How do YOU listen to AM?

[VAXman(Admin)]

Originally Posted by gr8sho92

I agree with the points made in this post. These points are surely valid for larger applications that manage a lot of data.

When it comes to streaming shoutcast (which is what this thread is about), this is a very focused and specific task. The music comes down the wire to my computer and I want it to come out the speakers. On some machines I have, they are very resource challenged including my work laptop. It uses over 430MB of RAM just to boot the darn thing and the vast majority of which I have no control over since the asset doesn't belong to me. Using an unobtrusive player that uses a small amount of RAM is very useful in this situation. If you have a very very low-end machine that has a small amount of RAM (say 160MB total), running an application with a small memory requirement is handy.

If you are so inclined Vax and have low-end w* machine around, try XMPlay just for grins.

I want to point out that I DO use iTunes to manage my personal music library because of my iPod. But for listening to AM, XMPlay does the job nicely in a very stealthy way.

Cheers

The claim, as I read it, what that the smaller memory footprint made it better.

I don't know the XMPlay s/w and I guess I never will. I looked to download it and try it, but it is Weendoze only.

The thing to remember is that iTunes is a collections of myriad functions including playing Video. Personally, I would have preferred Apple to divorce the Video from iTunes and create an iVideo/iWatch/iTV application but they did not. It's like a single guy with a sedan. He really only uses one seat but the others are still there. Should he buy a motorcycle? Or, stick with the sedan in case he wants to pick up a videographer, a database manager, a shopper and TV broadcaster?

My first comment about the 100% CPU was from a real customer situation. If you don't understand what the computer metrics you are observing mean, then you'd be best off to stop wasting system resources to collect/view them. The story is quite humorous. If you want to know, I can describe it in another thread or a PM.

[gr8sho92]

Originally Posted by VAXman

The thing to remember is that iTunes is a collections of myriad functions including playing Video. Personally, I would have preferred Apple to divorce the Video from iTunes and create an iVideo/iWatch/iTV application but they did not. It's like a single guy with a sedan. He really only uses one seat but the others are still there. Should he buy a motorcycle? Or, stick with the sedan in case he wants to pick up a videographer, a database manager, a shopper and TV broadcaster?

I don't have a problem with the designpoint. A 5th gen iPod or better can do video so the application that supports syncing it should do all of the work necessary to feed it data. I've been using iTunes as soon as it became available and was using MusicMatch before that (this is what Apple was shipping with the Gen I iPod).

Let's say you have a lot of music stored locally. In order for iTunes to start, it needs to read some XML files. If the library it manages is large enough, you may need to wait anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds just to open iTunes application. Same on the closing side when it writes the XML back out to disk apparently. This isn't a big deal to me if I need to deal with managing updates to the iPod.

But when it comes to listening to AuralMoon, I've gotten spoiled by the "instant on" aspect of smaller applications like XMP, or running PocketTunes on the Treo 650.