iTunes for Windows needs a major overhaul
I purchased a 30GB iPod a while ago because we thought we would be doing game development on it. The plans fell through, but instead of letting it collect dust in a drawer, I decided to let my family use it. It’s a well designed device in many ways, but the Windows software is truly lacking. I refuse to purchase low quality DRM’d music from the iTunes store, so all of my music resides on CDs. I’ve imported most of my CD’s into Windows Media Player and the WMA files take up about 11GB of hard drive space. I much prefer WMP-11 to iTunes to listen to my music. In order to listen to my music on the iPod, it needs to pass through the iTunes software. This is a much more unpleasant experience than it has to be. iTunes allows me to import a “folder” of music at a time. When I add CDs to my collection this wastes considerable time because iTunes has to convert each WMA file into its preferred format. I have a dual core AMD 4800+, fast memory and a fast hard drive. From what I know about performance, the iTunes music converter runs at least 5X slower than it could if someone at Apple with some brains would optimize the code. I see this as one of the many ways that Steve Jobs punishes Windows users. Besides the possible loss of quality in doing another format conversion, the iTunes files WASTE ANOTHER 11GB OF SPACE! The only reason I have to suffer through a slow conversion process and have 2 copies of my music is because of the endless conflict between Apple and Microsoft. I thought this was the worst of it until my hard drive containing the iTunes files died. I plugged in my iPod and asked it to “sync” thinking that the music on the iPod would be copied back on to my new, empty hard drive - WRONG! iTunes gleefully erased all of the music on my iPod and made me start all over again. I guess I’ve been spoiled by Microsoft’s use of the word “sync” which means that data goes in both directions.
Apple is usually good about thinking through usability and design in their products, but deleting all of my music without even asking me is a big error. I’ll keep my CDs for now.
