Saturday, 06 March 2010

Windows Media Player and iTunes

Since I started using my Blackberry for music, I've been using Windows Media Player to manage my music on my PC. Previously, I used to use WinAmp, which has nice features, but the Blackberry sync software supports only Windows Media Player and iTunes. It wasn't a big hassle to move to WMP.

However, since I recently won an iPod Shuffle, I was left with a bit of a problem: the iPod is supported only by iTunes; there don't seem to be any working alternatives. (I thought we'd moved away from this whole proprietary software thing, but apparently not.)

So I had to install iTunes, and I thought I'd see if it could satisfy my needs well enough to replace WMP. After some googling, I exported my WMP playlists to iTunes, and they came in OK. I tried creating Smart Playlists, and they were OK except that you cannot create a Smart Playlist that is based on the path to any particular music folder, unlike in WMP, and I found that really irritating. WinAmp's dynamic playlists are a fair bit more flexible than iTunes's or WMP's, however.

The interface of iTunes is quite slick, but I prefer WMP's "stacked covers" when viewing artists. iTunes is also unable to retrieve album information and album art unless the album's on iTunes with name etc. exactly the same, which seems to eliminate 95% of my music. WMP, by comparison, is really flexible in that respect, and even lets you choose close matches and edit track names appropriately. iTunes seems to only support album art embedded in the ID3 tags, whereas WMP will read the hidden album art files too. It's also easier to add album art in WMP, with a "paste album art" option. Weirdly, iTunes doesn't dynamically update changed music within the music folders, where WMP does; you have to rescan the folders. iTunes does sync really easily to the Shuffle, but that's what I'd expect.

At the end of the day, I prefer WMP; I'll keep iTunes loaded (though I uninstalled Bonjour almost immediately), and I'll export my playlists from WMP to iTunes every now and again so I can update the Shuffle.

During this whole process, I did manage to do a lot of cleaning up on my music, adding album art (since it's supported on my Blackberry), and finding a whole lot of albums that had never showed up (because they had no appropriate ID3 tags). MP3Tag worked very well for mass updates and cleanups of the tags - things like automatically correcting the case of track names.

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