iTunes

From SDWiki

<getBoa> What is good one iTunes-like software for linux?
<Dream_Team> banshee, amarok
<Dream_Team> if you really need like itunes
<Dream_Team> songbird.
<ArthurArchnix> I don't believe linux has a music player that has 80MB updates every three days..
     but those that Dream_Team mentioned are good.

[edit] Overview

iTunes is a stupidly heavy and overgrown MP3 player for OS X and Windows. Weighing in at nearly 120 megabytes^[1], it is the exact opposite of the spartan interface of any decent player.

[edit] What's wrong with it?

• It's fucking huge. The act of listening to a song should not involve waiting for thirty seconds for the player to load.
• In its normal mode, it consumes THE ENTIRE SCREEN. You can't scale it down to a little window in the corner and keep an eye on your playlist. On the other hand, in the "zoomed out" mode, all you get is pause, previous song, and next song, a really useless tiny 4px high bar to change the song position, and no playlist view at all.
• It pretends to play video, but overall it feels really clumsy and halfassed, as if they just realized the morning the video-playing version was supposed to go out that they hadn't written the code for it yet. Putting videos on an iPod (which was the entire point of iTunes getting video playback to begin with) doesn't work half the time, as it has to convert it to some dumbass format that nothing else plays except for iPods. It's so shitty that homebrew third-party apps written by people who had no idea what they were doing actually do a better job of converting videos into an iPod-usable file format.
• Two words: Cover Flow. This is one of those "insanely great" piles of shit that Apple uses as an excuse for your computer to consume an average of 99% of the CPU to display JPEGs. Thank God for dual-core CPUs where such usage is reduced to 50% (i.e. one of your cores).
• On Windows, instead of using the normal Windows look and feel, it still tries to pretend it's an OS X program, and uses all the OS X keyboard shortcuts, so it looks fugly and out of place, and keys don't do what you expect. (Never mind that even on OS X, it still looks fugly and out of place because that so-called standardized GUI that Apple is so highly touted for just frankly doesn't exist. Every OS X app looks a little bit different. Some have pinstripes, some are brushed metal, some are flat metal, some have that glass look. There's no rhyme or reason to any of it. But that's beside the point here.)
• Instead of using some sane, well-optimized, and tested storage format (such as, for example, Berkeley DB or even SQLite), it stores its data in an XML file alongside some custom-made binary format for some godawful reason. This means there is absolutely no way to optimize searching or seeking, and the mere act of updating it takes an incredible strain on the disk because, after every single change, the program essentially has to rewrite the whole file -- which, thanks to the sheer verbosity of the format, can easily grow in excess of fifty megabytes with a sizable amount of music. Further, absolutely everything is saved in one file: all song metadata, playlists, and play statistics are all shoved into a huge, unmanageable hunk of XML.
• It's written by Apple, and Apple has a vested interest in your hard-earned dollar. Thus, you are met with more than your share of menu items to purchase crap from the iTunes Store.
• iTunes heavily promotes the use of Apple's inexplicably-popular (nearly to the point of ubiquity) piece of crap, the iPod. Yes, you can use other players with iTunes, but it's not going to be fun. Not that using iTunes is fun to begin with, but it'll be more not fun if you try to sync a player that uses Media Transfer Protocol.
• Apple pushes hard for further adoption of the AAC file format, and as a result, iTunes does not play OGG, WMA, FLAC, and many other common formats. To be fair, these can be played if you take the trouble to install flaky third-party extensions that don't quite work right. (See also previous point.)
• iTunes eats babies and has been known to kick dogs.

[edit] References