You’re not saying that this product “could be better”, You’re saying that it is hard to use, is worse than it used to be (which wasn’t very engaging) and that it needs a complete overhaul. You’re really dissing it. You’re comparing it to a spreadsheet, (have you tried numbers by the way?).

You’re criticizing it for handling different file-types differently (context over consistency), and you are complaining that the control-panel interface for the iphone has tabs, - which basically almost every nonlinear control-panel on the mac and pc have. (And which has been around for the iPods for a very long time.)

I havn’t used WinAmp much, since I’m on a mac. But you were talking about the Aesthetics. So I gave you my opinion on those. But there might be something about using iTunes on a PC that gives a different experience than it does on a mac?

I’ve been using iTunes since it arrived on the scene in 2001, when it blew the competition away. I was using the lovely Audion at the time. ITunes is quite an opinionated piece of software, and I can clearly see how it might not go down well with some of the windows crowd. However 600 million downloads indicate that quite a few windows users like it.

Now, I say it works damn well, because, like you, I’ve gone from a few hundred to several thousand songs. I’m still able to quickly find any song I’d like. Some more advanced search and categorization features would be nice. But I have to ask myself if they are really needed, since I actually find my songs close to instantaneous. The app is still snappy on my laptop, and new features like coverflow blow my friends away when I show it to them on my livingroom TV. (The visualizer does not, but I hear it’s getting a long needed upgrade in OSX 10.5).

So are you criticizing the usability or the pleasurability? I called you’re post “sensationalistic” because it doesn’t bring much to the table. Everyone can have a go at something popular, and 3000 diggs show it’s a good strategy for improvings your stats in google analytics, but I miss the pointed and constructive criticism.

Have you ever used WinAmp? One skin doesn’t make or break an app. It’s fairly well-reviewed. (e.g. http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/09/winamps-10th-an.html )

iTunes doesn’t work damn well. It works, period. It could work better.

Spreadsheets are usable. They just aren’t pleasurable to use. That was my point and the point of this article about iTunes. I think this is pretty far from “sensationalistic opinionism.”

Firstly; Give a better alternative. It is ok to presonally dislike itunes, but where is the better aleternative? I’ve yet to see music/multimedia-sorting, syncing and playback application more flexible than iTunes. A lot of the most usable file-handeling and library applications out there are taking after iTunes. Like Delicious Monster, xTorrent and Miro.

Secondly; Aesthetically applauding WinAmp over iTunes nearly made me fall of my chair. Or at least seeing the screenshots in the link you posted did. The default skin looks like a horrible mix of something from an 80s space invaders game and a car stereo system. In my opinion. There are indeed some stylish library programs out there, but WinAmp is not one of them.

There are many Improvements to be desired in iTunes. But basically it just works damn well. It has for a long while represented a significant step in the paradigm shift of turning users away from file-browsing and file-organizing in the finder/explorer. We now organize our files in context. Photos in iPhoto, playback media in iTunes, mail in our mail client and so on. The iphone has no visible file-system. go figure.

And btw, Spreadsheets actually work, They are, for quite a few people, really usable.

… it was never designed well. How it handles different media is klugy. Playlists are, at their heart, just folders. The new iPhone addition to iTunes had to add tabs into the center pane. TV shows are clustered one way, movies another.

You are so right. I would add to this the fact that the Store’s homepage is an IA nightmare. All of this said, I’ll be a little miffed when they change this stuff because it provides such good material for the interaction design training classes I teach.

That’s what iTunes is doing/has done to the Finder, the FileSystem, and pretty much every high-data-volume application’s UI out there… You’re a bit late with your complaint.

(Apple reinventing itself as a media company? Media application makes everyone realise data is a medium and medium is data? I dunno, I see it pretty clearly, does no one else?)

The Media Library component, though, is atrocious. If I know what I want to play (e.g. one track, or a folder/album’s worth of tracks) Winamp is lovely. If I’m sorting through my [mumble] gigs of music, then I don’t want Winamp doing the job, not least because of the dumb UI and the fugly light-on-dark default colour schemes it foists on users.

Obviously, iTunes suffers from its developers not being able to take a year between big iterations in the same way as the rest of iLife. It’s scrambling and incremental, driven by new hardware, the demands of the Store, and whatever else Steve has cooking. (And there’s the whole Windows-compatibility thing, too, though that’s a minor issue.) The best approach would be to keep a skeleton team handling point updates for the next six months or so, with everyone else placed on a bottom-up redesign, in time for the iPod rollouts next year.

I rather like it when things outgrow their original titles. In the UK the BBC’s TV listings magazine is still called ‘Radio Times’, having started decades ago as a purely radio-based mag. And there’s also “Carphone Warehouse”, which I suspect doesn’t sell any car-specific phones these days.