Podcasts and Windows Media Player
Monday, January 8th, 2007I’ve recently been playing around with a PowerBook G4 and OS 10.4.x in order to become more comfortable with the OS at a lower level. While I can support it on a basic level, if there’s anything wrong under the hood, I struggle a bit; I just don’t know it inside and out as I do Windows.
While using the Mac, I started up iTunes and began poking its buttons. On my PCs I use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 to sync multimedia content with my XV6700 and my iRiver H10. As I play with iTunes, I’m very impressed by its built-in podcasting support and the ability to customize the MP3 format audio ripping. While WMP can rip to MP3 format, the options are pitifully limited. No VBR, you can’t define the type of ID3 tags, etc. iTunes lets you do all that.
Additionally, Windows Media Player 11 — even though it was released long after Podcasts were popular, and at least a year after iTunes natively supported the downloading of Podcasts — still has no built-in podcasting support. That’s just sad. Instead, I’ve been using Juice, a third-party application that downloads podcasts and injects them into WMP’s media library. While it works, it’s very kludgy. This should be an integral feature of any major media player released in late 2006.
If iTunes would sync content to my PDA and non-iPod audio player, and if I didn’t already have an extremely large media library in WMP, I might consider switching. Oh! iTunes (and the iPod, for that matter) also remembers where I left off in an audio file and resumes there the next time I start playing. It drives me nuts that WMP — both desktop and mobile — don’t do this. Listening to ripped audiobooks or other lengthy content is very frustrating in WMP. It can’t possibly be that hard to add a field to the library database to “bookmark” the last stopping point in audio playback.
Thus concludes this, the first rant of 2007.