Well I have been playing with iTunes on Windows for a number of of days and I thought I would share some of thoughts. iTunes does seem to be quite resource entensive, so a fairly capable machine is required. I’m running an Athlon 1GHz with 768MB at home an it is totally fine. However my work machine is just a Pentium 3 800MHz with 384MB, (in CPU terms not a lot of difference). Since I run a lot of applications simultaneously switching to and from a music player becomes an issue.
My usual complaint with the library features is still there, accessing a large music library with 10GB+ worth of files over a network is still slow, regardless of playing with Samba performance options. (That reminds me I must play with Samba 3.0 some more. Might have some new performance features.) The music tagging features seem more faster on my PC than they do on my Mac, hmm but that could be because I’m tagging local files.
iTunes on Windows is generally a responsive application, and works very well my only criticism would be that you can plainly tell that they have just lifted the Mac application, the background service ‘iTunesHelper’ is started in the background during user login. So iTunes consumes memory even if you do nothing with iTunes in a session, why can’t it be started when the user launchs iTunes – I understand that would mean that the startup time is greater, perhaps making
Well I guess I’m going to have to live with the network performance problem, everything else seems ok. Feature for feature everything is there, though I guess once I get my iPod fixed I’ll continue to use the iBook as my main sync point.
My advice to any Windows iPod owners would be to get iTunes for windows since it does make using the iPod simpler. My only hope is that Apple does address issues that are being raised and quickly. Support for third party encoders/decodeder would be a great feature, not sure about the ability of using other players since that will of course take away Apple’s edge.
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