iTunes 7.0 is nice and all, but...

...it's pretty damned buggy for the Windows release.

Last night, I was adding some music to a iPod nano. Since I wanted to clear the whole thing and just start fresh (as my fiancee was getting tired of the music), I decided to use the restore feature. I did this so I can move forward without any bias to the good times I've had with my current music selection and end up keeping everything on there anyway.

Well, while iTunes seemed to take eons to scan my music for gapless playback options and updating the album covers (which, by the way, hasn't finished after three hours), I decided to add music to the nano. I mean, I've got tons of memory, a decent multi-core processor, and a fresh install of everything (Windows, drivers, and friends).

Everything is running nicely--except iTunes.

OK, fine. So I fired up my Mac and did the restore there. It only has a G4 processor (a slow one, at that) and not much else, plus I haven't wiped it clean since I put Tiger on it the middle of last year. And it worked fine. Of course, it doesn't access my huge amount of music, so it didn't have to scan for gapless playback or album covers.

While many may think that--hey, that just shows the stability difference between the PC and the Mac. I see it differently.

I am not going to go so far as to call it a conspiracy, but I do think that the Windows version of iTunes was not programmed as nicely as the Mac's. It could be the relative inexperience the Apple x86 programmers have compared to the rest of the programming team, but the Windows version of iTunes just isn't up to snuff. And there's no reason it shouldn't be good. My 4200 64-bit x2 SLI PC is pristine. My computer is quick and has tons of resources. It's plugged into a good UPS and cleaned from dust regularly. Yet, iTunes much worse here than it does on the passively-cooled single core 1.25 GHz RISC PowerPC CPU.

I am not trying to start a flame war--I'm not. I am just saying that the company that stands behind it's mantra that it's the best OS (Apple) needs to NOT make crippled software for the other guys (Win x86).

technorati tags:apple, intel, amd, windows, osx, itunes, ipod

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