Sat iTunes
I have to say, iTunes sucks. I've been using it since it came out, and I think it is a really crummy application on the PC platform. For starters, as soon as you have over ten thousand songs in your library, scrolling becomes super-slow, mainly because the re-drawing engine is poorly written, perhaps on purpose. BTW, same thing happens on Quicktime, and it always has. If you drag the windows around your desktop they refresh quite a bit slower than a regular Windows app.
Then there is the linking of the songs. iTunes doesn't dynamically attempt to re-link songs if you change the name of an existing folder, even by as much as a character, which is a pain. The iPod service which is supposed to detect it when you plug it in, is super-buggy, and half the time doesn't work. You can confuse it really easily by manually ejecting it. Also, if you quit iTunes and try to launch it again right away, it doesn't work, no explanation. You have to wait a minute or two.
Sorting is a poor feature too. Re-sorting songs under your library is very slow, same problem with the re-drawing engine. Even typing a few chars of a name and waiting for the app to browse to it is slow. Not to mention when you have a song selected and you re-sort to see other songs added around the same date, for example. It doesn't keep focus on the song you were playing, which defeats half the purpose of a sorting feature to begin with. Terrible usability.
Finally there is browsing for songs when a song becomes unlinked. This behaves pretty randomly. Sometimes if defaults to current path. Others to the last used path (which it should always do), and others to the root of any drive. I suspect this is because some of Apple's engineers don't really understand how variables and paths work under Windows.
BTW, this is all on a high-end last generation PC with 2 Gb or RAM. I can only imagine how bad it must be on a PC 2 or 3 years old.
As a result, I avoid iTunes as much as possible. I only launch it if I want to sync a playlist to my iPod. The rest of the time I use the snappy Winamp, as I have been doing since 1998.
Anyway, that's enough for today. Taking a train out of Pen Station in 1 hour.
, and won't get back in town until very late Wed night.
