I listen to a whole lot of music. There are really no two ways about it; if I’m at home, music is playing on my computer. If I’m not, it’s playing on one of the myriad of portable devices I own. I maintain a music library with just over ten thousand songs spanning most every genre and year in the last half-century. This of course means that I need to run some mean music organization software.

Like most other iPod owners, my default player is Apple’s iTunes, but lately it just hasn’t been impressing me as much as it used to, as evidenced by this long list of complaints:

• Regular memory usage is around 130MB, and that number balloons to well over 250MB if I dare open that new-fangled glossy cover flow feature.
• To make matters worse, if I close the cover flow, usage drops almost immediately to around 180MB, but refuses to dip lower, making me suspect a memory leak.
• I keep the application running 24 hours a day and after about a week of uptime, its footprint can often climb above 300MB (without coverflow), lending more evidence to the memory leak theory.
• As I type this, iTunes is converting some WMA tracks to MP3 while playing music, and is sipping 78% of my 2GHz dual core processor. That’s inexcusable.
• Smart playlists are dumb at best, allowing only a global AND or a global OR for all playlist conditions. Sometimes this just doesn’t cut it, and I find myself chaining two or more playlists or using De Morgan’s law just to figure out the boolean logic behind a desired set of conditions. Yeah, I’m that much of a nerd.
• The iTunes store peddles DRM-laden garbage. Sure, they sell iTunes Plus tracks now, but those are still m4a files (while the rest of the world sells MP3), and most big-label releases are still protected by FairPlay DRM.
• When importing a folder full of songs, it often creates two copies of each track in my library and on my file system. Except that sometimes I get two copies of only some of the tracks, while the others copy as normal…
• If a friend who runs a Mac brings his iPod over, I can’t plug that iPod in and stream tracks off of it because it’s Mac formatted. Sure, Windows doesn’t know the format of that hard drive, but Apple does; couldn’t they write a driver layer that can read it? I’ll bet that they could.
• iPod cables are expensive. What are all of those damned pins used for? My blackberry is a mobile computer and it syncs just fine with a USB cable. Every device on the market uses the USB standard, while Apple sticks to this ridiculous cable with at least 30 pins on it, forcing third party manufacturers to license the design and jacking up accessory cost as a result (ok, this is really an iPod complaint, sue me).
• Lastly, when editing information for multiple tracks, like for an entire album at once, the application doesn’t save my changes to the id3 tags. Yet if i modify the info on each track separately, it does. What gives, Steve?

Overall, considering the long list of features that iTunes does provide, it’s certainly not the worst program ever written, but I can’t help but think that the Windows versions an after thought in Cupertino and that they just don’t get as much polish as the Mac versions of the program. Long story short, I recently went looking for alternatives. The shortlist of what I require from a jukebox application:

• Easy to navigate interface that lets me search, organize, and find my music with ease
• Track ratings. This is a must when your library has more breadth than the weekly Top 40 list.
• Smart and Static playlists that let me automatically partition my music into logical subsets
• Equalizers are nice, but should come with some presets that i can tweak to my setup.
• Low memory footprint with no leaks – I run this app all day long, so make it efficient
• Automatic file system organization so that I don’t have to worry about it.
• Search by track name, artist, album, etc.
• CD burning and ripping is a nice extra, but I can use a third-party app with no complaints if necessary
• XML file importing so that I can migrate my giant library from my existing solution is a must. Honestly, I’ve written a number of simple apps that parse an exported iTunes library (see the sidebar); This is a dead simple feature to add.

And so with the help of the SomethingAwful SHSC community, I’ve installed and played with a number of media players over the last couple of days.

1. Songbird: Perhaps the most full-featured iTunes clone that I’ve ever seen, this app has some serious promise as an iTunes replacement. Memory usage is similar to that of iTunes, but is a little more stable, and doesn’t seem to leak so bad. The interface is fully customizable and skinnable, and it imported my iTunes library in about 5 minutes. Unfortunately, it lacks an equalizer, CD burning or ripping, and has the same poor smart playlist support that iTunes does. I get the feeling that I haven’t even scratched the surface of this players’ feature set, not to mention the hundreds of plugins that you can add from inside the program. Built on the the same XLU framework as Firefox, it’s generally stable, has a tabbed interface, an in-app web browser, and links to SHOUTcast, lastFM, and a ton of other web services. While it’s not quite there yet, I’ll be keeping a close eye on future releases.
2. Zune: Over the summer, I participated in a Zune marketing program and received a free device in return for reviewing it and the player software. My full reviews can be found over at the Bus Error weblog if you’re interested. The basic story goes like this: Track ratings are either “i like it,” “i hate it,” or “not rated,” which doesn’t provide enough resolution for a large library. The interface is pretty and an interesting departure from iTunes’, but the Zune Marketplace and Social are seriously hampered at best in Canada, which is a shame because I’d probably buy a Zune pass and use this thing to discover new music otherwise. Lastly, when filling the Zune from a smart playlist, there’s no way to limit the number of songs in the playlist by size, so if your library is larger than your Zune capacity, it’s a guessing game. The popular iTunes to Zune playlist converter utility (available in the sidebar) was a project of mine written to address the fact that the Zune is an amazing device with crappy software behind it. Unfortunately iTunes is way ahead of the Zune Jukebox, even though Zune brings some great new ideas to the table.
3. foobar2000: For what it does, this program is simply amazing. It plays music with my entire library loaded in just under 35MB of memory, and has more customizable features than you could reasonably count. Unfortunately, it lacks ratings and smart playlists (at least i think so – there are a bunch of playlist options that I just don’t understand), and is about as easy to use as reading a novel printed in binary is to read. This app does everything, but for anything more than playing specific songs, albums, or artists, it requires a bunch of reading to learn about. I’m sure that if I spent a week or two learning the ins and outs, I could get the hang of it, but this player is most certainly not for the consumer marketplace – it’s for people who don’t mind taking time to configure it properly and don’t want high level abstraction from the file system.
4. Media Monkey: One of the only Media Players that I’ve heard of that still offers a paid option. I suppose when you don’t have a store and you’re not open sourced, you have to make money somehow. The free version has a good feature set, and a lifetime license is worth $20, considering the extra features that are enabled with it. On first launch, it took about 10 minutes to index my music folder, detected that I had iTunes installed, and imported all of the library data from it. Unfortunately, this last step took forever, although I could listen to all of my music in the mean time – it just isn’t all tagged properly. At first glance, this appears to be the best jukebox software ever written. It sorts by just about any criteria you could wish for without making playlists, automatically pulls track information from amazon or wikipedia, has podcast, SHOUTcast, and ICEcast, and a web browser built in, and has a direct link to purchase any track in your library from the Amazon store. As of yet, this is by far the most impressive media player that I’ve ever encountered. I will be purchasing the full license and temporarily adopting it as my main jukebox. Expect to hear more about this app in the future.

So there you have it. As per usual, Apple is shiny and simple but doesn’t necessarily include every feature that one could want. Microsoft brings a strong contender to the table, but fails to pull ahead in the race, likely until they throw a few more billion dollars at it. The open sourced Songbird looks promising, but as with most open sourced projects, will need to hit version two before it’s viable for the mass marketplace, and foobar2000, while an example of impressive programming, is so stripped down and customizable that it would confound the average user. Kind of like Linux. Ok, that wasn’t really a fair jab. For now, I’m going to be playing with Media Monkey, and I’ll share my experiences when I’ve thoroughly explored its feature set.

Which player is best for you? If you’re not a computer enthusiast, and don’t feel like paying $20 for a media player, I’d go with iTunes. It’s simple, intuitive, and provides every feature that the average user expects. If you don’t like rating your music, or have a collection of less than 100 songs, check out the Zune player – it’s a neat twist on iTunes, even if it’s not that great for large collections yet. Songbird is most certainly an app to keep in mind, and will probably become a possible iTunes killer as it approaches maturity. Meanwhile, if you want an eye opening experience that will show you how a media player ought to work, look into Media Monkey. It really is cool.

Cheers,

Jon

Edit: As pointed out by my colleague Jake Billo in the comments of this post, some of what I wrote about iTunes in this post was 100% made up and totally incorrect. Not that I was intending to lie about it, but some of my thoughts regarding iTunes were misconceptions. For the record, if you haven’t yet challenged your membership to the cult of Steve, you should still try to do so – there are alternatives out there. And yes, the grass is greener on the other side.