Since I have been running Windows again at home for a bit again, I have been using iTunes on Windows a fair bit. It has to be said that it does seem faster at performing operations, for example doing a library re-build or additions takes only seconds. (I keep all of my music on a file server served to the PC or powerbook via a Samba share.) My powerbook however takes minutes. As for actual interaction speed there is no difference. The convert from WMA feature is also very nice.
CodeWeavers are also working on support for iTunes on Linux via CrossOver, which will be nice as well, my only worry will be getting updates.
My only major niggle at the moment is that I can’t share iTunes meta data across platforms, I have tried hacking the XML in the iTunesDB file but just end up with corrupt files. Plus the path differences cause problem, even tried regex’ing them but still end up with corrupt library file. If anyone has a way of doing this then please post a reply.
I’m not sure, but isn’t the library XML file just a “friendly” view on the binary data file that actually is the library?
I had some tracks in my library that had broken times in them, so I tried hacking the XML file to change the details and itunes didn’t care. (Although it might have been re-reading the data from the files itself…)