In preparation for returning to lots of windows usage at home, I decided to try out WMP 10 on my work machine. To my surprise, it seems a lot better than older WMP’s and WMP 11 looks even better, maybe almost to iTunes parity.
Then it got me thinking about the various reasons why the whole Windows Media world has been less successful than the iTunes world, and I keep coming back to the same thought: writing good client UI’s is _really difficult_, while creating websites to sell music is realtively easy.
With WMP 10 and 11, you finally get the sense that Microsoft has finally realized that they should write the iTunes equivalent client software, but don’t be like iTunes and lock it to one music store. That provides the best of many worlds, you get a solid, well-tested UI that’s written by guys who write UI’s for a living (and furthermore, you _don’t_ get a crappy UI that some music store wrote for itself), and you get the flexibility of choosing from a lot of different music providers and choosing between lots of music devices.
This is sort of the same principle as the world wide web. Broswer software is really hard to write — that’s why there are only 2 or 3 really popular ones. But HTML is much easier, and that’s why there are a bazillion websites.
Because Microsoft didn’t pick up the slack where it mattered, the windows media world so far seems to have been some mix of some mediocre software which only work with some mediocre devices, which all use the WMA format, but all results in a mediocre experience.
I’m all for the choice that WMA offers. I’m especially intrigued by “music giants”:http://www.musicgiants.com, who sell WMA lossless files — something I’ve been waiting for iTMS to do for a long time. Hopefully a good WMP 11 will make things more interesting, and maybe even force Apple’s hand a little bit (I’m perfectly happy to stay with iTMS if they offer a) a subscription service for < $20/month and b) lossless purchases[1])
It's somewhat annoying that WMA is still a closed format (i.e. there's no legal open source decoder implementation and such), but I figure for things I will be ripping myself, I can always fall back to MP3. Sure AAC is better, but you can always just pump up the bitrate a little bit to get similar quality. With disks being so cheap these days, the extra space you pay for by having 192kbps or 256kbps instead of 128kbps is surely worth the freedom from DRM that MP3 offers.
fn1. I'm pretty pessimistic about this one though. If you think about their CD burning policy, it doesn't make sense for them to offer DRM'ed lossless files, since you could just burn it and the re-rip and end up with the exact same bits.