Post 9 - Reaction to the reading (Week 4, part 1)

This week's reading got me thinking about bias and its role in information gathering. Thanks to the author's unwillingness to say one thing positive about Windows Media and his glowing, straight from the Apple website, review of QuickTime, I can't really trust his review of either.

This quote really killed me:

"The player integrates a lot of audio support similar to that found in the Apple iTunes application . Play lists and access to the Microsoft music store are prominent additions ."

Gee. Because iTunes isn't attached to a music store at all, nooo. They aren't trying to sell you something at every turn, it's a feature, not a marketing effort.

Considering past statements I've made, you'd think I was a huge Windows Media fan. Nope. It just happens to be what opens most of the time when I play music without thinking and I know how it works. I happen to like WinAmp better than any of them purely because it's the first player I tried and I have figured out most of its eccentricities. Plus, it plays in a teeny tiny window, something both WM and iTunes seem to have forgotten how to do. I'm not into the whole world of audio player skins. I want the content in a non-distracting frame if I see it at all (I largely listen to music on my computer at work).

If we're talking about what endusers will see, the players are largely the same as far as what they will do. I use all three (WinAmp, WM and iTunes) pretty much interchangeably depending on what format the content is in. I didn't even realize I don't have Real installed on this machine until I tried to find it for class. They're all free downloads, what do I care if I need to download a new player to view some free content? It's a different matter if I've paid for the content, but there, I'm even more invested and likely to download the player. I don't know if it matters so much to end users what format companies use to encode their media, so long as the player is always free.