Ultimate Showdown: iTunes VS. Zune

Ok, the gloves are off, I'm going after iTunes once and for all. Too many people think that it is the bee's knees and it is my duty as a pseudo-audiophile and overall Windows defender to proclaim that the Zune software is much better. Get over iTunes, come to Zune. Lose the zero and get with the hero.

iTunes is an inefficient music manager in comparison to the Zune software. If your using a Mac then this entire argument is irrelevant because your not on an OS with the capability for Zune. But to all of you Windows users, I want to educate you.

I will show all the features that Zune triumphs in over iTunes.

1. Album info retrieval

iTunes will only grab full details of an Album if it has an Internet connection at the same time it is ripping a CD for you. If you don't have a connection during a rip, you can only manually update the album info. The album art it grabs might be very low resolution and could look terrible on your computer. Zune will grab the album info any time it sees that the album info is insufficient. For all the albums I have ripped, I have never manually typed any info, or personally looked on the Internet for album art. iTunes sometimes doesn't even have the album art so you will be stuck to look for it on your own. It is a very painful and boring process.

2. Zune Social

A part of Zune's software is Social, where you can have other friends, and see what music they listen to. You can also make new friends that have similar music interests as you. When you play a popular band it will give you an artistic display of the band as a screensaver and show you statistics of how popular it is among the Zune community, it will show you most popular song, how many times the band has been played that day and so on. If you have a Windows Live ID (The same one you use for Xbox Live, Windows Messenger or Hotmail) then any other Zune users that are your friends in that list of programs are automatically added to your friends list in Social. If you use Windows Live Messenger, when playing a song it can show to everyone on Messenger what you are listening to. iTunes literally has nothing that can do this.

Mixview

Mixview allows you to view an Artist, and it will show you in an ascetically pleasing manner the bands that have influenced that band, or bands that have been influenced. It will show you the top listener of that artist in that Zune community. iTunes has a similar feature called Genius, but it isn't as comprehensive as Zune, and when I tried to test it, iTunes kept on crashing on me.

Organization

The organization on the Zune software is streamlined for complete efficiency. By comparison, iTunes is a clunkier jukebox. Zune will organize your music by Artist, Album, and Song, just like iTunes. But when you go to a certain artist, it will show all the albums for that artists, using the cover art to organize it, something iTunes can't do. When you are looking at a particular artist, you can see in your social what other friends of yours that also listens to that artist, something iTunes is incapable of doing.

There are weaknesses of the Zune in comparison to iTunes, but these weaknesses are irrelevant due to what they are.

Store

iTunes has a much stronger market for digital downloading. However, both stores pale in comparison to a CD's quality AND versatility.

Radio

Zune offers no Internet radio stations, where iTunes does. But if you enjoy good quality music, listening to these stations will not satisfy you because they are not at a lossless quality like CDs are.

There you have it, Zune is by far the better music jukebox and if anyone thinks other wise I encourage them to show me why.