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.
Post a Comment
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 plac