Peer-to-peer pressure

[Pete]

Right well I've seen the light and got rid of iTunes and am using winamp for music playback. Quite why that program is used for anything apart from transferring music to the iPod I don't know.

The responsiveness is slow, every time there is an upgrade it further cripples the program and the importing from CDs is patheticly slow. The sound quality is far from perfect and functionality limited.

So I got thinking, are there any other programs of recent times that have become popular purely for their fad status despite their appauling functionality? Yet I can't seem to think of any, I thought of MSN Spaces but then it's more because it's built into MSN (which rubbishes any smartarse who wanted to say IE) and therefore is more convenient than signing up for more complex stuff.

So how has iTunes done it? Has it ridden on the back of the iPod, is it the music store (which is also becomming poorer) or is it just mac morons drooling in their usual manner?

[Fireboy]

Right well I've seen the light and got rid of iTunes and am using winamp for music playback. Quite why that program is used for anything apart from transferring music to the iPod I don't know.

The responsiveness is slow, every time there is an upgrade it further cripples the program and the importing from CDs is patheticly slow. The sound quality is far from perfect and functionality limited.

So I got thinking, are there any other programs of recent times that have become popular purely for their fad status despite their appauling functionality? Yet I can't seem to think of any, I thought of MSN Spaces but then it's more because it's built into MSN (which rubbishes any smartarse who wanted to say IE) and therefore is more convenient than signing up for more complex stuff.

So how has iTunes done it? Has it ridden on the back of the iPod, is it the music store (which is also becomming poorer) or is it just mac morons drooling in their usual manner?

I never liked iTunes for Windows much... but it does work much faster on a Mac. Saying that, there's not really much competition on the Mac platform. WMP doesn't seem to do anything, and RealPlayer borrows parts of iTunes/QuickTime to play back most non-RealNetworks files.

[Dr Lobster*]

Right well I've seen the light and got rid of iTunes and am using winamp for music playback. Quite why that program is used for anything apart from transferring music to the iPod I don't know.

The responsiveness is slow, every time there is an upgrade it further cripples the program and the importing from CDs is patheticly slow. The sound quality is far from perfect and functionality limited.

So I got thinking, are there any other programs of recent times that have become popular purely for their fad status despite their appauling functionality? Yet I can't seem to think of any, I thought of MSN Spaces but then it's more because it's built into MSN (which rubbishes any smartarse who wanted to say IE) and therefore is more convenient than signing up for more complex stuff.

So how has iTunes done it? Has it ridden on the back of the iPod, is it the music store (which is also becomming poorer) or is it just mac morons drooling in their usual manner?

I used an older version of WinAmp for some years (i forget the version, cos i'm at work now), and it wasn't all that bad - the reason why i got rid of it was although the playlist manager is quite good for a couple of hundred files, as my music collection has grown, searching for files is near impossible, it's a case of scrolling down a list with a few thousand files in and clicking them to play.

I now use the Windows Media Player 10; the searching for songs and creating playlists is a lot easier than it was in the version of WinAmp i had, once you tinker with the interface by removing the unneccessary columns and so on, it become usable.

I've always hated QuickTime (now with itunes) and Real Player, not the formats, just the bloated players. QuickTime now installs a iPod Windows Service or regardless of whether you have an ipod, the funny thing is, if you disable it, it still lets you transfer files to an iPod.

But my true pet hate is the way in which they litter your quick launch, system tray, desktop, and start menu with icons. If you do take out these stupid background processes which don't appear to do anything useful, they get put back (forcing you to delete the file).

Also, Real Players insistance that you sign up to the pointless newsletter when you install it; not sure if it still does this, i haven't run an install of realplayer for months.

The latest verion of Acrobat Reader is a piece of shit, i may well end up going back to v5.5. For those of you that don't know, if you enable it to display pdf files in your browser (default), it stays in memory hogging anything between 5 and 40mb (on my system). It also stuck a 'fast start' program in my start up group, to improve start up speeds, at the expense of bootup speed and memory (it sits in memory whether you use it or not)

Other things that I find annoying generally, are apps which install shell extensions without asking (so your right click menu is littered with crap you never use) and apps which change your file associations without asking.

Oh, and HP's scanner software which claims to be 'Made for Windows XP' yet, you have to be a 'Power User' to use it. Where I work, all the Windows XP installations are setup in such a way so that the user of the machine is only in the 'Users' group, to make it harder for them to feck the machine up.

That's all my software moans until i get home, at least!

[Pete]

See in my opinion WMP would have the chance to be the best player if it just supported more formats. I do like AAC vastly more than both WMA and MP3 but it can't play it. Unless I can get a good codec for it from somewhere?

The thing I miss from iTunes Library that the one in Winamp seems to lack is the useful "compilation" tag which removed half the artist list and made browsing much easier. I'll have t o have a go with WMP 10's library as I haven't tried it since 9

Acrobat 7, once you delete the gumf, is far snappier than 6 though as that was horrific. I don't see why a reader needs so much crap though. Macromedia had thr right idea with flash player 7 when they focused solely on performance with no new crap.

I always untick the things to put gumf in your right click menu as I find it infuriating. PowerArchiver is a particular sinner. I've trimmed mine down to "Add to name.zip" and "add to archive" which lets me fiddle with options. A listing for every supported file type is not needed really.