Windows Media Player (WM11) vs iTunes
So I changed jobs, and I’ve had to trade in my Mac desktop environment, for Windows Vista. Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be some fanboy slam on Vista — there’s enough of those to go around 
No, this is simply a comparison of a “typical” user wanting to listen to his library of music while getting a few lines of code banged out each day.
I have built up a decent collection of music over the years, bought from various outlets — CD’s back in the old days and ripped to my drive, then a VERY big lull when the RIAA went totally insane filing suits against everyone and their grandmother (literally). My multi-year pause in spending money on music was my little silent protest. Hey, it only amounted to a couple hundred bucks a year, but I felt it was the point. Anyway, once more outlets started selling non-DRM music online, I slowly started buying music again. Well this library is only as good as my ability to listen to what I want, where I want, and when I want. That’s the absolute BIGGEST reason I will only buy non-DRM’ed music now. I have some music from the iTunes store that I can’t easily listen to — like in my car, which now has a nice Kenwood radio with a USB input. It simply won’t play my .m4p files on my flash drive. Guess I’ll have to upgrade those now that Apple has the option to un-DRM the files.
So now to the real bit of this post – WM vs iTunes. Well, this one is pretty easy for me. Windows Media Player loses. Period. Sure, it works — it plays music. I’m not going to fault it for also not playing my DRM infested iTunes music, as that’s a music industry stupid. But I will definitely fault Microsoft for building a very annoying player. Usability was apparently not in the design specifications. It tries, really hard, to do things for you, like scanning for music and organizing your library. It tries, really hard, to present a snazzy interface. It tries really hard, to look stylish. It tries, really hard, to present 128 different ways to view your library of music. All of this it does however, it does in a cluttered and difficult way. I really hate to get on the Apple bandwagon. It was tough enough to talk myself into buying my MacBook Pro. But there comes a time when you just have to realize, there’s a better way to do things.
The best way to sum it up, is to NOT go into a bullet point conversion, and just point out the fact it takes one more interaction with WM11 than it does on iTunes. I attribute this really to the interface differences. iTunes is very clean, sparse, and straight forward. In one word – it’s OBVIOUS. All the advanced stuff is there, it’s just pushed down a level on the UI, and laid out in a very familiar manner. WM11 on the other hand, feels almost obfuscated. Functions and features are duplicated across the interface, and at inconsistent levels of UI menu depth. The look and feel matches, well, nothing. It’s like starting over, and I’ve been a Windows user since 3.0 and a Microsoft user since DOS 2.0.
You really don’t appreciate the differences, until you get used to something else. The switch to the Mac for a year wasn’t easy, and it really is because you have to UN-learn some really bad habits and modes of thinking. It’s the same with the move to Linux from Windows. People ask me all the time, what’s different about using Linux/OSX than using Windows? The best answer I can give, is “you spend less time f#*king with your computer, and more time enjoying it.”