> sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
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> sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
To each his own. Foobar2000 looks pretty much like all the music players before iTunes: http://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.