iTunes and Windows Media Player

After CNet and Chris Anderson now is my turn to compare WMP 10 and iTunes ;)

Last Friday I downloaded WMP 10.0 and I liked it. I never looked at iTunes because I did not find a reason to do it.

Today a coworker showed me the coolest iTunes feature, which IMHO is that you can share music with the people in the same network. I installed it, and I can stop using it. Is like I'm listening to music just as an excuse to use iTunes ;). You just tell iTunes you want to share your music and everyone else sees it as part of his iTunes experience.

Of course, this made me an iTunes evangelist, as now I want everyone in the office to use it. It converts WMAs to AACs when you try to add WMAs, so unless you have a lot of WMAs it's not a big issue.

On the other hand, there are a couple of features that at first I thought it had but it has not. One is the ability to search for music globally. You can search only in one user's list at a time. The other is the ability to have a common playlist where each one adds some songs and everyone listens to them.

For searching globally, there is a Java program called ourTunes that does it, and it also allows you to download the audio files to your computer (iTunes just lets you listen to them). The fact that you can write code to talk to the iTunes servers is also cool and opens a lot of possiblities for third party tools.

As everyone in the office was playing with iTunes I also noticed that my Thinkpad T42 speakers suck compared to my coworkers Toshiba's.