500MHz with 128K RAM and XP PRO and it is working just fine. I am using the Aero GUI, shadows and cleartype front smoothing and Dragging while moving. Basically, everything that can slow down the UI is on. In addition, I checked the chipset the GPU and it is using Intel's old graphics processor that came with the chipset, yuk.
However, the performance is good. Resizing has a minor lag, but it doesn't get in the way. And, using the bottom right re-sizer, I can expand the window practically the full size of the LCD. I want to be fair, so I read most of the other users experiences here and on other sites and no one has reported the extent of the trouble you had. Most have initially reported high CPU usage but then they realized that iTunes was still going through the initial import.
You seem really defensive about your initial impression. I don't understand it other than that you are embarrassed to admit, it may be unique to your setup. I included my e-mail address so you could see that I am not trolling or anything. But, really my setup is the bare bones minimum and iTunes for Windows is just great. And, it is a lot cleaner UI than Window's Media Player. I've never used WinAmp so I can't comment on that, but it seems to be everyones favorite.
"I am using the Aero GUI."
Ummm...how is that possible?
Does anyone know if it is using MSIE, or apple-a-fied kHTML?
I have this slow UI issue too but I'm not reading all 200+ posts.
My system is a 2.4Ghz P4 with hyperthreading enabled.
1GB RAM
GF4 FX 5600 Ultra
Windows 2000 Pro SP4
DirectX 9
Last Windows update was about a month ago.
There is NO reason for this to lag on my system.
When I try to resize the screen, it takes quite some time for the screen to catch up with my pointer. Since they use a non-standard widget set, I thought at first I had missed the widget or didn't know how it worked.
The scrolling is bad too. Until I read posts from a few more users I was thinking what a nightmare this would be to run on a <1Ghz CPU.
Has anyone figured out why it is lagging?
Is it just Eugenia and I?
Mutiny
"Apple has introduced a malware app for the PC. Apple changed my files and folders without my permission. Without even telling me.
Time for a nice letter to Apple Legal. "
Oh please!
You are obviously too intellectually challenged to be attempting to use this product, even though it is designed so a 5 year old can install and use it without an owners manual.
If you would have bothered to read the prompts during the initial start-up you would have seen that you DID GIVE PERMISSION for iTUNES to do what it did.
Apple Legal?
Give me a break!
Arrogant, self important bozos like yourself should bag the whole idea of using anything from Apple. Their products are designed for people with a brain, not just a big mouth.
Yeah, while even suggesting legal action is rediculous, iTunes really screwed up my mp3 album folder. I'm probably gonna end up reripping the whole thing because it changed album names and rendered my m3u playlists usless. Its a good app and im glad they ported it, but so far it's caused me more annoyance and enjoyance.
It just goes to show who is reviewing/previewing products on web sites. Eugenia, Aero is code name for UI of upcoming Windows version codename Longhorn! What you probably ment to say is Luna
Heh
HHmmmm maybe it runs on the mac osx better because all their software and hardware meets certain industry standards..
I have a 2500, with 512MB and Ti4200 AGP8X. At 2048x1536 resizing is choppy and so is scrolling. At normal resolutions though, I dont see too many problems.
I installed iTunes for win 2000 and XP on my powerbook 687 running VPC 6. It is comparable for the most part to all the application I run including Office in emulation. It minimizes & maxes with relatively quick speed given this is emulation on a notebook with modest hardware specs. I would describe the performance as very usable. The statement " Summary: if your application GUI works slower then Swing and Mozilla, blame your crappy coding skills." is not credible. This software, will, without a doubt will run well on a 667 Celeron class machine with at least 128 RAM.
While it's true that the drag resizing can be slow on some systems the other aspects of the software are not. iTunes is a marvelous piece of software. Just enjoy yourself, that's what music is about.
Just before I get to the replies, does anyone know if Apple has finally fixed up Quicktime so that it doesn't constantly flicker when resizing it on Windows? I can't work it out, it is DirectX accelerated yet it acts as if I had 1000 applications running in the background. Have they fixed this "flicker feature" in Quicktime 6.4?
As for the performance issue, it would be interested how "optimised" iTunes is for Windows? is it borderline optimised or basically a "here is iTunes, we'll fix the ideosycracies later". I have a feeling that it the later. In a few releases Quicktime 6.4/iTunes and the codec will be properly optimised using every bell 'n whistle available at its disposal.
I'll see if I can test it on my old PIII 550Mhz and see what the netresult is.
As for the review, good work ELQ. It is good to see a review willing to should the horns 'n helo's/walts and all. Too many times I see reviews, both from the Mac and PC camps get all giddy like a school girl at an Aerosmith concert.
Oh, and I can't help myself:
"IN SOVIET RUSSIA APPLE iTUNES YOU!"
Anonymous (IP: ---.mn.client2.attbi.com) - Posted on 2003-10-16 20:40:55
"UPGRADE PEOPLE. You waste money on everything else so why is this a problem?"
It's a problem because there IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRATE for many people. Anyone who upgrades simply for the sake of having the latest operating system is just stupid.
How is this any different to those same people whinge and whine about "instability" and "security issues" then they refuse to upgrade? There is a path to a better "future", you can buy a copy of Windows XP and you'll find most of these problems will disappear.
Also, you fail to realise that Apple isn't the only decision maker at iTunes. They need to get the record labels onside. If the record labels decide that Windows 9x series is too much of a security risk in the respects of lax copyrights controls then they can easily tell Apple that will only allow them to sell to Windows users as so long as iTunes only runs on Windows 2000/XP, which has those copyright controls in place.
So in actual fact, for all we know, the people pulling the "compatibility" strings could be the recording labels not Apple.
Anonymous (IP: ---.mn.client2.attbi.com) - Posted on 2003-10-16 20:39:31
So tell me. Do you actually program for Windows? If so, please explain to me why Apple could not make this software compatible with Win 98 and ME? I manage to make my software backwards compatible with Windows 98 with no problems.[i]
Maybe they didn't support it because it lacks the security features that iTunes needs for DRM to ensure that files aren't shared willy-nilly.
[i]In a nutshell, it is still far to early to obsolete Win 98 and ME. Millions of people are still running Win 98 and ME (in fact, more people are still running Windows 98 than people who use Macs).
And these are the same people who plague this forum whining about instability and security issues. It reminds me of the person who gets a botched house renovation job yet the person decides to go back to the same rennovator for more work to be done on their house.
People don't learn until they're on their death bed and they get a sparkling revelation via devine intevetion, and no, it isn't Bill Gates saying, "Upgrade my son, UPGRADE!".
The search field is fabulous at the top of the window. It's insanely fast too. I've got over 10 gigs of MP3's and when I type in a song title, it's usually found the song before I can finish typing.
I miss my favorite feature of WinAmp3, however: the "enqueue" setting to queue up the next few songs you want to hear in a playlist. That's very cool, and Apple should have included it.
As far as speed is concerned, I think whoever wrote this article did some exaggerating. This app is perfectly fast on my Athlon 1.6Ghz. In fact, it's one of the faster apps I've seen.
Since my iBook died I've been missing iTUnes. Now I have it on my PC. Yes, its a tad slow, but sure beats any other player i've used! Go Apple, now to port it to Linux
Athlon 2100 and Win2k, didnt notice any speed problems at all. What was the early comment about the store? Downloaded the client early afternoon, and have already purchased a few songs, burned them to CD, etc...
I checked out your dance station, Eugenia. Holy, you must be on crack to listen to that stuff!
I don't know if anybody posted this before (I'm not going to read more than 200 messages to know) but if you don't have an iPod, then it's a good idea to disable the iPodservice from the computer management program. It's set to manual by default, and a quick check of the task manager showed me the stupid thing was taking up 2 Mb of my memory for nothing because I don't have an iPod, and even though 2 MB is not much, I don't want to waste a single MB of memory on useless things. So those of you who don't have an iPod, you can set the iPodservice to disabled.
Sebastian
Not a bad program. Only complaint I had is that I had to disable my Norton Firewall (version 2004) to use it. It was complaining that it didn't have enough memory (even though I use 256MB). Speed is not that bad and I run it on a Pentium III 850 with a Nvidia GeForce 4 card.
Error statement;
We could not complete your Music Store request. There is not enough memory availible.
There was an error with the music store. Please try again later.
I'm having the same problem except I have 512mb RAM 2.4ghz, p4, Geforce 4 4200 WinXP w/ windowblinds 4.1. I disabled my Norton firewall but still can't get into iTunes online store(I had already setup an apple account).
Other than that I have had no other major problems except some wierdness with thunderbird and itunes going at the same time. The radio stations are working fine, No redraw issues, and itunes didn't mess up my mp3 library(mainly because I chose not to store my tunes in My Music).
One thing is missing is a easier favorites feature for radio stations. The way iTunes does this is not user friendly, You should be able to right click on a radio station and save as a favorite.
I've been using iTunes on the Mac since the beginning and thinking through the comments people have made in the preceeding entries. It took a leap of faith way back but I decided to let iTunes manage my files and I haven't looked back. Once you get accustomed to editing tags within the iTunes application, you will get nice nests of artist folders with album folders within. I drag files into a ••New•• or ••Probation•• playlist and toss the original files. I use smart playlists aggressively - and they make life very sweet. I have done careful listening tests with speakers and headphones and import everything as 192k AAC files. You can go nuts worrying about actual genres or you can use genres, as I do, more arbitrarily to define smart playlists. I don't know whether G-Force, a super visual plug-in on the Mac side is available yet for the Windows version, but it probably will be soon. Finally, you can assume that iTunes will get better. Whatever you think of Apple hardware - and there's quite a bit of bile in some comments - they are RUTHLESS software developers. There is a great deal of substance to the widespread belief that Macs are easier to use. iTunes/iTunes Music Store make a killer combination on which you can pass your own judgment.
I've found that the interaction of iTunes with the rest of the GUI is fine. No problems there. However I too am seeing the sluggish behaviour internally. Scrolling and resizing are dogs. Yet I can drag the window (sized to 2048x768 dual monitor desktop) around without any slowdown. My system is an XP1800/512MB/Ti4200.
Apart from that resizing issue it is very nice to use generally. I copied a folder of MP3s (didn't want to risk it barfing them up... and see I was wise given some other comments) and added them. Then did a volume match across 2000 files. No problem. Created a playlist and threw a bunch of tracks into it then right click BURN and created a CD.
Yep, a nice package with some rough edges (on Windows at least). I doubt I'll use it as a playback tool, however as a management and roll-my-own-compilation tool yeah I'll give it a fair go.
ps: Of course no music download/purchase available in Australia with it. Blah.
According to my maths. The floating point performace is about 20% down on what is required and you don't get anthing like the full performace out of the 2nd CPU plus I doubt very much that iTunes for Windows is optimized for dual CPU.
..but how many *average* *normal* home users have SMP systems? And no Eugenia you're not an average/normal home user.
I'm a fun of oggs and xmms nor winamp have ever had an issue with them by iTunes... well I should say Quicktime... the support blows.
There's a free plugin but while using the plugin every access to an ogg file uses 100% CPU for about 10secs.
My box is a 1.5Ghz P4 with a 1G of ram I don't see why it could take 10 secs to do any music file operation.
The other issue is that iTunes doesn't understand ogg-tags, but this is probably more to do with the plugin than iTunes.
So why doesn't apple have a ogg codec? they support other minor codecs yet no Ogg support. decent ogg support would make me switch to iTunes any old day.
Felt adventurous this morning and installed iTunes on my PII -300 box running Windows 2000 box with 128MB ram (i.e. well below minimum requirements). While the interface wasn't very snappy, it was certainly usable. Sorting a 2000 song strong library in the search box up the top took about a second after each keypress to refresh the list, and playing music (no vis) only took up 10-20% of the CPU. Still much slower than on my iBook, but now I've got a neat way to stream music into the living room from the iBook in the bedroom.
it's a common feature between quicktime/iTunes. the rendering library for the brushed metal look really chugs along... quicktime is flickery, at least iTunes doesn't seem to suffer from that problem, but OUCH. no app should be that sluggish to draw iutself! luckily it doesn't extend to the performance of the program - does seem to be purely a rendering issue...
left it indexing my library at home while i head into work. looked like it was going to take a long time to parse 5000 tracks!
Well, I look at it this way regarding some of these bugs regarding iTunes for Windows. This is a first software release for the Windows platform. Considering that, I think this product is quite good. Plus, from what I've been told, Apple does continue to update their software so perhaps these bugs will be quashed soon.
I'm running it on a P4 2.53 Ghz, 1 Gig Ram, and it feels very snappy. I even bought some MP3's already; one of the celebrity playlists. (Great idea! Hope they get more.) LOL!. Downloaded them and already burned it to a CD.
So, for a first release, kudos for Apple for finally letting Windows users take advantage of iTunes and iTMS.
I love this app,Apple should make more of their software available for Windows.
P4 2400, 512meg ram.
works like a dream - window resizing no problem, but then, I don't have "show window contents when dragging" selected.
As for CPU - it climbs up to 80% when doing something such as opening a radio station category, but as soon as it's playing a song, CPU drops to next to nothing.
It does use a hefty amount of ram tho - 22meg
I like it.
230+ comments? Is that a record?
Anyway, I've also used it for a couple of hours now, and I must say it's a pretty nice app, might even replace my Ashampoo media player!
I wish someone had warned me that it was going to totally re-organise my mp3 collection. I am not happy with the way it has shoved files about and cocked up my whole directory listing. :-(
I don't have any slowdown blabla either
resizing, scrolling, all fine. while playing it's always under 1-2% cpu.
It does uses thoses 22 megs of ram, though.
Oh btw, I guess all the people with a slowdown are running with sound normalization on or something =PPPPPPPPPPPPP (let's say 50% chance )
it even lags less than winamp3 for that matter (this buggy winamp3...)
i don't like wmp9, and probably because it's ms ui style which i don't appreciate much so... itunes main player, yeah
XP Pro, Barton 2500, raptor, 9600 pro. When I drag the window around my cpu utilization skyrockets. So I dragged a Mozilla window around for comparison, and yes, itunes does consume more resources. Scrolling the pages on the music store aint too smooth.
Adding my music folder was fairly quick. I have no 60's music on my drive so the category is empty. I toasted it.
Radio feature is nice.
My CD Drive keeps getting probed. Inexplicable spin up noises. There's nothing in the drive.
The prism colored eyeball in the corner is foul looking. Actually I never have liked the brushed metal look of Quicktime player. The colors are a lil too pastel. XP's no beauty queen but there's just this lack of harmony. Maximize/minimize doesn't work in a way native to the OS. To paraphrase Jobs, it sucks.
The store: Took me a while to figure out how to get a listing for PJ. There's no form box to search in, only a drop down menu for genre. Then I noticed "power search" in what looks like the embedded web page, and I click it and am rewarded by....
Some blank paper.
Trying to scroll, not working hmm click on empty space inside the window WOAH HOLY SHIT it stopped responding for a few seconds. And then - I am inexpicably viewing a ladytron album. Must have clicked the mouse in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hey, I like ladytron.
This is convenient. I'll look here for album information and then leech the complete album off kazaa. I have medical bills. My transmission is fucked and it's registration time, which means insurance and smog and no money for Apple.
Sure is a bunch of old boomer geezer yuppie music on the front page though. ROD STEWART. Their "staff picks" are pretty funny. Annie Lennox, Suzanne Vega, U2, Seal, REM, what year is this?
Seems to run fine on my machine, 1Ghz Athlon but a 533 celery is the on bottom end of the advised setup
that's it is dual doesn't make much difference
with windows anyway.
For a fine player on slower machines try foobar2000
that works even on 266MHz PII with winXP.
There are a slew of Apple docs of iTunes for Windows out. Some are simplistic, others may be helpful:
iTunes 4: About Music Store Authorization and Deauthorization
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93014
Music Store purchases can be authorized in iTunes 4 to play on up to
three computers. Deauthorizing a computer allows you to manage which
computers can play purchased music.
iTunes: Music Store - How to Use the Shopping Cart
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93017
iTunes: Music Store - How to Purchase Songs With 1-Click
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93024
Tunes 4: How to Contact Music Store Billing Support
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93027
iTunes 4: How to Back Up Purchased Songs
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93033
iTunes 4: How to Create Playlists of Your Favorite Songs
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93045
Tunes 4: What's New
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93141
iTunes for Windows: Additional Troubleshooting for Burning Issues
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93286
iTunes for Windows: "You must purchase a new QuickTime Pro key to regain QuickTime Pro functionality" Message
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93351
iTunes for Windows: How to Burn an Audio CD
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93353
iTunes: How to Add Artwork to Songs
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93354
iTunes: How to Share Your Music
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93355
If your computer is connected to a local network, you can share your
music with up to five other computers.
iTunes for Windows: Installing Additional Plug-ins
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93357
In addition to the iTunes Visualizer, you can install and use non-Apple
Visualizer plug-ins.
iTunes for Windows: About Where iTunes Audio Files Are Stored
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93358
You can find the song files in the iTunes Music folder using Windows
Explorer or by choosing the Get Info command in iTunes.
iTunes for Windows: How to Tell If You Have a Drive That Can Burn a CD
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93359
iTunes for Windows: Unable to Burn a CD
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93360
Find out what to do if you can't burn an audio CD using iTunes for Windows.
iTunes for Windows: System Requirements
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93361
iTunes for Windows works with Windows XP or Windows 2000, and a QuickTime compatible audio card.
iTunes: How to Find and Listen to Shared Music Libraries
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93365
iTunes for Windows: How to Copy Music Between Authorized Computers
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93366
iTunes for Windows: How to Copy Songs Over a Network
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93367
iTunes for Windows: Trouble Burning a CD or DVD
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93379
iTunes for Windows: How to Move MUSICMATCH Songs into Your iTunes Library
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93390
iTunes for Windows: About Fast User Switching With Windows XP
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93395
Windows XP allows you to quickly change accounts using Fast User
Switching. However, if you want to use iTunes with a different account,
you must first quit iTunes before switching users.
iTunes for Windows: Music Sharing with Windows Internet Connection Firewall
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93396
iTunes for Windows: Music Does Not Play
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93400
Learn some steps to take if you are unable to play songs in iTunes for
Windows.
Tunes for Windows: "Unable to Install InstallShield Scripting Runtime"
Message
http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n93411
A !=1607 error message appears when you try to install iTunes for Windows.
I don't know what could be causing the problems stated in the article, I have a P4 2.4 Ghz processor and am running iTunes with only 2.1% processor usage. And I can resize the window with no problems at all. There must be something else wrong with your test setup.
I have 2 Macs at work and installed the Windows version at home yesterday. I burned all the tracks on my Mac to DVD-R and loaded them into my Windows machine at home and now can listen to everything on it perfectly since it is now authorized onto my iTunes account.
Radio stations play perfectly, no dropouts or rebuffering on my cable modem connection.
iTunes is much more than "a simple playback app".
Windows XP Tip of the Day
By default, when you grab a Window by the title bar and move it around, the contents of the window will move with it. You can change this behavior so that only the outline of the window moves when dragging it, until you drop the window. This can be beneficial for slower computers, as it will take less processing power to draw the screen changes. To make this change, right-click the Desktop and choose Properties. In the Display Properties window that appears, click the Appearance tab, and the Effects button. Clear the check box (click) next to "Show window contents while dragging." Click OK and OK to make the change take effect. Now when you drag a window to another part of the screen, only the outline will move until you drop it.
PIII 550 and PIV 2.5Ghz - rock solid and fast. The PIII serves the network (gives my old iBook 600 a break...ahhhh). On the PIV, except for starting the app (when it blips up to 50%, mostly disk IO) the darn thing never goes over 7% of CPU.
I'm using a four-year-old Dell laptop with a 400 MHz Celeron slugging away inside it, and iTunes seems to be running totally fine. (Personally, I don't understand what about iTunes even _requires_ a 500 MHz Pentium, but whatever.) Yes, resizing the main window is a little slow. It's A LITTLE SLOW on my 400 MHZ SYSTEM. There are no problems whatsoever on my brother's computer, a 1.6 GHz P4.
Eugenia, did you try testing this on any other computer besides your own before posting your review? Nobody's expecting you to be Apple PR, but it's not the most journalistically responsible thing in the world to post such a blistering review based on one experience on one computer.
Sure, that can be the MAIN THING you say in the review, but I'd have wanted to see if your problems were an incompatibility w/ your system (which, granted, would be insanely not great) or the result of Apple screwing up. Which, contrary to some Mac cultists' opinions, does happen some times, and I say that as an avid Mac user. (One word: iPhoto 1.0.)
She concludes that the UI problems she is experiencing must be caused by Apple, leaving no room for the possibility that it may perhaps be just an isolated incident.
Such results call for further testing, and at least should have included another machine.
Secondly, Eugenia. Such hostility will surely turn off readers. This is my first visit to your site (linked from macrumors.com), and I surely didn't get a very good impression from the way you have handled the followup questions to your impressions.
Blistering review? How is this a blistering review? She said the overall experience was good! Maybe in the Mac world that means "it sucks" though, I don't know.
So from your report, "A LITTLE SLOW" means it's blazing fast? And "no problems whatsoever" means it crashed all the time, right? This is, of course, using your logic.
I am sorry, but reviewing an application is not about getting exact details about the system, and testing it on all known platforms. It's about a running software on a platform that meets the required specs. And her machine meets the required specs. She gave them to you up front!
And then she reports on what the experience was like. And that's what she did. If people experience other results, it doesn't invalidate her review.
She said the application was good. It had a few minor problems. You can even find evidence of this problem here: http://discussions.info.apple.com/WebX?14@13.xArhalejiZP.0@.599ac9b...
That is what's called a problem. Eugenia reported it.
I guess to you "the most journalistically responsible thing" to do would have been to have lied and rather than tell the truth, and give the app an overall good review, she should have said "It sucked" a few hundred times.
Next time read the article.
"Secondly, Eugenia. Such hostility will surely turn off readers. This is my first visit to your site (linked from macrumors.com), and I surely didn't get a very good impression from the way you have handled the followup questions to your impressions."
So let me get this straight. She reports honestly what happened. The application IS slow when the machine meets the minimum requirements (even more). Again, she reports this in her review. Finally, she gives the application an overall good review.
Then she is jumped by people 1) can't read the entire article, 2) are morons, and 3) put words in her mouth. And you expect her to just take it all lying down? Would you rather have lied? I haven't seen her go off on anyone that didn't give it to her first.
Her review was a good, honest review. It wasn't marketing text. If your miles vary, and the app runs faster, great!
I enjoy these personal reviews. If you prefer boiler plate PR reviews paid for buy the company, this ain't the place for it. If you are looking for an open discussion, and an honest review, this is the place.
Eugenia, you're wrong about a great many things. It's as simple as that.
A) If a Celeron was a Pentium-Class processor, it would bear the Pentium name. It doesn't, therefore it's not. Less cache on the CPU is most definitely a factor. If it was Pentium-class, it would have Pentium-class specs. That includes cache size.
B) Face it. Your machine is old. You're running a low-end processor BARELY above the minimum requirements for iTunes. You can say dual however many times you want, and bold it as much as you want, but it's irrelevant. Your machine runs no faster than 533 MHz. Period. Now you're running this processor along with a video card made by a company that, despite what you believe, has a history of shitty drivers. Granted, not as bad as ATI, but bad. Your card in particular has known problems with some AGP chipsets (VIA in particular), and Matrox OpenGL drivers suck all around. Another thing of note is that your card is AGP 4x, yet your system is a dual Celeron 533 which probably means it's quite old - older than AGP 4x. AGP speed stepdowns are ALSO known to have problems.
In your reply RE: Why not possible?, you say "You are assuming stuff here." So wait... you're not? Every comment you've ever made says that the problem is most definitely with iTunes and not with your hardware, as that would be impossible. That's a bomb of an assumption, and (considering the hardware you're running) is most likely incorrect. People running the same software on other machines have no trouble. Personally, iTunes runs like ASS on the Windows box I tried. However, I'm not above being able to say that since it's a Pentium III 533 with a shit video card, it's definitely the hardware and NOT iTunes. It seems to me you're in denial about the performance of your hardware. iTunes is a brand new application. your machine is how old?
So in response to all of your statements to others to "Get a clue", perhaps you should jump on that train first.
"Then she is jumped by people 1) can't read the entire article, 2) are morons, and 3) put words in her mouth. And you expect her to just take it all lying down? Would you rather have lied? I haven't seen her go off on anyone that didn't give it to her first."
Other than a few obvious exceptions, I really don't see people attacking her personally, but questioning the results of her experience and claims.
"Her review was a good, honest review. It wasn't marketing text. If your miles vary, and the app runs faster, great!"
It was a good proclamation of her first impression, which she appropriately titles the piece. My problem is with the conclusion that is drawn which is based on assumptions made with no further study or inquiry (However, its overall UI speed needs to be worked out by Apple).
She makes no room for the possibility that the UI issues she is experiencing is not due to the application itself, but rather an isolated experience.
I have no doubts that she has experienced poor UI performance. However, the testing procedure could be called incomplete at best.
Case in point:
RE:Just finished installing iTunes.........
By Eugenia (IP: ---.client.attbi.com) - Posted on 2003-10-16 20:57:28
> Ok Eugenia, that machine of yours has a problem. This thing runs fine.
I am sorry, but this is not an acceptable explanation. Every zealot will just give this exact explanation everytime I spot problems. There is nothing wrong with my machine, the problem is with iTunes' UI: it's slow on a SMP machines. Better testing and optimization should have being done by Apple.
Any chance SoundCheck is on by default?
It scans every file imported into the Library and makes volume adjusts so that all songs are the same general volume level.
This would be a CPU intensive task, and could very well cause the initial CPU usage issues people here have described.
As far as the redraw problem, I doubt its Apple's software. If it works on most, with a few exceptions having trouble, I say they did a fine job.
That's the whole point of Macs to begin with - an alternative to the hodge-podge of custom built garbage that PCs are. It's rather difficult for any real custom software developer to make a truly compatible app that would work on every machine out there. Give Apple a break, they did a superb job porting a Mac-only Carbon app to Windows. Not just to make money, but to give you Kazaa using Windows bums a music download alternative. Most music piracy occurs on PCs.
Does anybody know when the BeOS version comes out?
Does anybody know when the BeOS version comes out?
Yes, never.
Yep, the UI is slow, even unresponsive. Fast on my Dual 1.25, but on my 2.4 GHz P4 with XP, sometimes the UI just doesn't respond. The music keeps playing, just the window doesn't show up. It's a bit like dreamWeaver in that respect (click on tab and waaaaaaiiiiiittttttt).
Apart from that, it's GREAT to have iTunes on Windoze. Work is just a little funner now.
Papblo, Eugenia does OS News for fun and has to deal with an endless stream of idiotic comments. Be nice to her :-)
I have a multimedia keyboard, i.e., play/pause, stop buttons. Usually, the player does not have to be in the foreground for the it to catch the button presses, but iTunes only catches those if it is in the foreground. Had gotten quite used to using these. Bugger that.
i mean really, not bad at all
http://www.wma-mp3.com/
Excuse me if I repeat myself, but your music requires freedom from Microsoft for use on the iPods. Also Podworks (versiontracker.com) will upload from iPod to computers.
I was hoping to read some insightful anecdotes from Windows fans and users alike regarding iTunes 4.1 for Windows, and more specifically, the iTunes Music Store. Not only about its speed, but initial impressions in different facets of the software and service. Instead, it seems that Eugenia's initial impressions have set the scene for all-out war amongst OSNews readers.
As the owner of an iMac running the latest Mac OS X, and a user of iTunes since its earliest days, I can state that what makes iTunes is the philosophy around which it is built; that is, that you don't really want to use iTunes any more than is necessary. The key to this is staving off feature creep, and making all functions of the application accessible within about two clicks. iTunes implements this philosophy well, and it feels clean and thought-out to use.
The only 'fun' part of using iTunes, realistically, is using the iTunes Music Store. That buzz of finding a track you want, purchasing it inexpensively, and then listening to it for a time. I'm told a good job has been done with this, too... but being thankfully outside the RIAA's sphere of control, I have yet to experience it myself.
If you like playing with your music player software, iTunes will probably disappoint when put next to the likes of WinAMP. If you don't, then iTunes will put a smile on your face, even ahead of MusicMatch Jukebox or Windows Media Player.
Windows users: Welcome to the party. Stay awhile and enjoy.
Dude, get a faster computer, complain about the speed of the app, but your CPU is sooooo slow, do you know how cheap hardware is nowadays...
Better yet, use OGG. It's patent-free and better.
http://faceprint.com/code
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis
I wouldn't recommend iTunes to anyone. It doesn't solve any freedom problem at all. None, nada. At ''best'' it would mean a ''legal'' alternative to the illegal P2P usage. If this so-called illegal usage is less popular, the users become more vulnerable. If it stays used by the masses, nothing will happen except FUD. Stand strong.
Or, which i'd recommend, try ftp://ftp.scene.org for legal, free music -for example. Supporting big record labels is no good, let them become rotten to death in their traditions.
Here are my initial impressions:
1-1) 1.8GHz P4, resizing the iTunes window is lagged, badly. It's not unresponsive, but it is definitely lagged compared to any other program on the system, even those running concurrently.
1-2-1) Apple: this isn't a Mac application, you're in Windows now. I shouldn't have to click on the bottom-right corner to resize my window. I shouldn't need a steady hand to only adjust either the height or the width of the window.
1-2-2) Clicking the maximize button should not cause the window to get smaller. Second glance made me realize there is no maximize button. The initial window size of iTunes is about 20x what I need from my music programs, but if I'm going to go that big, why not full-screen? I'd probably want full-screen if I was going to use the music store features.
1-2-3) Trying to resize the smaller version of the window (after clicking the maximize button) yields no ability to resize, despite the resizing grip, but instead makes the window become even smaller.
1-2-4) Double-clicking the title bar (another way to maximize windows in Windows) yields some preset-sized window rather than a maximized window. Needless to say, it's much smaller than a maximized window, and still not consistent with expected behavior.
2-1) Importing files... right-click on the 'Library' entry in the left-hand pane, and get... ZERO options to import files. File menu has all I really need, though.
2-2) On the positive side, adding the MP3 folder on my hard drive seemed to work fine, despite the fact that the MP3 files themselves are a few folders deep. Some programs have problems with this, but overall this is expected behavior from iTunes.
3-1) The smaller mode for iTunes is nice, like most other playback apps, but is a little bigger than I would like it to be.
3-2) There's a lot of wasted space, and the buttons to close, minimize, and resize are in the wrong place (despite there being enough room for them in the right place).
3-3) On the positive: mouse wheel controls volume as expected.
3-4) Left-click and Right-click perform the same function over the panel that shows the title/etc. I would prefer that right-click brought up a set of options for this panel, or a context-menu to change tracks or something.
4-1) Most of the interface elements in the larger window are actually fairly good, except for the inconsistencies already mentioned.
4-2) iTunes didn't seem to be able to find artwork for any of the albums in my playlist. Ill have to check the settings a bit more to see if there's something that may be stopping this.
4-3) I can't find a way to edit the genre/title/etc information without leaving iTunes and doing it in Explorer, then retrieving the file. At this point iTunes promptly ignored the changes. Yeah, I really want such descriptive genres as 'Rock', which describes 99.9% of my playlist according to iTunes. (Note: just figured out that I had most of my MP3 files set to read-only, so of course it couldn't edit this stuff, though it would've been nice if iTunes had told me this was the case rather than just making everything greyed out).
Ill have to try it at home, later, to see how it handles larger playlists. I only have about 80 files that it can read on this computer. I had to go into the preferences to disable the crossfade playback, which was driving me nuts (wtf is it cutting off the last 5 seconds of every song? Oh, here it is: fuck up my music enabled). Had to go through the horrid QuickTime options to disable it's status tray icon (also disabled the status tray icon for iTunes). Despite choosing 'Do not put icons on my desktop', it put icons in my QuickLaunch bar (which it didn't give me an option not to do), so I deleted the QT icon but left the iTunes icon for the moment.
Overall, playback is good, management is ok, with good filtering.
The big thing on my home system (where I'll try it next) is that Windows Media Player has a mode where it docks itself to the task bar in Windows XP. I'm not sure that iTunes could ever replace it unless it could do something similar, and equally well.
With millions of CPU/Mobo/Video Card/Sound Card/Hard drive, including driver software, combinations that exist on the Win side I am amazed that anything even works! And Win iTunes being v 1, I have to say that Apple did do a great job porting it.
While resizing does lag for a brief moment on my AMD 2000/ATI Radeon 7000, everything else is just as smooth as on my Quicksilver. iTunes will get better with each successive release.
Microsoft astroturfers should probably consider another forum to troll in.
I've installed iTunes on two systems now--Win2K and XP, both on Celerons just under 2GHz--and it works just fine on both. CPU usage on the XP hovers between 25% and 40%, and that's with a browser and MS Word open and running. Window redraw is no better and no worse than any other apps I use, and the GUI works just fine.
As for the complaints--this is a first version of the app on this OS, people! When was the last time Microsoft released a first version of an app that didn't totally suck? And this app doesn't suck, it is far better than average.
Eugenia,
No offense but a dual Celeron is a non-standard hardware configuration to begin with and I very much doubt that Apple would code Windows iTunes for MP configurations.
All I have to say is that I use a WinXP machine for work, and finally I can have something that makes it feel more familiar to my Mac at home, except I have no Terminal, no Unix commands, blah, blah, blah.
I installed iTunes for Windows, and it works great! Now maybe it is time for me to consider getting a doc connector for my 3G iPod.
<RANT>
To all those who are complaining about the operating system issue: please stop complaining. Apple made a business decision. Not so surprisingly, Windows 98, and 2000 are very different. Sure, you could compile the program to run on both, but the performance tweaks for one would not work on the other, and perhaps break the product. Think of it as supporting two DIFFERENT operating systems, however similar. Plus, they're giving it away for FREE! There is a profit motive though, but I guess Apple figures that those who are most likely to use the music store are also the ones who want to upgrade their computers because they like to CONSUME, and PURCHASE. If you feel that Apple is being mean to you, get over it, because you are the square peg in their round hole. If we support win98, the win95 users will complain, and if we support win95, the win 3.1 users will moan. Apple had to draw a line in the sand somewhere, and that line was at delivering a superior product for their target audience, rather than wasting development time and resources on developing a version for people who (in a market sense) would run it on older machines, complain about the speed, and not be likely to purchase any music. This is not an attack on anyone, I'm simply stating my opinion that you guys are not the target audience.
</RANT>
On another note, I have noted that itunes consumes a lot of CPU, on both Mac, and (supposedly) windows. At least it does on my iBook. There are a lot of mp3 players (winamp, winmp for windows et al.) that consume less than 2% of a ~1GHz CPU. I run iTunes at about minimum 7% CPU on my iBook 600. CPU usage spikes when you interact with itunes, but if you let it play the music without screwing with the GUI, it's tolerable. I put linux on my iBook to try it out, and must say that I was very impressed with xmms. It consumes 0% of my CPU playing ogg vorbis files. Plus, ogg sounds great.
>Bizarrely, It seems to use the same amount of CPU utilisation even when it?s doing nothing at all!
Hold it! It seems to be doing something.... it is going through all the songs and determining song volume, what ever that means. Hume....all very strange.
ROTFL!!!
you're so cute!...relax its just a (great) aac/mp3/wav/aiff/lame/ogg player. Once you become accustom to how things work maybe you'll begin to enjoy it ;-)
Not so surprisingly, Windows 98, and 2000 are very different. Sure, you could compile the program to run on both, but the performance tweaks for one would not work on the other, and perhaps break the product. Think of it as supporting two DIFFERENT operating systems, however similar.
Having written a lot of software with my development systems on either Windows 98 or 2000 and my target platforms on Windows 95, 98, and 2000, I have to disagree. The only time it becomes an issue to support 9x and 2k is when you develop on 98 and completely ignore portability issues, or absolutely require SMP and full multi-threading capabilities. It is fairly easy to write software with 2k as a target and have it work fine in 98, as long as you pay attention to specific areas that have compatibility problems (again, mostly SMP and multi-threading support, the first of which is unsupported in 98 and the second of which is slightly different between the two).
Supporting Windows 98 is not a hard thing to do, and most developers have found it a bit easier when dealing with certain areas that iTunes also deals with (drivers for things like CD burning, audio effects/editing and codecs), which tend to be a pain in the ass on 2k/XP.
That being said, the poor GUI performance of the application combined with the excellent playback performance leads me to believe that they did quite a bit of work on the threading of the application (otherwise the poor GUI performance would lead to bad playback), meaning that it probably would have taken some work (though fairly minor, and with most likely a moderate-to-minimal performance hit on 9x only) to make it work in both. 98 is still a very dominant part of the Windows family of operating systems, and is likely to remain so for a couple more years.
Of course, when it all comes down to it, I haven't used 98 personally in 3 years, and have no reason to go back to it. I usually don't even test my software on 98, because the target platform is always 2000, but I'm lucky in that my software is on a defined platform with no variance in the OS.
Eugenia does *not* own this site and is the editor for free and for fun. Comments modded down do not follow the guidelines of the forum. And she is not the only one of the staff that mods down comments.
P3 700MHz, no problems with scrolling, resizing. Though not having the maximize button MAXIMIZE was retarded. And not being able to manually maximize is strange also. Leaves like three or four pixels to the edge of the screen. Odd
Saw someone post earlier about it comparing song volume and that making the ap run slow, to them I say this. iTunes can make all your song volumes the same, so that in playback when Motzart is done, you don't have to run over to turn the volume back down so that Tool doesn't blow your speakers out.
Nice to see Apple putting the effort in to include us.
Eugenia, post some snapshots of from the Performance tab in your Task Manager. Show us the CPU utilization of Processors 0 and 1 while iTunes is loaded and you are dragging/resizing the UI. I just did it on my single CPU box and the CPU utilization *does* go up. I'm interested to see if it is spread evenly across both processors on a dual system, though. My guess is that it isn't, and your second processor doesn't matter one whit towards the performance of the app.
I just resized iTunes while watching the performance monitor on my dual 2.4GHz XEON box.
CPU 1 went from ~4% utilization up to ~30% utilization during the time I was resizing the window (accomplishied by grabbing the lower right corner and moving the mouse around randomly for a few seconds). CPU 2 showed no discernable increase in utilization.
I'd have to say that you're correct. A dual system isn't going to help for the UI speed (as I also assumed it wouldn't) and Eugenia's dual 533 is no better than a single 533 for iTunes. Therefore her machine is just above minimum system specs and probably isn't expected to run iTunes much better than it is. The issue is not the software, it's the hardware it's being run on.
Saw someone post earlier about it comparing song volume and that making the ap run slow, to them I say this. iTunes can make all your song volumes the same, so that in playback when Motzart is done, you don't have to run over to turn the volume back down so that Tool doesn't blow your speakers out.
One thing I noticed is that a lot of people were using this feature to excuse the responsive-ness issues, yet it's not enabled by default (I found it in the same preferences panel as the crossfade playback option). Personally, if my speakers blow out when my music changes drastically, it's time for better speakers If I wanted a compressor, i'd put one in the line (I have 3 or 4 of them built into the rest of my effects hardware).
I didn't notice any problems with scrolling, either, and with the resizing it actually follows along in a rather responsive manner, just about a full second behind my cursor (and when I let go it catches up and sizes to where my cursor was when I let go).
I'm thinking the brush metal crap is going to clash even more with the silver-themed XP I use at home, but I'll give it a run anyway just to see how it handles a few thousand MP3 files.
A dual system isn't going to help for the UI speed (as I also assumed it wouldn't) and Eugenia's dual 533 is no better than a single 533 for iTunes. Therefore her machine is just above minimum system specs and probably isn't expected to run iTunes much better than it is. The issue is not the software, it's the hardware it's being run on.
It's a celeron to boot, which not only wasn't meant to run in SMP in the first place, but isn't equivalent to (or better than) a 500MHz P3, either.
That being said, I see some resizing issues on a 1.7GHz P4, so I'm not so sure that the hardware is entirely to blame.
Its an issue with the hardware, but also an issue with the software, it SHOULD have been written with better threading in mind, however as it doesn't use threads for the UI particularly well, the hardware is barely at minimum spec. I am sure ITunes will improve on windows, better threading, etc. But in the end, this product is what a lot of people have been clamouring for on Windows since it appeared on the Mac, and for a first release, its pretty spectacular.
I installed iTunes for Windows last night on my AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 1 gigabyte of DDR RAM, and Windows 2000 Professional machine. It looked nice, but it was not a Windows application. Trying to maximize it resulted in its "crunching" itself. Right click did nothing. Plus it was generally slow. So after a few hours, I uninstalled it. Perhaps I'll try it again in a half year or so, but until then, Windows Media Player 9 it is.
Ronald, everyone knows that Metallica is the poster child of the "Say No to Online Music" movement.
Well in Eugenia's defense, somthing this simple should not cause her the problems she is having. It really is absurd to have terrible lag and utilization when simply resizing a window. Apple's whole platform now revolves around OpenGl, and they have seemed to forgotten that Windows isnt. I personally think they should have created a real windows version for iTunes and not an OSX port.
On the other hand I will say that P2 core or not, celerons suck.....BAD. Also, Matrox cards....terrible terrible cards. Even if youre strapped for cash, just about any budget card will do better than a Matrox card. There are good and bad configs out there. You want the best compatibility, reliability and performance, use an AMD or Intel chip and an ATI or Nvidia video card period. Id equate using a Matrox card to using a Cyrix cpu. ick.
Got a P4 2.4 533 FSB, iTunes is at 2 % most of the time. Why do ppl complain, just get a new mobo and a new cpu. Man people running 500Mhz are crazy, i mean com'on, who agress with me here, 500 mhz is slower than my grandma... You can get ex govt. computers for like $50 running at 500mhz, even my uni is running faster than that, infact my uni is running P4 2.6...
iTunes is not CPU hungry, it is just designed for better hardware...
Argue this, i don't think you can...
I totally agree. If you use your computer for more than typing word documents, there is no excuse. Especially when you can pick AthlonXPs in the 2000 range and GF4 MX cards for pocket change.
Apple did this to make M$ happy. Now, users of Win 98 will have to upgrade to XP in order to use iTMS. More money for Bill makes him happy, maybe he'll continue to support Office for OSX.
I've been using iTunes since it first came out. In fact, I used SoundJam MP for a couple of years before that - before Apple bought SoundJam from Casady & Greene and hired their MP programmers to turn it into iTunes. Anyway, iTunes has come a long way. It plays on my old G3 350 Mhz Mac nonstop all day streaming radio and playing MP3s. It never freezes or crashes. It's really solid. Expect that shortly with the Windows version after one or two updates.
Regarding, music selection in the store... I agree that selection if far from great. But you should have seen it a month or two ago. The volume of selection has come a long way. You have to realize that the content selection is very much dependent on the record labels and artists. Initially, they've been selective pushing their stuff onto the iTunes Music Store. Dipping their toes in the water, sort of speak. The uploading of content into the store is accelerating quickly. I see that when I check the “Just Added” section. They update that every Tuesday. You can see the last four weeks’ of additions. With the independent record labels jumping on now, the music selection is starting to get really tasty.
Cheers.
i am on a notebook... 1.3GHz P-M CPU (faster than it sounds), radeon 9000 graphix... and iTunes is just fast and cool.
faster than on my powerbook G4/667 for sure.
the only performance thing i noticed is that it uses more CPU than WinAmp when playing mp3s - 15% CPU vs 7% in Winamp. That's still ok though - don't notice it when i work.
moving windows is as fast as i can move the mouse, and uses 100% CPU, but so does moving any other windows window with the mouse.
What the heck is wrong with you to say that not supporting windows 98 is a major flaw?!
It's almost _2004_ for craps sake.
Yeah, that's only 6 year old software. Gee. I wonder why they decided it wasn't worth it to support it. Maybe because they didn't want to back-port all their drivers for CD burning to win 9x. My guess is that the Win9x networking stack would crap itself silly if someone tried to implement ZeroConf on it.
Think about it for more than two seconds people. This application isn't just a userland application, there's a lot of drivers and other dependencies going on behind the scenes. I applaud Apple for dropping win9x support.
Now where's my linux port?
If I remember, Eugenia was also lambasting Mozilla about slow graphics on the exact same system.
Ever stop to think it might be your hardware configuration E? Because the problems sound very similar and / or related. And from my expirence with mozilla (after your total hissy-fit) I'm willing to bet you're pretty off the mark on this one as well when compared to how things run on my box.
So how well does it work when you boot to single-processor mode?
lightnin, the iTunes Music Store requires no subscription.
"...now if apple would release a version for the rest of us heck i might not mind getting a subscription to their store thing."
I'm still trying to figure out just WHAT the problem is for people on this app.
I'm running it on a Dell Latitude C400. This thing has a PIII Mobile at 1.2GHz, a BUILT in Intel Video (830M) with shared video memory, and 1Gb of RAM.
iTunes for windows FLYS. Definately better than the same thing on my G4/500 with 10.2.
Windows resizing, screen redraw, visualizations, everything. Snappy.
As to resources, the Task Manager was using more when I opened it to check, and Internet Explorer was using more RAM, so again, not sure what people are seeing here. Remember that iTunes isn't just a program, it also is KIND OF a web services program as well.
Anyhow, just wanted to chime in.
CharlesJR
I'm still trying to figure out just WHAT the problem is for people on this app.
I'm running it on a Dell Latitude C400. This thing has a PIII Mobile at 1.2GHz, a BUILT in Intel Video (830M) with shared video memory, and 1Gb of RAM. Running WinXP PRO, SP1.
iTunes for windows FLYS. Definately better than the same thing on my G4/500 with 10.2.
Windows resizing, screen redraw, visualizations, everything. Snappy.
As to resources, the Task Manager was using more when I opened it to check, and Internet Explorer was using more RAM, so again, not sure what people are seeing here. Remember that iTunes isn't just a program, it also is KIND OF a web services program as well.
Anyhow, just wanted to chime in.
CharlesJR
This is a big minus for me. Everytime I start up this thing it registers itself as the default mp3 player. You cannot change the file associations in the preferences. Sucks big time.
after reading the article and the first 30 or so comments, I almost have to wonder if some of these problems are just peoples individual systems.
running iTunes on my Win2K machine with a Duron 1.2GHz and 256MB ram on a nforce 220 chipset...CPU utilization is only at 2-3%, resizing the window is snappy(no 1+ second delays or any drawing artifacts) and this is with the visuals/eye-candy ON.
NO problems whatsoever other than it didnt find my audio files at first search(it only looks in the "my music" folder the first search)
I installed itunes onto my win2k Shuttle SN41g2 (Athlon XP2500 + 1GB RAM) and it's been just fine. CPU Usage is just 10% but thats only just listening to music via the radio though.
Harjtt
: o )>
On my system running a 2.08GHz AMD Athlon XP processor and 512MB PC2700 KingstonHyperX memory iTunes performs rather slow. Audio playback is fine, browsing the Music Store is fast and I like previewing tracks. But resizing the window is choppy, as if it isn't using my graphics card and iTunes is taking up almost 40MB of memory! That is unacceptable.
Conrad
skips to previous/next song! hehehe
"Funny. It didn't change anything on "My Music" folder. WMP9 used to do that (ie Broke my AC/DC folder in half, AC and DC!!!)"
Wow I didn't think it was possible to have a folder with "/" or "" in the name in windows. At least every time I've tried I get a helpful dialog box pointing out the few characters that cannot be included in file or folder names!
Running on Win2k SP3, 850 Athlon, Matrox g400 dual head with 384 MB RAM - works great. Streaming 56kb right now, with PC Anywhere standing by & Filemaker Pro open, TM shows CPU average at 10%, peaking at 18%. Now, turning the visuals on brings it up to 86-90%, but no big surprise there.
I see the lag in window resizing, but it's far from unusable. I notice too, that the resize is alot faster if you release the mouse button right away than if you click, drag, & wait for the window to catch up.
Not bad at all for their first Windows release. Remember, timeliness to market is very important for this app, too. They needed to get it out in time to compete with the multiple Windows music-buying apps. If they waited too long, chances are that one of the competing apps would get entrenched, and no matter how bitchin' the app was it would be a big "so what?".
I suspect that Apple will keep to form as with OSX releases - look for speed & stability improvements in the next release.
Both for Mac and Windows 
If it seems bloated to old or even new crap Wintel/Amd 'puters that's because the computers probably use some weird graphics, mainboard, etc. stuff...
iTunes simply rocks! It is simply the best digital Jukebox
uncheck Edit --> Preferences --> General --> Use iTunes as the default player for audio files
Check out http://www.livejournal.com/users/onejdc/50802.html
for what happened with me. Seems as though I'm not alone. lol. Which is sad, I was really looking forward to iTunes. Ah well. Winamp Beta 5 released today...i'll try that.
Celeron 533 is still adequate for all tasks except gaming and CPU hog apps (rendering, media editing). If a music player cannot redraw scrolled content in sensible time on that kind of machine, it can't be a fault of software. More or less smooth scrolling is quite possible on P1, and unless the programmers suffer from permanent brain damage due to exposure to Steve Jobs distortion field, scrolling should be completely smooth on Celeron 533. If horizontal scrolling of a table or resizing stutters on machine of that level, someone made a mistake equivalent to using bubble sort in a database app.
You can check out Apple's Music Event at this link:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/musicevent03/
You can experience Steve Job's reality distortion effect. It's really quite amazing. Well, it's interesting, at least. The event, that is.
Anyone know if and when Apple will roll-out the store for non-US customers?
well, lets see.
the gui os rendered in Open GL, so if you run a GFX card with BAD OpenGL performance, then you will get a sluggish gui no matter what frequency your CPU is running.
the HTML rendering in the store is rendered by webobjects. it has been ported to Windows, so you can expect some bad performance from it until it gets better optimized for Windows.
there is no brain deadness, just the cost of porting a program to another platform. but if you only program in windows, you would not really have experience in that. try talking to some Open source folks to get an idea of how hard tehy think it was to port iTunes to x86 and windows.
Look at everyone here... "I've got 2.4 ghz P4 with 2 gb ram and it takes up 40 mb of ram. UNACCEPTABLE!" Sheesh... so what if it takes up ram... that's what programs are supposed to do. this ain't your run of the mill mp3 playing software like winamp. Anyways, RAM is cheap, CPU processes are cheap. If you have a 2.4 Ghz processor and you're complaining that it's using 17% of it. What are you going to do with the rest of the CPU processing? What are you going to do with the 1.5 gb ram left over? get over it. resources are cheap.
Something must be completely f**cked up with this reviewers machine.
Installed in on a 2ghz celron Dell portable, and the UI is extremely snappy! Know others who've installed in on even slower boxes, and no problems there either... In terms of perfomance it absolutely smokes WMP and MusicMatch (the latter is very sluggish on low end machines).
It doesn't seem to be very professional to post a review, negative on performance without testing on different machines! Anyway - for me it works better than any other player I've EVER tried, and that goes both for performance and ui responsiveness.
i have a duron 1ghz with 300 some odd megs of ram and a geforce 4 64mb card, i also have a g4 with a radeon 32mb card and 1 gig of ram, and i actually think the windows app is much snappyer and more responsive than my mac one, im amazed at the exact replica
If it seems bloated to old or even new crap Wintel/Amd 'puters that's because the computers probably use some weird graphics, mainboard, etc. stuff...
I somehow doubt it, but I'll be looking when I get home to be sure. This system's a Dell, so the components, though not the best, are definitely not obscure. Intel CPU, ATI graphics, which would be on the top of the line for any x86 PC, though I wouldn't call either component in this PC top of the line itself. It's definitely better than most of the average users' computers out there.
Simple fact, with WMP running playing music and a handful of other apps running, I have CPU Usage between 0 and 10%, with occasional spikes as high as 15%. I run iTunes without playing any music and it stays pretty much the same. I resize iTunes (still not playing music) and it goes to 100% and stays there for a moment after I release it.
I have issues with WMP as well, there's no doubt there, but that's not the item being discussed. Apple's only real hold on any market on x86 machines has come from what they can deliver that no one else can. The app itself isn't going to be the draw for the product, it's going to be exclusive content in the store, just like the QuickTime player draws people that need it to see the latest trailer for movie X. If they really want people to like their apps in Windows, they need to make them behave in a manner more consistent with the environment and make sure that they don't sacrifice usability for looks (if using the brushed metal theme could even be considered sacrificing anything for looks, since it looks like crap imo).
the gui os rendered in Open GL, so if you run a GFX card with BAD OpenGL performance, then you will get a sluggish gui no matter what frequency your CPU is running.
the HTML rendering in the store is rendered by webobjects. it has been ported to Windows, so you can expect some bad performance from it until it gets better optimized for Windows.
there is no brain deadness, just the cost of porting a program to another platform. but if you only program in windows, you would not really have experience in that. try talking to some Open source folks to get an idea of how hard tehy think it was to port iTunes to x86 and windows.
If you want to port something quickly, I guess you would do it this way. You make some simple emulation layer to translate the calls the original app makes to different calls on another OS.
If you want to port something correctly, you make a native port. You don't call OpenGL if the default desktop doesn't use OpenGL, you call default window calls. You don't port some webobjects over to Windows to render HTML, you use IE. If you want hardware acceleration of the window, you could use OpenGL, or DirectX, but either way it should perform better than this seems to be performing. This looks more like they left the OpenGL calls in and put in a layer that talks to Windows instead of going straight to the OpenGL drivers.
Just because resources are abundant doesn't mean you write bloated code. People are abundant, everywhere even. That's not an excuse to waste them.
Apple, IMO, could have done a better job with the coding. I feel like they grabbed 4 or 5 of the orginal iTunes developers, handed them "Windows Programming for Dummies" and said "Have fun."
Mind, I *do* think it will be an excellent application once it is more finely tuned! I *LOVE* iTunes for the Mac, and spent several months trying to emulate it on the pc.
I guess I think Apple felt pressured into releasing an application by a deadline, not based on the product's readiness.
Pro's
-nice clean interface
-good sounding
-cool search feature
-library organized things wonderfully
-radio steaming interface is niiiiice
-supposedly normalizes volume levels in library (if true)
Con's
-slow/choppy resizing and dragging
-19M download
-refresh buffer every 5 minutes when streaming radio
-lil heavy on the cpu
-quirky interface (no maximize)
Conclusion: Leave it on to normalize songs in the background. It's definitely the best all-in-One package I've seen for windows (I hate musicmatch). However, I don't see it as a killer app, and other then the normalizing feature, nothing offered here that would make me choose using it for mp3 listening, ripping or burning instead of other programs like winamp, cdex, or nero. Lets hope there's a couple updates.
Notes: Online store wasn't available in Canada.
Computer specs dual amd 1500 on tyan k7 with 512 ecc ram, GF3 ti500
To me, for a 1.0 release they did an incredible job. Media player, CD/DVD Burning, Music Store, .....
On my 1ghz Athlon with a Geforce2 440MX it works like a charm.
On that same machine he latest version of MusicMatch is nearly unusable with their gui responsiveness. And that is a program that's been windows native for years and through many versions. Similar issues came up when I tried WinAmp3 so I went back to use WinAmp 2.x.
To this day there probably isn't a windows program that runs perfectly on every possible PC hard/software configuration, not even the OS itself, so for a company coming out with an app that performs as ITunes for windows as their 1.o release, it is just impressive and I am sure that subsequent releases will improve the user experience.
Apple seems to be one of the few companies that actually achieves better performance in new releases, where as for most other companies their apps just become bigger, slower and their solution is always "oh, just get a newer, faster computer, then the app will run appropriately"
Will it replace WinAmp, WMP or any other player out there? No, but it others great features worth using for and for me it at least replaces MusicMatch and WinAmp3 for now.
So, great job Apple and keep up the good work
"Anyone know if and when Apple will roll-out the store for non-US customers?"
I'd like to double that-- Europe seems to be forgotton once again
yes, I can confirm this. I do not mind it spiking to 70% when loading something (every application does something similar) and I do not mind the idle CPU time, but I do get 100% usage when clicking n the GUI to move it. this is a Open GL problem. I don't know what Apple will do to fix tis except to perhaps render the GUI in DX9 which is better supported on cheap cards and renders better in windows if it needs to use software rendering. we will see, but for right now, I do not have a problem with the program because I can minimize it with out a sluggishness issue, I can shrink it to mini player with out an issue, and the windows size is the right size for managing my music. I did however submit a UI problem report about it, and I suggest you all do the same....it is under the help menu.
as far as memory, big deal.
Windows Memory management sucks anyhow and causes way to much swap because it tries to minimize the memory foot print of all applications running. well, hello, what good is it if you have 2 or 3 apps running but only use 30% of your memory? you end up swapping out a lot more than you need to. and don't say that it allows you to run more programs because it doesn't, it just under utilizes resources and slow down the user experience because of swapping.
now, of course, this is not under the control of iTunes for windows, it is the Operating system's decision on how to manage the memory, but iTunes can tweak this by telling windows it requires a bit more ram, so when the system is not running a lot of programs it gets the resources it likes for a good User Experience.
to all the Europeans out there......Hello!!! there are licensing issues to be dealt with for god sakes.
Apple does use OpenGL with almost all it's app's so if your graphics card doesn't support all OpendGL thats going to be problem.
Also some sluggish performance could be due to the fact that only ATI and Invidia make full fledge Mac counterparts meaning Apple did not probably optimize iTunes 4.1 for other graphic cards which didn't give full driver support. Apple has already released a knowledge base on iTunes and how fix 90% of issues. Apple is working on update to fix issues some folks are having while others are not. Remember Apple iTunes was fix platform and worked in pretty fixed set of hardware varibles and now going to 2 more platforms and unfixed set of hardware varibles means it could have some coding issues in the first verison release for certain users.
Main reason for not releasing on later verison was because of security issues and MS doesn't put full support on the older OS's anymore. Another is that all new competition that they are currently looking at are designed for XP and 2000.
I *think* its time you get a new system. SMP doesn't really give as much of a performance boost you are expecting.
Just my 0.02
May 2004 will be the release date for Apples Music Store Europe and it will include more Euro label exclusives just for the European customers.
Not sure if this will include Korea or Japan but it could.
Why is is such a surprise that people with hundreds of different system configurations all have different experiences with the same piece of software?
Either that or you all downloaded a different version of iTunes Windows.
Current Knowledge Base from Apple as of today.
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/itunes/windows/
Savoy Label Group Announces Over 3000 New and Classic Tracks Through Apple iTunes Music Store
10/17/2003
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Oct 17, 2003 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- The Savoy Label Group is pleased to announce the availability of its heralded catalog through Apple's iTunes Music Store. Home to a who's who of jazz such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstine, John Coltrane, Jimmy Scott and many others, as well as current luminaries such as Hubert Laws, James Moody, Lou Rawls and Andy Bey, SLG now offers over 3000 classic and contemporary tracks from the extensive catalog.
If it needs a card with good OpenGL perfomance, why isn't that little fact mentioned in system requirements? Relying on something and not mentioning it is braindead.
Futhermore, one doesn't use OpenGL for drawing user interface under Windows. It's a different OS with its own widget set and UI behaviour. The rendering system of Windows is not based on PDF and OpenGL. Hauling all this stuff on Windows is braindead. Since the interface of iTunes is rather spartan, it would be easier to make a new Windows-friendly UI with Windows-based tools. Then it would at least be consistent with other applications, and my desktop won't look like a dumpster full of different stuff (just imagine how Mac users would cry if MS Office came with Windows theme, and you'll understand me).
I am sitting here on a mac accessing the music store. Window resizing is suddenly very slow. It was not like this before.
Bandwidth?
I have used iTunes on my iBook since I got it. I didn't like the interface at first, but it grew on me over time.
Just installed it on my dual P3 1.1Ghz desktop box (512 Mb RAM). I had it scan my [network drive] shared music folder from my file server (13713 files / 37.2 days / 68.55 Gb) It took about half an hour, but not too much bandwidth. I have noticed the resizing problem, but it doesn't concern me because, well, I don't resize that often It plays really smoothly and the interface is nicely ported.
I'm really happy with iTunes... I'm going to uninstall Winamp shortly. And now I don't have to write that MP3 database that I've been putting off building
KOMPRESSOR
Ok - the reviewer is doing this for free. Ok, I've missed that one in the first place - so it's obviously more of a personal impression than a "review".
But still, that hardware IS old, and the Matrox card is not top of the line. And dual processors does NOT help. So i STILL think it would have been the most responsible thing for Eugenia to do to test this software on another machine before posting this "first impression"...
And some other good points other reviewers pointed out:
1. Apple is giving this away for FREE (stop whining)
2. Apple is ONLY doing this to sell more iPods (and to get Windows users interested in Macs)
3. The ONLY reason for the music store is to sell more iPods
4. The target area for this application is people who are likely to spend 300$ on an iPod. So just FORGET win9x and old machines.
And above all (even if you DONT want to buy an iPod or listen to old Rod Stewart songs on the music store haha):
iTunes has the best designed interface for organizing songs ever built into ANY player. This is what is so truely amazing about iTunes. It's so simple and just does everything you need it to do extremely well. Sooooo easy and fast to use. Nothing even comes close.
- Searching for songs is just soo cool! type in a few words and the songs are filtered INSTANTLY.
- The browse button is unique
- The ID tag maker rocks
- So easy to make playlists
- So easy to import songs
- Smart playlists so cool
Just wait till you get accustomed to the way it works, and you'll see what makes this app such a textbook example of Good Clean Usability Design (and family entertainment... )
Yes, i've been using iTunes on Mac for a long time, but spend most of my time working on Windows XP.
as far as memory, big deal.
Windows Memory management sucks anyhow and causes way to much swap because it tries to minimize the memory foot print of all applications running. well, hello, what good is it if you have 2 or 3 apps running but only use 30% of your memory? you end up swapping out a lot more than you need to. and don't say that it allows you to run more programs because it doesn't, it just under utilizes resources and slow down the user experience because of swapping.
You can change a lot of Windows' file management behavior, especially if you use a fixed swap file. I have very little swapping on my machine, and it's currently using a bit over half of the available RAM (one of my complaints about this particular system is that it only has 256MB of RAM, as I can often get it to max out and start swapping, though it's still not heavy on swapping even when it actually is paging to disk because of application requirements).
now, of course, this is not under the control of iTunes for windows, it is the Operating system's decision on how to manage the memory, but iTunes can tweak this by telling windows it requires a bit more ram, so when the system is not running a lot of programs it gets the resources it likes for a good User Experience.
The question, though, is why iTunes needs so much RAM in the first place. WMP is a little heavy when I've got it running at ~9.5MB. WinAmp tends to vary a bit more based on the playlist. iTunes blows them both out of the water. The feature difference between WMP and iTunes is minimal, if any, but the resource usage is very different.
umm...have you looked at other Jukeboxes? how many of them "fit" with the windows UI?
as far as OGL for the GUI....
how long do you think it would have taken them to rewrite iTunes for windows if they did not port their widgets and make a compatibility layer so that it can talk directly to the GFX card with out using the windows apis?
answer...A LOOOONNGGG time. not to mention they would have 2 code bases to maintain and would have to debug all the new code.
iTunes 4 is a mature code base, to NOT reuse it would have been "brain dead"
I am beginning to doubt just how much experience you have in the area Apple is playing in. I am not saying you are an inexperience programmer, but you know windows programming. that is a totally different beast than cross platform programming while running a business that pays for its software development from its hardware sales.
if they had 2 code bases, that would mean they would have to fund a new project that is not brining in much secondary revenue (the iPod sales and that is about it, the Music store makes them very few pennies on the dollar, they operate at a little more than break even)
so the project would be costing them money and not be benefiting their revenue stream much at all. by keeping the code base the same, they save in development time, debugging time, and deployment time. all they needed to do was to make some drivers for zero-conf to work and the iPod to work with the new features, build a layer that will talk to the GFX card(which would not affect performance if you have good OGL support) and port the needed widgets.
so stop complaining and start thinking.
I have it on a 300MHz PII
Resizing is slow, but playing over Network just works fine with ca. 30% of processor usage. I can't say what happen with a lot of songs local because I have all on the mac.
as I can often get it to max out and start swapping, though it's still not heavy on swapping even when it actually is paging to disk because of application requirements).
are you trying to say something different here? you are saying "it is not heavy on swapping even when it is [swapping]"
paging IS swapping. a page fault requires you to go out to the drive to get data that is not in the memory. sure. you are not removing something, but the CPU is waiting for the new memory so the fact that it is not in memory is what take so long, nit the sending the replaced data to the hard drive.
as far as the RAM requirements, that is because they needed to make a computability layer that would allow them to talk directly to the GFX card(sort of like what a game does). the layer was necessary so they could use the main code base for iTunes. this means that windows version is basically free to them, no company resources are going out to develop an application that doe snot bring in any revenue (the music revenue is almost nothing after everyone else takes their share) and it allows them to deploy new features for both platforms AT THE SAME TIME.
how pissed would you be if the mac users got a cool new feature and you had to wait?
also look at it from this perspective, they would have to wait to update the music store features until both code bases were in parity.
so it was smart business sense for a small price.
I'm on my Inspiron 4100 laptop here at work, 1 GHz Celeron, 768 MB RAM, XP. iTunes uses 2-10% of CPU while playing an MP3, averaging about 4-5%. There are occasional blips up to 20%, but I don't know why.
UI speed is slower than for an Explorer window, but certainly not debilitating. I'm thinking that something is wrong with the reviewer's system or installation.
sorry..I should have said "the CU is waiting for the new DATA" no the new memory.
silly me :-p
arrgggg....that should be CPU not CU
I didn't read all 328 messages from this thread, but just in case this has not been mentioned yet, I have noticed today that iTunes does indeed consume 70% CPU time on a 800MHz PIII after having imported a 2000 mp3 library and then selected the Sound Check option in the preferences.
In this case, iTunes had to analyse the 2000 songs which takes some times (about 20-30 minutes) and does consume 70% CPU time.
But once the analysis is done, the CPU usage goes back to a normal value.
so, itunes uses the CPU a lot when it is doing a lot of work.
who-da thunk it.
Right, but I have to add that even while analysing the 2000 songs, I was able to listen to my music or use other features without any problem.
iTunes for Windows is indeed a wonderful application and the few glitch should not hide the amazing features it offers.
You really can only chuckle when you read many of the PC reviews that knock iTMS for Windows. A fair comparison would be to have a Mac setup with the usual stuff and a PC with little or no stuff loaded. Since there are 1000's, maybe millions of variations in how someone can set up their PC, it is almost useless to compare the speeds of two completely different apps on two completely different OS'.
My PC using friends (almost all are criminal types) tend to have some stupid "mouse pointer enhancing crap" running, their machine is usually under constant attack if it is hooked up to the 'net and their CPU is spending a lot of time doing overhead or background work. I realize that this may be "real-world PC" situations but blaming iTMS for being slow (on a dual 550?) seems silly. You can be certain Apple didn't release Windows software only to be shredded apart, you can sleep at night knowing that they spent every extra dollar to make sure that the Mac experience (you gotta love it) was very much a part of using iTMS on a PC.
Blame the PC architecure that lets almost any hack to write code that will trip up almost any other software, regardless of how well it is written. Knowing that I can now get Mac software for a PC might make me want to switch......... < /end dream sequence > < /wake the hell up! >
And what's up with the articles author using the machine she is using? My expecation for an Industry Writer and alledged expert is that she would have the pimpest PC a manufacturer made. Dual 550's? Maybe I should yank out my old G3 266 and see how iTMS works.....hold on.... I have that already. No it isn't perfect but HELLO McFly, it is 5 years old. Doesn't that make it almost 35 years old in computer time....like a dual 550 would be?
ANYWAY, Welcome to Mac experience PC people. Don't fight it, love it! You are finally getting to use software written by people that care about your user experience. And like Martha says, "That's a good thing."
umm...have you looked at other Jukeboxes? how many of them "fit" with the windows UI?
Very few, but most of them try to keep some consistency with Windows. This app, on the other hand, barely makes any attempts to look like anything but an Apple metal-themed app. Instead of red, green, and yellow gum-drops we get an X Square, and Line. Most players at least give you some choices, and WMP gives you the option to enable the Windows border.
as far as OGL for the GUI....
how long do you think it would have taken them to rewrite iTunes for windows if they did not port their widgets and make a compatibility layer so that it can talk directly to the GFX card with out using the windows apis?
Probably the same time or less, as their main application code should be isolated from the UI code, and it doesn't take very long to build the UI code for a Windows application. Or they could've pulled the UI code from the QuickTime player (which is almost what it looks like they did anyway), though that has problems of it's own.
answer...A LOOOONNGGG time. not to mention they would have 2 code bases to maintain and would have to debug all the new code.
They still have 2 code bases to maintain and still have to debug all of the new code. The difference is where the code is, and we really have no idea how much of the code they maintained from the Mac OS X code base.
iTunes 4 is a mature code base, to NOT reuse it would have been "brain dead"
To not reuse the core functionality would've been brain-dead, but reusing GUI code when the two operating systems clearly use different UIs and different methods for producing those UIs is brain-dead. Mozilla/Firebird even suffers from problems related to not using a native UI, but at least their UI toolkit is more mature on Windows.
I am beginning to doubt just how much experience you have in the area Apple is playing in. I am not saying you are an inexperience programmer, but you know windows programming. that is a totally different beast than cross platform programming while running a business that pays for its software development from its hardware sales.
Apple makes plenty of money from selling iPods, which is the primary area of income for this particular application. They also make plenty of money from selling OS X upgrades, which is another area of income for this application. If they're trying to sell Macs or iPods to Windows users with this software, they're alienating some amount of their potential user base. They're also selling their online music store service, which could make them a very nice income if they can get a wide user base on Windows.
if they had 2 code bases, that would mean they would have to fund a new project that is not brining in much secondary revenue (the iPod sales and that is about it, the Music store makes them very few pennies on the dollar, they operate at a little more than break even)
If they operate the store at little more than break even, they're getting screwed by the record companies. It costs almost as much on a per-song basis to buy music from them as it does to go out and buy CDs. Most estimates for how the money is distributed in online sales put most of the money in the software developers' pockets. With a good piece of software, it's likely that they could dramatically increase iPod sales, which is certainly not chump change. Even with what they have we could see an increase, as I've seen people around the office talking about getting an iPod now that it supports Windows without even having tried the software.
so the project would be costing them money and not be benefiting their revenue stream much at all. by keeping the code base the same, they save in development time, debugging time, and deployment time. all they needed to do was to make some drivers for zero-conf to work and the iPod to work with the new features, build a layer that will talk to the GFX card(which would not affect performance if you have good OGL support) and port the needed widgets.
Yet OpenGL support isn't even mentioned in the requirements, as someone else already pointed out. The interface has some concessions to the Windows UI, yet doesn't bother with others, showing that they did make some modifications, though at what level is hard to tell. This obviously was neither a complete port nor a simple translation-layer approach, and so it falls short of either near-complete code portability or perfect performance.
so stop complaining and start thinking.
I'm trying to think of ways that this could be worse, and I've thought of many, but then I can think of many that would make it better, too. Interesting, this thinking thing, it feels much like what I do most of the time, yet how do I know I'm actually thinking? hmmm... I must ponder this now.
are you trying to say something different here? you are saying "it is not heavy on swapping even when it is [swapping]"
paging IS swapping. a page fault requires you to go out to the drive to get data that is not in the memory. sure. you are not removing something, but the CPU is waiting for the new memory so the fact that it is not in memory is what take so long, nit the sending the replaced data to the hard drive.
I was using swapping in terms of actively swapping to the page file, whereas paging would mean that the applications loaded require more memory than is physically available, therefore the page file is being used for some applications. It is possible to have the page file in use without actively using it, because many applications may have large amounts of memory allocated but not in use. Ideally you will swap data out of RAM into the page file that is not being used heavily, so most of the time that your system has that much RAM allocated you won't actually be using all of it. Similarly, iTunes could be allocating 40MB of RAM and only actually using it when you're caching large video streams, and it will be reported as using 40MB regardless of whether or not it's actually being used.
as far as the RAM requirements, that is because they needed to make a computability layer that would allow them to talk directly to the GFX card(sort of like what a game does). the layer was necessary so they could use the main code base for iTunes. this means that windows version is basically free to them, no company resources are going out to develop an application that doe snot bring in any revenue (the music revenue is almost nothing after everyone else takes their share) and it allows them to deploy new features for both platforms AT THE SAME TIME.
Optimally, the UI would be isolated from the code that implements the functionality and you could attach a new UI with little effort, even adding new features. They had to put in resources to develop a compatibility layer if this is in fact what they did, though the lack of any notification of DirectX or OpenGL requirements makes it questionable (and isn't OpenGL supposed to be fairly portable anyway? OpenGL multi-platform games rarely have a large discrephancy in graphics code between versions).
how pissed would you be if the mac users got a cool new feature and you had to wait?
Considering how long iTunes has been available for Mac OS, does this really matter?
also look at it from this perspective, they would have to wait to update the music store features until both code bases were in parity.
If the music store is using an HTML-based content delivery system then you shouldn't even need updates to the client.
so it was smart business sense for a small price.
Yet it took them 4 versions to deliver and still left a bad taste in some users' mouths. I just wonder how long they waited to start porting, because if they've been working with even a small team for the entire time they've thrown a lot of money into this.
If it needs a card with good OpenGL perfomance, why isn't that little fact mentioned in system requirements?
Why would you have a card with bad OpenGL performance? Why would you have any hardware without good support for open standards? No comprendo.
Running Win2k Professional
- 1.6Ghz Laptop with nVidia Graphics Card (Toshiba Tecra "Wannabe" Corporate machine)
I was excited by the recent release of iTunes for Windows and have not been disappointed. The UI issues Eugenia is having are not occuring on my Win2K machine. I am very happy with the Visualizer component - just like the Mac version, very nice. After reading many of the messages here, looks to me like Apple didn't test it out very well on WinXP.
But hey this is the first release!
Thanks.
To me, I notice in the Music store, all of the cover art and links change the mouse cursor to the Mac hand icon, not the Windows one. I've seen the same behavior in QuickTime that's embedded in webpages. QuickTime for me has always shown lackluster performance when rendered in HTML. My guess is that the bulk of the Music Store is QuickTime embedded objects and that's slowing it down.
I have loads of music in Microsoft format (WMA) and it seem that iTune can't load them in the Library and can't play them...
This is a big missing feature. Hope it will be there in 4.2 !
Not a CPU hog here, it work great, mabe a bit slow on the GUI but that's all. On a P4HT/3.2 Ghz.
No, WMA support will not be there in 4.2, nor in 4.3 or 5.0.
You have to consider that the Online Music War has just started April 28th when Apple release the iTMS. And there is a lot of money to win.
To the right side David: Apple / iTune / AAC / iPod
To the left side Goliath: Windows / MusciMatch / BuyMusic.com / Rhapsody / WMA / WMA Compatible Players.
And the winner is... well, you know the story.
how the hell are they gonna know what cards have good OGL and the ones that don't? if it is a 3d accelerated gfx card, it has OGL.
all that needs to be done is to tweak the compatibility layer to make it perform better.
I am not going to keep arguing this. it is a difference of opinion on how best to implement it. I am sure apple did a cost benefit analysis before they decided to build it the way they did. only a stupid company would pick a more costly rout.
Re: Ron Smith
Hmmm... maybe because I don't do any 3D work and don't care about speed of 3D rendering?
Re: debman
Just how long would it take to recreate a functionally similiar GUI in any visual interface design tool? I don't think it is longer then porting all those mac-specific low-level rendering libraries. I'd say, a week of work of a qualified programmer.
Real cross-platform programming is done with libraries that are designed to work on several systems, such as QT. What Apple did was *not* cross-platform programming, since they dragged their entire platform with them to another OS. And dragging something that was never designed to leave OS X results in really bad perfomance.
There are several native music players for Windows, for example (now deceased) Apollo and foobar2000. Even WMP sometimes tries to behave like a Windows app (it doesn't happen a lot, but it happens more often then with iTunes).
Feels wired. Apple has new software out and I can't use it on my MAC. PC users are so luck.
Windows 98 Entering Non-Supported phase January 16, '04, then end of life a year later ( http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle.mspx ). That might be part of the reason Apple chose not to support it.
how the hell are they gonna know what cards have good OGL and the ones that don't? if it is a 3d accelerated gfx card, it has OGL.
The cards used on Macs aren't very different from the best-selling cards for x86 PCs. The OpenGL support of the drivers can vary, though.
all that needs to be done is to tweak the compatibility layer to make it perform better.
I am not going to keep arguing this. it is a difference of opinion on how best to implement it. I am sure apple did a cost benefit analysis before they decided to build it the way they did. only a stupid company would pick a more costly rout.
Interesting enough, when I installed iTunes on my XP machine (about 10 minutes ago, it's adding my MP3 files at the moment), the QuickTime options were slightly different (when I went to disable it from my system tray). QuickTime's UI has DirectDraw acceleration (the proper way to do 2D rendering with DirectX pre-9, and more compatible in Windows than OpenGL in most cases, especially given that most card vendors have proprietary OpenGL extensions and implementations). iTunes itself, however, is missing these options (QuickTime lets you choose between GDI and DirectDraw).
My home computer (WinXP, P4 2GHz, 512MB RAM, GF4 Ti4200) has the exact same latency issue with resizing the iTunes window, and still maxes out the CPU usage while doing so (despite having a larger CPU and a better video card). If it was using OpenGL for the interface and for resizing, there should be little to no CPU use on this system, OpenGL performance in games is excellent, to say the least.
Does anyone know how can I change/choose the visualizations (visual effects)? Is that possible. I am a Windows XP user
Being a Mac user i find this all very intriguing. Sounds like a typical 1.0 iApp from Apple. No iApp was very refined on there intial release, but have become very nice with each new update.
I love all the UI complaints. Good stuff.
It's an Apple app and that's apparently how it will stay. Windows Media Player doesn't look like it belongs on my Mac either and I hate how it quits when i close it (not really a Mac behavior).
I can say that it would have been interesting to see them translate things appropriately to the native Windows UI. Even in functionality, i mean, even on the Mac I never really thought the "Maximize" plus sign widget was of much use. Still, it would have been cool if they honored the default behavior of that being a Windows port and all.
Beyond that all, it is interesting to look at the bigger picture here and that's a DRM war. It's brewing and all the players are lining up. I'd really like to see a standard light DRM format for ALL digital music stores. Come on, I mean, this is like walking into one music store and buying a CD that you can only use with a particular CD Player. These DRM-managed digital audio files should just work everywhere. In other words, I can move between stores and players with a single file type. And I'm not talking just about Apple. Apple's is by far the best, least-invasive DRM option at the moment.
Something will rise to the top, just spewing...
(There's a lot of posts in this topic - yeesh.)
No problems here...since people are putting up numbers for comparison:
P4 2.8c, 1gb DDR400 RAM (running dual-channel), Radeom 9500 Pro video card, 1,700+ files in library
No issues with scrolling...very slight pause before resizing, but seriously...so what? How many of us resize windows so much where that really matters? =)
Runs great. Organizes great. Music store is top-notch. Quick and easy, and the quality of the files is superb...sounds great on the PC and the iPod.
Memory usage is fine...around 18mb, much less than Netscape, for example. Besides, if you're running a computer where 18mb of memeory usage is a problem with how cheap RAM is nowadays, that's your own fault. =)
Processor usage during normal is is negligible.
I give it a solid A...would've gotten an A+ had it included an option to run it solely from the system tray. *shrug* No biggie.
Very good review, Eugenia. I think Itunes is great. I didn't have any problems at all. It was very responsive to me. I also like that you have a choice of what bit, I always like 320 because it has the best sound.
> The store: Took me a while to figure out how to get a listing for PJ. >There's no form box to search in, only a drop down menu for genre. >Then I noticed "power search" in what looks like the embedded web >page, and I click it and am rewarded by....
Did you notice the "Search Music Store" form in the upper right of the window.....?
My wife's Compaq is the minimum configuration required: Pentium 500MHz 128MB and Win XP (Disk grinds on all apps due to low memory, for some reason when I put in another 128MB module the PC starts crashing unpredictably.)
Well iTunes is a great Jukebox and compared to Windows Media 9 it is a heck of a lot easier to use. My Wife gave up on media player a while ago, she gets so frustrated with it. She is like most people, scared of computers and thinks their impossible for her to learn. I showed her iTunes and she was apprehensive at first afraid of looking stupid. She started using it and immediately got it down. Very easy to use and even ripping and burning came easy to her. I showed her the Store, well the rest is history, the new Artist Playlists are awesome, and researching and getting to music blew her away.
In addition, we played around with sharing via rendezvous and were streaming from my Mac Library. It works beautifully. As far as CPU utilization, After subtracting the Performance Monitors usage, it comes it ranges between 11 and 15%. That is really awesome for a Pentium 500MHz Pc with no SIMD unit to speak of and limited memory. It also seems that Apple did a lot of tuning of QT 6.4 for Windows, it is a lot snappier. (The Mac upgrade is awesome fast as well.)
Hope this helps.
Reading Eugenia comment's is somewhat reminds of me Dvorak years ago. Boosting about Apple and then OS/2 and then M$. Whatta way to make living.
Eugenia make some good point that the UI is slow and takes up too much CPU cycles. But the comment is somewhat have negative aura. Have bad experience with Apple that you now hate it so much Eugenia?
The problem itself is in Apple. The day Apple communicate effectively with their customers back in the Kawasaki days are long gone. Apple keep playing "misteryous way" in communicating their vision with their customers. Seems likely Steve still enjoy surprises, when most of people are old enough to get more surprises.
So Steve are you going to sell iPod for the rest of yourlife or you want to make history? Putting one software to windows to create an extra boost for your hardware sales is just not going to cut it. It's good, but not good enough by your standard Steve. Do you think people will ever have to buy an iPod just by playing with iTunes? You forgot how people want choices. iPod is the great stuff today, but without any hassles Sony sells more hardware than you do it with iPod.
I suggest Apple to communicate effectively with their customers and play a bigger league today. Port the OSX to x86 standard box, Steve or you will missed the chance again. Most business users are don't give a damn on what good technology is, they just want something that works. You said once "Computer for the rest of us" now the really computer for the rest of us is a windows machine. Macs is great but it doesn't matter. Most people doesn't even aware what Apple is. Make them say something about Microsoft they will nod. Myself was an avid Apple users but my last Apple purchase is back then in 1994-1996. I spent hundreds thousands then for Intel box. Guess what you can imagine people really want choices. Give them Steve. Most of them doesn't even aware what DRM is. They don't care, they just eat everything Bill sales.
Most people here are commenting a very good stuff about Apple new iTunes. Some are giving you a very good feedback. The UI, the stuff, just tune it. We hate to see ourself praying for Apple back in the day 1997 was. Success
with PowerMac in 1994 just to find doomed days few years later. And most people are now giving up thinking Apple, they move on Steve. Yes that people can live even without Apple (You proved ONCE back in the day in NeXT day),
but these people are tooo valuable to speak a good word about Apple. They work harder than most of people at Apple and not getting paid.
Now just give the shot. Make my day. Just beat Bill's ass. Make OSX for Intel today at least pre-announce it! just like Bill always do. Don't keep people wonder. Make it so or i will beat both of you in you own game. Don't make me.
Success to you all. Sorry this is not a good mail to write but I getting tire reading all this news while Apple is getting no interest of whatsoever we do for them.
Didn't take the time to go through all the comments, but...
Has anyone noticed the nasty hissing noise that comes out of your speakers when you start up iTunes?
Also, I noticed, for me, when I start up the visualizations, even in low-res and small size, they are all jerky, however, when I move my mouse around, they go go much more fluently. Very odd behavior if you ask me.
All in all, I find iTunes to be, unfortunately, very sluggish and just another display of Apple's innability to hire a decent Windows programmer.
Ok, this is the coolest thing to happen to my computer in a long long time. So nice to see that quality applications can be written for Windows.
"Just because resources are abundant doesn't mean you write bloated code"
.
.
I wouldn't exactly call XP a non-bloated OS.
it seems that everytime i try to connect to the internet (dial-up), the sound stutters (a bug maybe?). the visualization is a cpu hog also. everything else is great especially for organizing my huge collection of mp3s. if it can retrieve info of my mp3s automatically like WMP and Musicmatch, it would've been cooler.
Yep Steve did it again, he keeps surprising us (positive).
In this sluggish IT economics they managed to keep the stocks rising by innovating constantly, hey guys (at Apple) do you have time to sleep?
For all the negative people, you can always uninstall it (who did it?)
For the writer of the story I feel sorry that she needs to write in her free time on ancient hardware, but thanks for the effort.
For the owner of this site, don't be cheap and give that girl an award for her hard work and buy her a NEW pc.
Keep on rockin' in a free world
366 comments must be a record. Whatever you think of iTunes it's generated a lot of conversation (or argument).
The point is, there shouldn't be one, plain and simple...
David: WMP works perfectly fine on my computer, it is not slow, and features more, yet, iTunes is the one that is sluggish.
Stephen: I wouldn't call it bloated, especially compred to say, a few gig Linux install.
My Windows directory is 1.5gb, which is not bad in the slightest, considering OSes today are generally much larger.
I play a lot with this and I have mixt feelings. I was hearing a lot of nice comments about iTunes from the Mac users. Now I had the chance to play with this and to see if is really better than most of the Windows similar products.
...
...
Overall I give a indulgent 7 out of 10, and this only because the simplicity can be handy, that it has a nice burning and might be easy to use the Library once you are use with it.
You mey see the complete review at: http://www.spynets.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=1906
WMP has more features? you have got to be kidding right?!
name them.
at any rate, the resize is sluggish...so dang what. as for moving windows around, I turn all my visual effects off any how in windows and run classic mode, so when moving the window, I get a nice little outline marker rather than the window contents. it moves nice and snappy. all the features in the program are snappy, I get no such snaps and hisses, something must be wrong with your hardware, but I am running on a 1.1 celery notebook, so the speakers blow anyway...I might just not be hearing it.
but as far as features, it is a no contest. WMP CAN have al the features of iTunes, but you have to pay for them all. and even after than I don't think you can get network sharing of your music library (never tried it, have a mac and a PC notebook), and you certainly can not use smart playlists in WMP, that is really nice when you have a huge library and you want to burn a cd really quick of music that meats certain criteria.
did you use the network sharing?
did you compare the costs involved with MMJB and WMP to get the SAME features? how about smart playlists!!!
I don't think you gave it a true run through if you think it is nothing special. (it constantly wins industry awards for best music jukebox!!)
reading the feedback here and other sites from windows users, I finally understand all the posts on mac issues regarding price.
Most of the windows users commenting are running old, underpowered rigs w/minimal ram.
The irony is evident when extapolating those users to the g5 speed threads.ie, the ones slamming apple the most about speed issues are likely to be running celerons w/256 megs of ram.
lol!
Udky - I just tried to read your review, but had to give up a third of the way. May want to re-read some of it.
and you certainly can not use smart playlists in WMP, that is really nice when you have a huge library and you want to burn a cd really quick of music that meats certain criteria.
You may not. However, on MY machine I just select New Playlist and then voila, I can filter my library by Genre, Artist, Album, Video!,whatever or, indeed, any combination of the above.
Like MS Office, I suspect that iTunes and WMP have many features that are overlooked or not required by the majority of users.
Here is Apple's support page for iTunes for Windows:
http://www.info.apple.com/usen/itunes/windows/
To be honest, I was a bit skeptical about this release from Apple. Many windows users were disappointed with Apple's somewhat hack job of QuickTime. And I don't even WANT to begin to describe the job they did with iPod Manager (didn't even work with many PCs) and their choice of MusicMatch Juke Sh*t.
But they have put my concerns aside for iTunes. They have done an excellent job and has now replaced Winamp on my computer. And can I say, iPod is FINALLY a part of my system now, and no longer a burden. Hey Apple, I don't have to use 3rd party software anymore just to use *your* product!. Thank you Apple.
And for the reviewer's slowdowns - well... maybe you should replace that Dual-Celery with something that isn't a vegetable.
Quote: " I give it a solid A...would've gotten an A+ had it included an option to run it solely from the system tray."
On the Mac version there are three button in the corner. One to expand, one to minimize - the last to close the window entirely. This last option does NOT close down iTunes and as such it is running "from the system tray" (this being a Mac the system tray hence being the dock).
??????I wonder if anyone thought of trying the last button???????
I believe WinAmp closes down if you use that button so a lot of people may intuitively have missed that (is that an oxymoron?) on iTunes.
Anyway, let me know if this solves the system tray issue.
Also - is it possible to enque tracks by right-clicking the track?
I saw this just once on a friends PC, but we were never able to relocate the feature.
Best,
Nick
I do like iTune if I don't what to be lost in details and just to listen plain music, w/o any fancy stuff. With this, his part in my media life is done. I play a lot with effects and mixing songs and I think you agree that iTunes is not the one for this. If you have a good quality song then it's okay but if you don't, that's it, you cannot change this (no noise reduction, signal leverage, distortion control and so on). I understand that for users that do more than listen or purchase a song, iTunes is not the best option. Even the crossfade is not as it should.
However, I will still keep this as fun and for the times when I simply just want to listen the music or radio (only few of them with the format that can be play) and that's it. I don't see it to become my favorite player in any case, unless I stop playing with the digital music.
Share music? Cam be done with a dedicated apps. Besides, all this purchase share stuff don't work outside US. Also, the streaming, is not even for 100kbps connection. iPod and stuff? Hm, it will be a shame if is not working. This is a must, and is okay.
Peace!
"It's a problem because there IS NO GOOD REASON TO UPGRATE for many people. Anyone who upgrades simply for the sake of having the latest operating system is just stupid."
"I can also buy an airline ticket to Europe for a few hundred dollars. And when I get back, I can turn on my computer running Windows 98, do my college papers, run my statistical calculations, check my email, do research on the Web, just as efficiently as the guy running XP."
This is almost funny. Gee, you can do everything you want running Win98 EXCEPT THE LATEST APPLICATIONS. How much grey matter does it take to notice a reason to upgrade when it hits you in the face?
To those who still insist that all the latest and greatest apps should support legacy OS with the typical..."even the latest MS app supports win98" excuse, take a look at the req for MS Photo Story 2 or Movie Maker 2 in the Plus! DME suite:
System Requirements
The following hardware and software are required to use Microsoft® Plus! Digital Media Edition:
Operating system
Requirement: Microsoft Windows® XP Home Edition, Microsoft Windows XP Professional or Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition.
Haha! so much for legacy support.
As a developer, i would also abandon win98 because of all the instabilities due to not having protected memory, multi-threading support yadayadayada. Commercially, it would not make sense either. To support such and audience who would expects their 5 year old system (which they could have easily upgraded to a P4 or Athlon for 399) would suggest that one has a target audience that is is stingy as fcuk. You're not gonna get much returns from that. This is certainly not worth the effort in compatibility testing that is needed to make iTunes (and more importantly QT 6.4) work on a legacy win98 system.
For those who think that suporting a complex app like iTunes (and Quicktime) on both Win32 and NT platforms is an easy task, think again! You don't know how difficult writing huge programs are until you have done one. This is not some command line VB or Java app that you can develop overnight. This is the whole THING! QT framework, DRM, MP3 Database (criteria in smart playlist).
P.S: Photo Story 2 is such a lame copy of iPhoto 2... right down to the image resize slider. - Innovation for MS is to copy everything good.
Now back to XCode
I just installed iTunes on my P4 laptop (1 GHz, 512 ram) and experienced none of the sluggishness described, at all!
Could it have anything with iTunes being incompatible with certain gfx drivers to do?
I've got a Radeon 7500.
Well I tried iTunesWin. I was excited by it at first especially since I do the AquaXP thing.
I like its' features, I like its' ease of use, but I do not like the sound quality nor to I like the amount of resources (ie RAM) it uses.
I work in the music industry, so my ear having been professional trained to pick up on sound quality.
For me, right now, QCD Player with it's default MP3 decoder plugin or the MAD decoder plugin and iZotopes Ozone analog modelling DSP plugin sound way better than iTunesWin and it's "sound enhancer".
I find it funny how many people who are "audiophiles" or "professionals" in the music industry makes comments about iTunes lack of sound-enhancing features.
The truth is that iTunes is wonderful at not being in the way, giving almost pristine sound reproduction, which is what a true audiophile would want.
FYI, I'm a professional musician, a former recording studio engineer, and have worked in the music industry since 1986. Is iTunes everything for everyone? Of course not. But it's not supposed to be. It's designed to be a music jukebox/filing system/burning utility/music store. I think it does those things well.
How about better plug-in support. Better support for differing services. Oh, and the service that matches your track info, downloads album art, etc...
You can burn CD's with WMP, no big deal there.
And yes, WMP does support smart playlists... just from the fact that you think it doesn't shows that you haven't really used WMP.
How many people do you know that listen to music absolutely flat?
Nobody! The first thing most listeners to will do is at least boost the bass and the treble. Most everyone will adjust the EQ and sound enhancement features to suit their particular taste and sound preception abilties.
Most music professionals have high quality reference systems to listen to music on, the average home user does not.
And iTunesWin and all the other media players out there are targeted at the average home user.
I didn't say that iTunesWin doesn't reproduce the sounds well, I said it doesn't sound "good". Those are two completely different things. You and I both know that.
I'm running iTunes on a PIII 500, 256mb ram, WinXP Pro and an ATI 64mb Radeon 9000. It runs as well as any other program on my rather old computer. Moving the window around is fine, resizing does take a tiny bit longer than other apps but I've had none of the problems this guy talks about.
Well, i got though a few pages of replies here and got bored reading the same thing, so skipped to the end to reply...
iTunes needs XP I would think because of the way it does window managing. Under OSX it uses Quartz (which is OpenGL) but in windows it uses software rendering which is not supported by 98 (the type of software rendering that is, before any one complains). To make it 98 and XP compatible would probably also make it quite unstable.
As for CPU usage, it works pretty well on x86 machines considering it is based on RISC/PPC code. On my G4 800 it uses about 5-15% of the CPU time. 5% when its playing, 15% when it caches some of the track and deals with window movements.
As for WMA support and other online store support, are you people stupid? Thats like saying 'Why doesn't WM9 support the apple store or AAC' - its marketting, you don't add support to you rivals systems if its going to take away customers from yuor own services. However, ont e Mac side of things, iTunes can playback anything that quicktime supports, so if thats the same on the PC side, all you need is an open source quicktime codec to support WMA or OGG, there is an OGG one for the Mac so it must be portable to PC QT, i would think.
i am using itunes on intel celeron 600 mhz and 64 mb ram
with out any problem.
The smart playlist is the best feature in it .
Well, it installed without problem for me, I told it where I store my mp3's and I spent a weekend creating dynamic playlists (possibly the best feature of the program) and modifying all my ~5600 mp3's to have correct genre's and years as well as adding album art...
The only problems I have with it at the moment is that it will enter some songs in twice (one with the correct tags and another like this "artist - songname") which tends to be annoying, the other is when highlighting tracks for multiple changes and using the keyboard for it, when you press up it'll jump to the top of the list and begin highlighting the tracks above where I started, which can also get very annoying.
Aside from those 2 annoying bits, I quite like it... it also helps out a *lot* with my ipod in keeping my playlists fresh (this is where dynamic playlists are a godsend!).
I also tested it out on my win2k laptop at work with regards to locking it and itunes kept pumping out the music... haven't checked with my xp machine at home to see if it still plays on that.
With regards to complaints about no win9x support, it's about time those OS's were put down... it's like trying to tell w9x'ers that they shouldn't move onto a 9x os cause win3.11 still works... It's called progress and development fellas.
Apple could very easily write a WMP plug-in for their music store, it would appear under the 'services' tab.
As for AAC... it is not an Apple format, and heck, I wouldn't mind WMP supporting it, even though I have no AAC files, at least, until I start buying music on iTMS.
Well, while AAC is an open standard, Apple's Fairplay DRM is not. At least not yet. So while you could play regular AAC files in other players as they start to support the format, those songs purchased from the iTMS will require iTunes for now. I believe QuickTime has it's hand in allowing AAC Fairplay files to work on authorized computers.
Anyway, if I'm mistaken about any of that so be it, but it would be nice to see this Fairplay DRM either licensed to others or opened up in some way so this format spreads. It certainly is the most fair to legitimate consumers looking for an alternative to piracy.
I have been using Musicmatch for the past year, and while I find the iTunes interface more pleasing in most respects (especially when managing my iPod), there are already a couple of Musicmatch features that I miss:
1)ID3 tag management - Musicmatch is excellent at managing my music's ID3 tags, going so far as to search for a single tag based on nothing but a filename.
2)Ripping configuration - iTunes does not let me configure the placement and format of the songs that I import off of CDs. Musicmatch lets me specify the folder, filename format etc.
Those are my only gripes thus far, version 4.2 possibly??
It seems to have to do with the "sound check" feature. I experienced a super-slow UI when turned on. Everything is back to snappy when the feature is disabled.
I installed it on Windows 2000 in my laboratory and stream music from a machine in my office. I am experiencing none of the problems described and my machine is only a 1.6 P4, but I do have 512MB RAM. I have about 10000 songs installed and it scrolls through like a charm.
The machine I have has none of the junk that most people use, so perhaps there is something else causing the slowdown. I understand that Apple had trouble working with the Windows interface, so perhaps they would be better to give people the option of the standard windows theme. I know Steve Jobs is all about beauty, but . . . . . . .
I also experienced window resizing problems on my P3 1GHz with 512mb of ram and a 32mb GeForce2 GTS.
No scrolling problems, but then I prefer the scrollwheel over all scrollbar widgets.
Good review.:)
Speaking as a programmer, I would guess that some of the CPU hogging problem is down to iTunes scanning music files on your hard disk. With a bit of luck, that'll go away after a short time, depending on how much music you have.
The sluggishness when resizing seems worst when displaying the web browser type view of the iTunes store. This has to be the HTML widget, which as someone noted previously, is likely to be the KHTML port. KHTML isn't the fastest at resizing (relayout) to start with, so after being ported over to OS X and then again to Windows, it's bound to be a little under optimised right now.
There's also some sluggishness when resizing if you're browsing using the multi-paned view where you see Genre, Artist, Album and then a big list at the bottom. This is probably down to Apple's widget resizing being not quite as fast as it could be. Optimising the drawing of such complicated looking widgets (see the great use of gradients and pixmaps) is a tricky thing. The tricks that have to be pulled to get Keramik (KDE's default widget style) to render quickly on X11 are many, so perhaps Apple just didn't get around to that yet.
All in all, I would say that Apple just wanted to get the app out of the door and made some perhaps questionable decisions as to priorities. Personally speaking, I'm not too bothered by the window resize being sluggish - I'll just leave it at one size or mini mode, and use alt-tab and the taskbar to handle windows, like I usually do. For the five minutes I'm in Windows to see this thing, anyway.
Someone mentioned the UI inconsistency. This is indeed a shame and is something I've come to expect after the horror of QuickTime. It seems to me that Apple are the masters of the pretty UI but terrible at consistency, standards compliance, etc. This is sad, considering their past, but doesn't stop me wanting to a Mac
Rik
This is from a long time Mac user who also uses Windows:
1) Works fine on Windows XP laptop, but CANNOT buy a song! Several interactions with Apple Support have been a waste of time. Cancel that iPod purchase!
2) iTunes crashed my Dell worksation with Win 2000 Pro. Re-start hung up half way through - could not get around it - not even via Safe Mode! Had to reinstall OS.
Very disappointed!