Open Hatch

Great news.  iTunes will drop copy protection on every song they sell.

If they also adopted LAME mp3 as their default encoder, added support for .ogg files to the iPod, reduced the software and memory footprint of iTunes by about half (it is such a hog!), and announced an iTunes extensibility/add-on API, I’d be wowed.

I use Winamp, but don’t really recommend it to people.  It’s a nerd’s music toy.  I use plugins with it that let me do a number of things:

• Rate songs, sort into cue folders (such as “edit”, “re-rip”, “audition”), send to recycle bin, etc. – using keyboard shortcuts (which really speeds up music tryouts)
• Auto-sort and rename files by my own custom preferences
• Rip from various video game music formats
• Play back a wide variety of music formats
• Navigate and cue music from a branching directory view
• Copy files anywhere merely by dragging them from the playlist
• Backup library and rating information
• Sync my collection (including “smart views” – which iTunes calls “smart playlists”, which for example will play all songs of genre x or y above a rating of 3, or everything with an “audition” comment in the tags, etc!) with my iPod.

That is all thanks to Winamp’s open plugin API, which invites the good will and genius of thousands of people who program so many plugins voluntarily.  iTunes can do only the last two on that list, and backing up the library never saved song ratings for me (that was several versions ago, so maybe they’ve clued into allowing that by now – I don’t know).

Winamp also has play/pause/rewind etc. keyboard shortcut capability “out of the box”.  It is also skinnable, meaning the way it looks can be very customized (thousands of skins have been created I’d guess), and optionally change at random with every played song.