If you use both Windows Media Player and iTunes to manage your music, keeping your ratings synchronised can be a pain. Orzeszek Ratings lets you sync your play counts and ratings between Windows Media Player and iTunes with two clicks.

Windows Media Player and iTunes must be installed on the same computer, and must be pointing to the same files for Orzeszek Ratings to sync the play counts and ratings for the files.

That means that ratings and play counts for any files that are converted when they’re added to your library (like WMA files added to iTunes) won’t be synced, since your Windows Media Player library and iTunes library are no longer referring to the same file.

You may also want to check out MusicBridge. MusicBridge has a few more options, including the ability to sync track number, name, artist, album, album artist, year, genre, album art, and rating (but no option to sync play count).

However, I’ve found that MusicBridge’s rating sync is quirky. Some 3-star ratings in Windows Media Player become 2.5-star ratings when synced to iTunes, etc. The reasons are explained somewhat here. This quirkiness is one of the reasons why I wrote Orzeszek Ratings.

On 11 March 2009, Apple released iTunes 8.1. ‘Faster. Smarter. Better.’ Or so Apple claims. In particular, Apple provides this snippet:

Speed improvements

iTunes gets a speed boost. Now when it comes to loading large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, and syncing your devices, iTunes responds faster than before.

I suppose ‘speed boost’ means that it’s faster, not fast.

I’m running Windows 7 Beta x64 on an Intel X3350 (four 2.66 GHz cores) with 8 GB of memory. iTunes 8.1 takes 7–8 seconds to load. That’s unacceptable. By comparison, Windows Media Player 12, Microsoft Office Word 2007, and Firefox 3.0.7 each take less than one second to load.

Not only that, but once it loads its hopelessly unresponsive. When you click on an item in the sidebar to change to another view, such as Music, Podcasts, or Applications, iTunes appears to do absolutely nothing for half a second or so.

iTunes 8.1 did improve performance in some areas, though. For example, TG Daily reports that iTunes Plus songs download noticeably faster now. And Kirk McElhearn reports that iTunes now rips CDs and sets tags faster. That’s great.

But long progress bars when performing batch operations are not the fundamental problem. It’s the slow, unresponsive interface that makes the user experience unbearable.

Apple needs to drop the layer of bloat that translates Mac OS X system calls to their Windows equivalents, and write a native Windows iTunes interface that just works.