After A Week of Announcements, it’s only reasonable that a comparison study be done, a mini-review for the latest and greatest of the Media Players/Media library of the world. iTunes and Windows Media Player are present in almost all the computers in the world. Windows Media Player – coz of the Windows OS being the most popular OS of the world, and iTunes coz of iPod holding 75.6% of the marketshare of Mp3 players being sold!

Now as far as a novice, average person with an Mp3 player [need NOT be an iPod! I personally use my Sony Ericsson K750i to listen to music on the go] and with an elaborate Mp3 collection at home, which one of these would you go for? Also what are the pros and cons of the two pieces of software on our hand? Downloadable artwork, downloadable music information, downloadable what not.

Podcasts-InternetRadio-Tv shows – the works. What does each software give you? Let’s take a look shall we?

OR

Premise
Downloaded Windows Media Player 11 Beta 2 and extremely satisfied with the music management of Windows Media Player 11-Beta 2 along with the memory consumption. I am running these on my laptop with 1GB of RAM. Extremely satisfied that WMP11 takes about 40MB of RAM only and about 40MB of Virtual Memory @ any point of time. Runs fast, and the minimize to the task-bar – the WMP Mini Player so to speak was also a neat trick, along with the small pop-up to check out which song was playing [automatically pops-up on song change this time] was nice !

[Suggestion: Make it pop up with the album art-work next time for the RC1, Microsoft]
WMP11-Beta2 supported artwork and music information automatic download, which was free and pretty good in fact. Once you manually remove all the unnecessary ID3 tags, Media player automatically grabs the song information and the art work for your music, unless there is a conflict in the song name/artistname or album name etc. Heuristics can always be improved. I was impressed to say the least by this and it was nice to see which album I was playing @ first sight and to see all your songs neatly stacked into their respective album, independent of their location on disk was a definite boost !
When you synch it with your MP3 player, then it also created the folders according to the music library – Artist Name -> Album Name -> Song Name, which was NEAT!! You can of course turn this option off as well, but for a folder management freak like me, it is almost God-sent. !

iTunes 7 was announced and from the screenshots, looked so damn cool, it made me download it and install on my system.
Now, let’s analyse the process right from installing to playing songs and videos and library management process and outputs of both iTunes 7 and WMP11-Beta2.

WMP11-Beta2 vs iTunes 7

vs
Installation
Like any other Windows installation process, WMP11-Beta2 installs without a glitch on your Windows machine. Once it comes up after the installation, it will give you the option to search ur computer for music. If you have your music split up across many disk partitions and an external disk, then you can select this option to let WMP11 search through your hard disks and other media and index it!

Like what Google has implemented in the Picasa of “watching folders”, WMP11 now comes with watching the folders you ask it to. So, any new song you add into these folders, gets added on to your library and WMP11 tries to download the song information for the same ! *Super*

iTunes7 doesn’t have any problems while installing on your PC as well. Although I hate the fact that it installs a WHOLE load of crap along with it. Check out the screenshot of my computer, with the main program of iTunes7 NOT running, lemme repeat, iTunes 7 is NOT running. I mean WTF? I don’t need a damned iPodService running in the background hogging my precious memory and I definitely DON’T need an iTunesHelper running when iTunes itself isn’t running. Agrees, these might be absolutely unavoidable for an iPod+iTunes user, but then, i am not one and hence i need an option to let iTunes7 know that I am not gonna connect my non-existent iPod onto it and hence don’t need an iPodservice taking ANY amount of memory!

[Click on the picture for a larger image]

And for sure I don’t need it hogging my memory if iTunes itself is NOT running! Phew… *breathing to myself and counting back from ten*

Anyhoo just as a test – I had WMP11 Beta 2 and iTunes7 running separately and found out the memory consumption of each, just like that

Here’s the comparison chart

Test system specs: FSC Amilo Pi1556: T2400@1.83Ghz,1024MB PC4200 DDR2,120GB Fujitsu MVH2120,Geforce7600 G0 256MB GDDR3,WinXP Home SP2 patched with all the latest security updates

Note: iTunes memory is calculated by iPodService+iTunes+iTunesHelper memory consumption. I have not included Quicktime memory consumption, as I am not including the DLLs used by WMP within the Windows OS DLLs. Fair deal don’tcha think?

Conclusion: WMP11 beats iTunes in most of the memory tests, but still, the difference is felt when you actually scroll through the songs in your window. iTunes – even with such a configuration seems a drag, when compared to the almost smooth scrolling within WMP11. Personally WMP11 beat iTunes hands down according to me. Hmmm wondering how Microsoft is not coming up with a Mac port of WMP11 especially with support to the iPod. *wondering*

Music Management
WMP11 features all the major sorting category for the music it has indexed on its directory. There are many views you can select.to view your music apart from the viewing category – Artist|Album|Songs|Genre|Year|Rating, much like WMP10, not present in iTunes !

[Click on the image for a screenshot]

What I was amazed was the really fast indexing by WMP11 and a detailed management of these, in tandem with its own update from the web. You can also force the tag updation [info updation in the WMP11 parlance] by right clicking on the song and clicking on “Find Album Info”. I just hope Microsoft continues to keep this paid. Coz, rite now it’s a USP for them over iTunes, as iTunes requires you to have an iTunes Store account, for which credit card information is required and Apple has never mentioned anywhere if that takes up any money from ur card, just for album artwork!!

Conclusion: Within Windows WMP11 is a better music manager, not hogging memory or causing any sluggish UI activity when the conversion and the remaining activities are going on. And the fact that you need an iTunes Store account for downloading album artwork is a HUGE disappointment! ! Coz, I downnloaded iTunes7 with a lot of anticipation to test this feature out, and see the 3d view. I was terribly disappointed Apple *hmmprff*
Urge vs iTunes Store
Much like the integration between iTunes and iTunes Store, I think Microsoft has tied up with Urge for music downloads, tv shows and the rest o the jing bang, which is good for the people with moolah to buy music of these services. [Btw no offense to you guys who do that Keep @ it. You pay for these software to be free anyway]!!

Personally i was kinda impressed with the integration of iTunes Store with iTunes, as compared to the Urge integration with WMP11. But still somehow iTunes7, and I tested it out – iTunes 6 itself is too slow in the UI as compared to WMP11.
Look n Feel
Guys over at Microsoft have spent quite some effort in changing the look of WMP11. The jet black interface with the blue buttons is a sight to enjoy. I loved the look rite from the beginning. Furthermore, great enhancement has been done in making it mesh well with the default color of the Vista taskbar [yeah it's gonna be dark as well duh!]

iTunes still maintains its Mac look and feel, which mite be the reason for the sluggish behavior in Windows. ! Nothing phenomenal, except for the 3D album artwork look which unfortunately couldn’t be tested by me!! [Still pissed off Apple!!]

Cons
Video playback in iTunes7: The vdo collection and interface looks amazing. However when you run a vdo and run your mouse over the window, it jerks up and suddenly your vdo jerks, because of the controls fading into the window. I mean, WHOA!! I was shocked when that happened. Pathetic would be an understatement when I say that! I mean jerkiness in the video? Terrible and horrible!

Disapperance of songs from WMP11 Library:This was a cause of major cocern at times, when the songs suddenly disappeared off the library [possibly still in Beta 2 coz of some problems like this], but it scares me, coz with an option, like Delete from Media, if deleted from library on by default, ur music might suddenly disappear one day, which is SCARY!! I think Microsoft should let it by default remain unchecked.

Conclusion

• For a novice user without an iPod and who wants to organize his music into albums, and see thse albums on screen and who does not have an iTunes Store account, the WMP11 is a sure bet.
• For those people with an iPod, and who are used to iTunes, but who don’t have an iTunes Store account, try giving WMP11 a whirl. You just might like it as your music manager !
• For those of you who think iTunes is the greatest and best music management software, I really don’t see it !!

Disclaimer
I have to give this as part of the policy of Scribez! The opinions presented here are my own and outta my analysis. You can comment whatever you want, but please don’t expect me to justify my findings and opinions with anything further gerd [geek+nerd]ier. This is as much as I go. Already have tested my limits. I am doing this for Scribez!! Have to get back to my normal sane self after this analysis.

This week has been full of activity, considering the amount of roll outs of new gadgets and their related services. The consumer market is going to go crazy with all the new options coming out !

Apple, came out with their “It’s Showtime” on the 12-Sep-2006. They announced

• 
  The 5.5G iPod featuring brighter screen, an 80GB version, games support
• 
  The Rainbow iPod Nano featuring a new design and various colors [Hmmm clip on covers next??]
• 
  The “Smallest Mp3 player” iPod shuffle featuring Clip and go and 2GB of memory with an aluminium casing
• iTV – Apples entry into the Set Top Box, which is becoming huge in the US market
• 
  And to support all this – the iTunes 7

Close behind, y’day Microsoft has finally announced their entry into Apple’s dominant market – Mobile media players – and media service itself with Zune. Status has finally changed from Coming Zune !

• 
  They announced their first Zune player – available in White, Black and Brown [why didn't Apple think of that??]
• The Zune media marketplace – or something like that, which I never bothered to check

More Zune pics [source: http://engadget.com/]

The Harddisks turned 50, celebrating their golden jubilee in many blogs around the world. Surprising that none of the hard disk manufacturing companies came out with any interesting hard-disks!! Hmmm.. anyhoo, the event wasn’t publicized anywhere other than Engadget and some other blog news sites.

Microsoft Hardware came out with some real sexy peripherals for the “live” world of Microsoft.

Microsoft, again announced some more Vista RC1 Preview licenses and I managed to get hold of one and I have dowloaded the RC1 DVD ISO. I need to burn it and give the OS a whirl. !

All in all, an amazing week, I must say! !

Today I came across blogmusik which plays music online on demand. It has a very simple interface. Basically a rip off of the Ipod interface one reason it could become really popular. I wonder if this is legal and wouldn’t be surprised if Apple goes after them for stealing their design. The best part about this service is that you can listen to any music by just typing it in. Unlike Pandora and Last.fm which function as radios i.e. you can’t select the song that you actually want to listen to and are restricted to the songs that the radio is playing. Most of the popular music is available but some obscure bands won’t be available. It also has a playlist feature which works only if you register.

On the whole it very simple and works great. Though it still needs a lot of work and flash interface is a bit buggy. If it could function like Last.fm and Pandora i.e. recommend music to the user based on what he/she has listened to it could eventually become a very popular service. This service seems to be running somewhere in France. Their blog does not give many details on where or who they are from. Though I ask myself the question on how legal this service is. Posted by bluesaze