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.