It most certainly is a reimagining of history, everyone was using Winamp to play their mp3s when the iPod first came out in 2001. Winamp was the best, nothing came close to beating it. AOL paid $80 million for Winamp.

Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.

The reason iPod was so popular was it's form factor/UI/UX/ease of use and the iTunes Music Store.

It also needed USB to become successful, FireWire held the iPod back from mainstream adoption.

Winamp 2 was the music player of choice of discretionary users who knew to seek out software on their own. Winamp 3 came out and it was so colossally awful that most people stayed on 2.

If you bought your computer in a store -- like most people in the US at the time -- instead of building your own, it came bundled with some other product: WMP at least, possibly MusicMatch, RealJukebox (eventually merged back into RealPlayer), which you were likely using. Getting your Nomad or iRiver, a comparable devices to the iPod, to work with that, was not as smooth as the iTunes-iPod combo.

Getting your device to work was just a matter of plugging them in and copying the files to the mass storage drive that appeared afterwards. From the most popular options, it was only the iPod that needed some special handling with special software to write to its proprietary database in order to listen to new files on your device.

> Meanwhile Apple had the monstrosity that was/is QuickTime.

Nope, Apple had had iTunes since 2001, and by the time the iPod came out, I for one had ripped most of my CDs to iTunes and basically used the Mac as the primary music machine.

I vaguely remember that when my sister installed iTunes on her Windows XP machine, she also found herself lumbered with QuickTime... whether that was a sly bundling move by Apple or an actual dependency I cannot recall (or perhaps never really knew), but what does stick with me is how much regular grief it caused her.

Actual dependency. Mac or Windows, QuickTime was the mechanism by which iTunes performed any playback at all whether audio or video. Anything that ran in QuickTime could theoretically also run in iTunes though if I recall correctly though, iTunes would still limit the file-types you could import into your library.

Even today, iTunes still depends on QuickTime, but given I haven't used Windows in almost ten years or seriously used iTunes in almost 8 years, I couldn't tell you whether that dependency is the old QuickTime 7 API or if Apple ported a subset of the newer QuickTime APIs over I also couldn't really tell you which they use on Macs* anymore either given I prefer to avoid launching iTunes whenever possible.

That said, iTunes up to about version 6 point whatever the last point update was, was genuinely a really great jukebox on Windows. It was easy to use, loaded fast, ran fast and I ran it nearly 24/7 on my old XP machine. iTunes 7 ruined all of that, and my first indication would have been when it took over an hour to complete the install process and the first run was dog slow.

* Apple did deprecate and remove QuickTime 7 from Mac OS X, that said, I wouldn't put it past them to maintain an API in maintenance mode exclusively for their own use, particularly when it comes to maintaining the many-heads of the beast that is iTunes.

XP and WMP might pre-date the iPod but they were useless in terms of media management and music syncing. For one, WMP default to the .wma format for audio which didn't work on any portable player at the time. You could switch it to use MP3's but you had to install an MP3 codec in order to get that to work and most users had no inclination to do anything of the sort.

I think the OP's point was that, while you could do this stuff on Windows, it wasn't nearly as functional, seamless, or simple as it was with an iPod and iTunes or even MusicMatch (which really, really sucked, at the time).

My recollection was Creative Nomad played .wma, which at the time blew away .mp3 quality.

And the Creative Nomad ZEN Xtra with 60GB was phenomenal for a reasonably sized library.

For software, I recall two options:

MediaMonkey Gold, a media player that synced with ZEN players and could automatically convert media formats.

Notmad Explorer, a software suite from Red Chair Software that allowed for file and playlist management for the ZEN players.

Yeah, but those early WMP versions were just simple media players with really awful, clunky, slow syncing support.

Microsoft took about 5 years to catch up, no small part due to USB 2.0

> Windows XP pre-dates the iPod. Windows Media Player pre-dates the iPod by over ten years.

XP was released on 25th octobre 2001. First ipod 2 days before, on 23th october 2001.

XP shipped with WMP 8, but WMP 9 was the landmark release that brought more ripping options, star ratings, a quick navigation screen, and essentially made WMP into the product that is familiar to many from the XP era.

Except literally (almost) nobody used windows media player to listen to mp3s. Certainly nobody I knew and the majority of my friends are not "techies." Whatever windows media player was doing is not really relevant.

In 2000, the streaming media player market had RealNetworks in first place [1] with 12% market share, Apple with QuickTime in second at 7%, WMP in distant third at 3%. By 2004, QuickTime had over 36% share, WMP in the lead at 38%, RealPlayer just shy of 25% [2]. WebSiteOptimization.com's January 2008 report [3] about streaming media players uses data sourced from Nielsen for the years 2003-2008 that shows the steady rise of iTunes, the flat trends for QuickTime and RealPlayer, and the more modest growth but higher absolute numbers for Windows Media Player.

Clearly, the install base of these products significantly contributed to the software people used to manage their portable music players. In May 2003, a Nielsen report put Winamp's install base at 5.5 million, Windows Media Player at 43.1 million, RealNetworks at 26 million, and QuickTime at 13.5 million [4][5].

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/10/business/technology-micros... [2] http://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-product-marketing-says-qu... [3] http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0801/ [4] http://www.zdnet.com/article/music-players-market-share-wina... [5] https://www.cnet.com/news/aol-trumpets-new-winamp/

I wouldn’t put too much stock in those figures, especially Nielsen. I was in the streaming industry at the time, built the world’s largest Windows Media streaming network. I agree with other comments here, people largely didn’t manage media libraries using WMP.