(I Don’t Know) How To Organize 3370 Songs

By Ron Scott March 8th, 2009

I made the switch from Windows Media Player to iTunes last fall, and I haven’t looked back. My only reason now for using Windows Media Player now, is DVD playback (and even then, VLC works just as well).  It feels like I’m turning into an Apple fanboy before your eyes. I love getting new music, but 3000+ songs can be tedious to work with.

The media player switch occurred for a few reasons. I was planning to buy my iPod, which obviously was meant to interact with iTunes. I was getting a little frustrated with the album art manipulation of Windows Media Player (iTunes adds it for each song individually, but WMP does it for the album, which is slightly different).

And I was annoyed with the sound quality of Windows Media Player. When I compared a song’s sound in both applications, the iTunes version comes out clearer. Don’t ask me why, but that’s how it is.  On my computer, at least.

So up to this point, iTunes has victory in the categories of sound quality, album art, and iPod interaction. Windows Media Player’s strengths? Better organization of songs. I like how the songs are separated (in the minimalistic view) by subheadings of the artists. In iTunes it can be much harder to sort through and look for a certain band’s music. Windows Media has better visualizations and fullscreen functionality, and better Rip/Burn/Sync dialogs. For now though, I’m sticking with iTunes. In the last month I’ve added a lot of podcasts to my library that would have been a lot harder to get through Windows Media Player.

In my mind there still isn’t an ideal media player, but I think both Microsoft and Apple are working towards it. Everyone’s music libraries are growing (mine increases by about a dozen songs a week, on average) and the large collections require a good tool to organize all them.

Question time. How do you feel about iTunes and Windows Media Player?

Category: Music, Technology.

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