As the Apple fanboyz dilligently masturbated to Steve Jobs presenting the latest underwhelming range of Apple products, I decided to visit the Apple store and download iTunes 7.0. Installation took two attempts as it failed to load after the first installation. Eventually I got it working and several things about it have really pissed me off:

1. It's a memory hog. Man, is it a piece of lard. I have a 122GB music collection and iTunes takes up 122MB of my physical memory. 1MB for every 1GB of music.
2. The album flick-through feature is tragically slow. It doesn't seem to cache any of the album art fast enough. I have an AMD 3600+ with 2GB RAM so it shouldn't sweat it.
3. What's with the new mini-store feature? I now have a nasty piece of clutter on the bottom of my window continuously begging me to load up the apple mini-store so that it can violate my privacy. Piss off!
4. It takes a long time to shut down with large collections. In previous versions you got the impression that it had shut down but it hadn't. It was still sitting in your memory after at least a minute. With 7.0 I now why. When you shut down a windows pops - 'saving itunes collection' and it just sits and sits there. Not nice.

For the last month I've been using Windows Media Player 11 as my main jukebox and it's a very, very nice piece of kit. Beta 1 had it's rough edges but Beta 2 is top-notch. What do I like about it?

1. Uncluttered interface. The 'softies have done a brilliant job at trumping what Apple is supposed to be best at.
2. It's blazingly fast. It loads up straight away. Album art appears quickly as your scroll through your collection
3. It sounds better. I don't know what they've done. Maybe it's some EQ preset but my music just sounds better in WM11. I've played around with the EQ settings in iTunes and I can't replicate the quality.
4. It shuts down quickly and doesn't linger around in your physical memory. It only takes up roughly 55MB of memory.

One slight problem though. It still doesn't support podcasting but then I'm not too worried. I don't listen to many these days due to a lack of time and sources tell me that support will be coming soon. :)

Try WM11. You'll be pleasantly surprised.