Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamroom | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that actually likes iTunes? Is it really a resource hog? To be honest I've never really noticed (it seems to work well for me), but recently have seen a lot of anger directed towards iTunes, so am wondering if this is mainly a problem with iTunes on Windows?

View on HN

iTunes is the best music player I've ever used, and that includes the one I cared enough about to write for myself. It's "big", but so is my collection, so I forgive it.

For windows one of the better clients is foobar (I use itunes for the ipod and foobar for listening), for linux well you are kinda sol if you want a good music player (mpd with a gui client or ncmpcpp come somewhat close).

How does it compare to old stand-by players like Winamp?

foobar2000 requires a little more finagling than winAMP to set up, but it can be very nice when you do. It's also significantly lighter than winamp. They both do things that iTunes won't (in particular play flac and ogg, which is a very important feature for me).

In my experience, yes - it's a huge resource hog. Up until recently, I'd leave iTunes open all the time. After a couple days of being open without a restart, iTunes would have claimed ~1.2GB of memory. Pretty ridiculous. It's even worse if you use coverflow.

That being said, it's still my favorite audio player. It's one of only two programs I miss when I'm working on Linux.

I like it. My only gripe is its sense of timing. If you have it start on login, which is a good idea if other people use your library, it does a LOT of disk seeking and jams up the whole login process. It would be nice if it would prioritize its library read below "getting a browser and mail reader open".

Never had a problem with it here either. Someone trying to rationalize their dislike of a popular brand is my guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com