Julian, if all you want is a dead simple no-frills media player, try VLC Media Player (www.videolan.org). It’s open source, available on multiple OSes and as far as I know, has it’s codecs compiled into the app, which has pros and cons, I know, but at least you don’t spend hours trying to find codecs. It supports a *really* broad range of audio and video formats.

No media library or any guff, but there are some advanced features under the hood if you dig around (including ability to stream across a LAN).

I have to say I’m curious how a company that can design some fantastically usable UI’s (iPod) can generate an app like iTunes.

Wrong again? Could be – I’ve had enough practice, that I am getting good at it now.

You persuaded me to install it, and give it a try.

Progress displayed [only] in the title bar?

Equaliser dialog box has a fake Title bar?

30 minutes wasted happily updating properties of my songs, because they are inconsistent and I am anal?

Still no File | Open? No way I can find in the application to simply navigate to a file in a subdirectory and say “Make the bits in that file play through the speaker”?

Still no .wav files?

Getting help requires Internet access?

Is there is a difference between “Enqueue” and “Queue as Next”? (I still can’t tell after reading the help.)

Cross-fader symbol looks like my iPod’s shuffle symbol?

You see an empty NetRadio list and you can’t add a station by right-clicking?

“vol” is the abbreviation for “Volume”? Isn’t the speaker icon ubiquitous for this purpose? Why not a standard Windows slider here?

Select some songs. Hit “Create playlist”. It is created and it is empty. Why not include the songs I just selected?

Musikcube raises more questions, rather than providing an answer. I still don’t want another stinking music library.

I googled for musikcube.

But I don’t want another stinking music library. I want a simple mp3 player. Oh, and a .wav player.

Sorry, I didn’t investigate any further.

WMP not only steals your Teddy Bear, but also pulls all the stuffing out and sticks the carcass on a stake on your front lawn.

I’m not going to disagree. I am certainly not going to claim Windows Media Player is a GUI success story.

Unforgivably, there’s no fucking menu bar.

I so agree. This is particularly disappointing as it comes from the same damn company that set the Windows conventions.

I attacked this ridiculous situation when this blog first started.

I did explain then that:

You get double bonus points if you used the opportunity to select View | Full Mode Options | Show Menu Bar, so that this usability problem wouldn’t happen again.

I have certainly taken this step, so, it seems like I have taken a similar approach to you: I have learned to simply disable or ignore each annoying feature.

How do I play a music file?

I use File | Open… (as turned on above) or double click on the file in Explorer.

For queueing, I right-click on the file in Explorer, and “Add To Windows Media Player list”.

In practice, I rarely use playlists. Perhaps if I wanted to use them more, I would find WMP worse. Perhaps if I didn’t use WMP, I would use playlists more!

Perhaps the answer is at least partially a kind of Stockholm syndrome

No, I don’t love my captor; I don’t even respect it. I don’t claim it is the lessor of two evils. It’s more just the devil I know!

For example, while playing with WMP for this comment, it became non-responsive when I accidentally pointed it at a CD drive. What is this? Co-operative multi-tasking? Name one good reason why the UI thread and the disk-drive accessing thread aren’t different threads. Name one good reason why a thread blocked on input from a driver can’t also be monitoring for an abort message from the main thread.

Oh well, this is the sort of problem that gets fixed in version 2. What’s that you say? WMP is up to version 11? How can that be?

Yeah, no sign of Stockholm Syndrome here!

I have a similar reaction to WMP that you have to iTunes. I find the interface incomprehensible and gratuitously nonconformant. WMP not only steals your Teddy Bear, but also pulls all the stuffing out and sticks the carcass on a stake on your front lawn.

Fucking File | Open menu? There *is* no fucking File open menu. In fact, there’s no fucking File menu. Unforgivably, there’s no fucking menu bar.

How do I play a music file? I can see the “Now playing” panel and it says “Drag items here” to create a playlist. OK, so I go to explorer, find my music files, and try to drag them in. But no luck; the cursor changes to show that the files can’t be dropped there. No idea as to why not …

And so on. The point of this rant is not to say that my media player is better than yours, nyeah nyeah. Instead I’m just curious as to why you would find WMP (apparently) acceptable and iTunes annoying.

Perhaps the answer is at least partially a kind of Stockholm syndrome, as Chris astutely commented on my blog. Reading your article above I was reminded of some of the iTunes annoyances that I have become blind to, simply by progressive exposure over a long time frame. Overall I find that iTunes has improved with each successive release but occasionally they make a step backward. On first discovery of whatever annoying feature they introduce, I have learned to simply disable it and continue to use the application as before. For example, when they introduced the iTunes store thing, it took only a little while to discover that it was called the “minibrowser” and disable it from the menu bar. In comparison, a new user gets confronted with all of the annoying features at once.

That’s my theory anyway – perhaps you have another explanation?

Just out of interest Julian, which media player do you use?

In approximate order of decreasing usage, my media players include:

1. Panasonic DVR
2. Sony car stereo
3. Apple iPod shuffle
4. Windows Media Player
5. YouTube and other flash-based players
6. LG PowerDVD
7. Quicktime
8. AVIPreview
9. VirtualDub