VS
After a few weeks of having an iMac I have decided I really dislike iTunes. When I was a Windows user I had always used WinAmp. It is not available on the Linux platform. In Linux I have grown to love an application called Amarok. It has most of the features of iTunes without all the clutter.
First of all Amarok doesn't want me to visit their store and buy more stuff. iTunes nearly insists that I visit the iTunes music store every time I turn it on. Some may call this a feature, I all it an annoyance. I would never purchase music laden with DRM (digital rights management). DRM removes the ability to play the music you just purchased on any other computer that is not "authorized". Sure there are ways around this but whats the point? If I'm going to purchase music it will be on a regular CD. Then I will put it on my computer myself. This not only gives me a hard copy in case I have hard drive issues, it also allows me to play it on any music player or any computer. So for me the iTunes music store is a waste of space.
Amarok does have ways for you to download music. Amarok connects to Magnatune who signs independent artists. Listen to the whole song and album before you buy it. You get to set the price for the music you purchase. What is it worth to you? Anywhere between $5-$18. Magnatune also gives their artists 50% off all profits. Compare that to traditional music distributors who give their artists $1 per album sold. In Amarok 2.0 they will introduce the ability to download music from Jamendo.
Music organization on Amarok is much more clear than in iTunes. You can organize your music in any way you want. By artist/album/genre/track/year/... Basically any MP3 tag. You can also browse through your music as it sits on your hard drive. This is very nice for those of us who like to keep our music organized and not in a big jumbled mess. Amarok also allows you to do a search through your music collection. And to top it all off, online radio stations are at your disposal.
iTunes does not allow you to browse through your music so easily. You can either search or use their simple Genre/Artist/Album sorting. When it comes to music organization and your ability to organize how you like it iTunes is weak. I also made the mistake to allow iTunes to organize my music for me. Oops. Now sorting back through all of it has been a major pain. When your talking about 35+ GB of music thats a lot of mess that iTunes made. My music folder turned into a jumbled mess. Yuck!
So there you have it, my feelings on iTunes. I don't like it at all. KDE 4.1 (Konqueror Desktop Environment) is currently under development. KDE 4.0 was released in January based on the QT4 graphical libraries. The promise of 4.1 is that it will be easily installable into any operating system. Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. As soon as it is released I will say goodbye to iTunes and install KDE 4.1 to reap the benefits of Amarok, not to mention Konqueror and Dolphin.
