Winamp vs iTunes

We were talking about this on the forums, so I decided to make a blog about it. What program do you use to listen to your musics? There are a lot of players available, but the two that I’d recommend are Winamp and iTunes. Let’s take a look at different features they offer.

iTunes

We’ll start with iTunes. I’m sure everybody knows about Apple’s music player, or rather, music organizer. It has a simple interface that’s idiot-proof. You have the basic buttons, volume control, etc. Nice and simple; especially the cover-flow system. It’s amazing. One great thing about iTunes is its ability to organize your music. If you’re too lazy to do it yourself, this features is perfect, however, if you have your own way of organizing stuff, like me, this features is your worst enemy. It completely changes your “library” (usually your My Music folder) and all its sub-folders.

iTunes’ interface

Here’s the file information you see when you right-click on a song. You can use the tabs to look at more options and features. Whet I like about this is the ability to add lyrics to the songs. I’m not sure if it works with all mp3 players, but it sure works with iPods.

iTunes - File info

Here you see the options available once you right-click on a song. The only one that stands out is “Convert selection to AAC”. It’s a nice feature, but I wish they include more options for it (such as format and bitrate).

iTunes - Right-click options

Let’s take a look at iTunes Preferences. Nothing major here. I checked out the “Advance” tab, but these are all basic settings.

iTunes - Preferences

iTunes’ visualization is butt-ugly. I waited a minute for it to change into something pretty (or at least use better colors), but that didn’t happen. The little box at the bottom right is visualization’s options. You probably can add more visualizations though (don’t take my word for it…. I’m guessing here)~

iTunes - Visualization

And here’s iTunes’ mini player. You hit CTRL + M and you get this. Nice, simple and compact.

iTunes - Mini player

Winamp

Now let’s take a look at Winamp. When you first install Winamp, it asks you what kind of skin you’d like to use (don’t worry, you can change it anytime). Your options are “Classic”, “Modern”, and “Bento”. Depending on what I’m trying to do, I usually use Bento or Classic. Here are some pictures of all the skins. In the first image, you see the Classic and the Modern skin being displayed. Notice that you can add or remove the playlist, library, and the equalizer. You can change their position too, or have them minimized. There’s a lot you can do.

Winamp skins

This is the Bento skin. It looks very nic and futuristic. As you can see, you have all the features that iTunes has (play-count, rating, etc) plus more. Bento is made up of 4 windows: you have the player on top-left, the info box (top-center), the current playlist (top-right), and your library (the big window). The library is similar to iTunes’ library, but it has more features and tabs for other stuff.

Winamp Bento skin

Winamp has a lot of visiualizations that come standard with the player when you install it, but there are tons more available to download. I spent at least 10 minutes looking at all the visualizations before I decided to take a picture of this one. They were all so amazing. And I haven’t even install any additional visualizations.

Winamp - Visualization

You can do a lot with Winamp. It’s because it has a kick-ass plugin system. Users can create their own plugins (gotta know programing though) and submit it to Winamp. They then put it up on their websites for everybody else to download. Installing a new plugins is very easy: you just download the file and put it in the plugin directory. That’s it. And here are many plugins available to download. You like iTunes’ cover-flow? Well, here’s a plugin that mimics that for Winamp!

Winamp - Plugins

Don’t you hate it when programs change your file associations? Winamp lets you control which files you’d like to associate with Winamp. It asks you first when you’re installing (you have to select “Custom Installation” though), but you can always change those through the Preference menu. You can even change file icons.

Winamp - File association

Winamp has a great conversion feature that allows you to convert you files into different types. There are more plugins available if you’re looking for certain files. The free version of Winamp allows simple conversions, but the pro version has a lot more features.

Winamp - Convert

This is how “File info” feature looks like in Winamp. You have the basic info showing in the main window, art-work and ID3 tags in other tabs.

Winamp - File info

If you put an image file in an album’s folder and name it “cover”, Winamp automatically selects it as album cover.

Winamp - Cover art

Press ALT + S to open up the skin menu. Changing skins is as easy as that. And again, there are crap-load of skins available to download. There are even programs out there that allow you to create your own skin.

Winamp - Skins

Even skins have options where you can change the way the look and feel.

Winamp - Skin options

And this is Winamp (Bento skin) mini player. You can select “Always on top” (ALT + A) and have it down at the bottom or on top all the time.

Winamp - Mini player

Some more skins. Noticed how they all look different and unique.

Winamp Skins

Conclusion

I’d say iTunes is good for people who want to have their music organized automatically. And if you buy your music from iTunes store. iTunes is great for synching your playlist with your iPod as well. Winamp can do that too, but since Apple decided to pull a Microsoft (screw you Apple for installing Quicktime when I only want iTunes!) and make things difficult, sometimes the music you synch with Winamp to your iPod doesn’t play. Winamp has many, many features, but what I like about it the most is the ability to play songs without adding it to your “library”. Say you just downloaded a song or a random audio file and you want to hear what it is… if you open it with iTunes, it’s gonna be added to your library, but if you open it with Winamp, it opens it in a “temporary” playlist. I used the word temporary because you can add and remove files whenever you want. iTunes doesn’t have this feature and unless you’ve tried it yourself, you won’t know what I’m talking about. Another thing I like about Winamp is that it’s a light-weight program that doesn’t eat up my precious ram.

I have iTunes and Winamp on my PC. I used iTunes to synch up my iPod and Winamp to listen to music. What player do you use to listen to music?

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