I have several complaints with iTunes of which the ever increasing size of the program as well as its hogging of resources are at the top of the list. Devin Coldewey over at TechCrunch has an excellent post complaining of this fact but is summed up nicely with

Facebook integration. Tweeting my music interests. AppleTV. Full-screen album extras. App management. An entire online store. Smart playlists. CD burning. Ringtone creation. Tips the scales at 88MB. All this in what is essentially the only music player on OS X. At some point enough is enough, and for me it was enough years ago. For god’s sake, Apple, all I want to do is play my music.

Now Devin is apparently a big fan of winAMP for its straight forward way of letting you get to the business of doing what is important – playing your music. He notes that even Windows Media Player is less of a pain in the ass than iTunes but still overburdened like iTunes is.

To a point I agree with him on this but with the newest version that comes with Windows 7 the Media Player has greatly reduced its hogging of resources to the point that it is even less than what the newest version of winAMP uses. I am not a big fan of its way of letting you access your media files but I’m willing to live with it just because it is so much better at using fewer resources.

At one time yes – Media Play was a pig and often needed additional codex’s to be installed in order to view some video files or listen to music in formats other than MP3 or WAV. With Win7 however Media Player plays DivX avi right out of the box. Another really great feature as of Windows 7 and its Home Network setup is the ease with which you can share music and video between machine.

So Devin maybe give Windows Media Player a little longer of a chance – you might be pleasantly surprised.