4 ms·

Is that really an ahem apples to apples comparison? Depending on when we're talking, iTunes had many more built in features than Winamp...

• tanseydavid 4y ago
  Large number of features is not a great excuse for slow start times.
• vladvasiliu 4y ago
  Winamp may be an unfair comparison. I'm not overly familiar with that period's iTunes, but I remember when I bought my first iPod, a 4th gen click wheel (don't remember the year, but it was already an "older model" at the time) I was using Amarok on Linux on an AMD Thunderbird with 256 MB of RAM. That thing would fly. And it did more than Winamp: it had an actual DB-backed music library, iPod interface, etc. Yet, a few years later, when I got a MacBook Pro with a dual-core CPU and 16 times the RAM, iTunes would still be painfully slow. And I don't remember it doing much more than Amarok. As a matter of fact, it was inferior on pretty much every metric I could think of.
  • anthk 4y ago
    Similar here. AMD Athlonb XP, Amarok, KDE3, no Arts, just Alsa and DMIX. 256MB of RAM and a Geforce2.
• addicted 4y ago
  I think you’ve got that backwards. iTunes had a fraction of the features Winamp did.
  • s1artibartfast 4y ago
    It is amazing, I remember using out of the box winamp for decentralized video streaming circa ~2003?. This was years before YouTube was even founded
    • s1artibartfast 4y ago
      not sure who is downvoting, but this was an actual feature, not a snarky comment.
  • dtech 4y ago
    On the music player side yes, but it had a lot of features/bloat like the music store and iPod synchronization.
    • bbatha 4y ago
      > it had a lot of features/bloat like the music store and iPod synchronization. This is a hilarious statement to read, cause that's probably what 80% of people were using iTunes exclusively for and relegating their music listening to their iPod/iPhone, especially in the later part of the 00s.