For a while now I have been using iTunes as my main music player and the iTunes music store as my exclusive online music store, however I have come to the end of the line. There has not been one single thing that has caused me to give up on iTunes and Apple, but a combination of lots of things that when put together make iTunes not such a hot product.

TV Shows

Recently with the start of the third season of Prison Break I decided to buy the episodes of Prison Break that I had not seen from Season two. That ended up being over half the season (I was in the process of watching them on Netflix DVD) and cost me nearly thirty dollars. When I started playing the first episode I was actually shocked by the quality, it was really bad. This is a relatively new show, shot in HD and should showcase the best that iTunes has to offer. Instead I got a blurry highly compressed mess.

Watching the show on my 24in LCD really showed the problems in quality. When viewing text on the screen the compression and artifacts really start to show. There were also some problems with graininess in the blacks on screen, but I will give Apple the benefit of the doubt and blame my monitor for that. Because some computer LCD's (especially from Dell) are know for some problems with black levels etc.

The next problem was the copy protection. My plan was to burn a DVD of the shows after downloading and watch them on my big screen, like you would with a music file after you download it. I quickly realized that there is no way to burn a DVD that will play in my DVD player from iTunes. My only option is to pay for an illegal application that will crack the iTunes copy protection and burn DVD, buy an Apple iTV and stream the video over my home network, or buy a video iPod and a TV out dock. So I was pretty much stuck watching the shows on my computer monitor.

When I hit this road block and was unable to watch the shows I just paid for on my big screen TV it really highlighted the problem with iTunes. They are in the pockets of the movie and music industries, and they are playing off of our desire for online downloads of these shows to take our money and sell us sub-par products.

If I went to Best Buy and bought a DVD set for $30 and it had the same level of quality as the iTunes TV shows I would return it in an instant and demand my money back.

Breakdown:
Prison Break Season2 on iTunes $39.99
Pros: Relatively fast delivery depending on your download speed, can order single episodes.
Cons: Poor quality, over 11GB download, price, no viewing on big screen.

Prison Break Season2 on DVD $49.99 from Best Buy
Pros: High quality, big-screen viewing, packaging and extras.
Cons: More expensive, you have to leave the house to buy it. :P

Music

The next problem was with the music. I have become so used to the average quality of the music downloads from iTunes and many other services that I was shocked to hear the difference in quality when I used dbPowerAmp to rip my CD's and using Apple Losslesss to encode the music.

For a long time as soon as I get a new CD I would just rip it using iTunes, and a pretty high quality setting. Then burn mix CD's from my download and burnt songs. After seeing the quality of the TV Shows from iTunes I decided to try dbPowerAmp to rip a CD I had just bought. I used the Apple Lossless codec to get maximum quality, then burnt a custom CD to play in my car.

Luckly I had actually bought some of the same tracks from iTunes before, so I could compare both. Playing on my cars Bose system the difference between the non-iTunes and iTunes versions of the same songs was great. There was a whole level of detail in the highs and lows of the songs that just does not seem to be present in the iTunes versions of the songs.

Breakdown:
iTunes Songs:
Pros: Can buy single songs, download immediately.
Cons: Low quality, most songs still have copy protection, have to use iTunes.

CD's
Pros: High quality, can rip and burn songs all you want, can use any music player.
Cons: More expensive, have to buy albums, can not instantly download.

Copy Protection

With my recent experiences I realized how Apple has been slowly getting us used to living with Copy Protection and I was almost at the point where I had accepted the limitations they are forcing on us. Movies have always had copy protection on them, but you could always go to your friends house and take your DVD with you to watch, and the big thing you can watch it on your TV with out jumping through hoops! With the TV shows I just downloaded not only could I not goto a friends house and watch the shows, I was forced to sit in front of my computer to watch them.

As for music we have it good right now with CD's. Yeah they are expensive, but when you get them you can still RIP them to your computer, burn custom CD's for your car, and download them to your music player.

If we keep supporting iTunes and other services that support copy protection then we are just helping the music industry kill off CD's and slowly ease us in the frying pan of digital copy protection. Before we know it we will all be neck deep in it and cooked.

Yeah Apple has started to release some non-protected music, but it is far from their whole library. Also you still have the same problems of lower quality than CD and it's possible that the music industry could change their minds at any time and just stop selling un-protected music.

iTunes the Application

iTunes has always been bloated, but now it is beyond the point of bloated and is entering the relam of Microsoft Office for built in crap. I have always been forced to download Quicktime with iTunes, which was not too bad seeing as iTunes is a music and video player. But now Apple is talking about bundling Safari for Windows with iTunes, and I have to download a new version of iTunes every time apple adds something for a product I do not own and do not want. Why do I have to have a whole Ring Tones section in my iTunes UI when I do not have an iPhone? Why am I forced to download a 60MB file every time Apple adds a new feature to one of their other products I do not own?

Right now iTunes is open and just playing a song, and for that it is using up 82MB's of RAM on my system, the iTunes Helper application is using up 12MB's of RAM and the iPodService is using up 4MB of RAM. That's a total of nearly 100MB's of RAM for a music player!

For comparison the latest version of WinAmp uses just 19MB's when playing music.

In Closing

For now I am going to be looking for a light weight music player that just plays music. I will be buying CD's and DVD's instead of downloads, and I will be using dbPowerAmp to rip my music into a high quality lossless format (probably FLAC).

Before now I still saw Apple as the underdog, and more worried about their customers than the bottom line. But after some of the recent events with them bricking iPhones, and releasing sub par iPods I think they have started to turn the corner and are looking more like the big corporations we have all come to loath, where a buck is worth more than keeping people happy.