If by having an "iTunes" library you mean it has some old DRMd 128kbps AAC files, I believe they'll let you download non-DRMd 256kbps versions which will then play in most decent media players. AAC achieves transparency at lower bitrates than MP3, and compatibility really isn't much of a problem these days. Windows users seem to like foobar2000, MusicBee, or dBPowerAmp so you can move on from iTunes.

> By the way, anyone know of a good terminal app for Windows? Not too crazy about Powershell. I have been using Git Bash and that's decent so far.

Reading your expectations and gripes, I'd say try http://bliker.github.io/cmder/ , the goodness of clink bundled with ConEmu and a sexy Monokai theme.

Why can't you migrate your music collection away from iTunes? I thought the DRM was killed long ago.

Apple removed the DRM from new music sales. All existing music sold before then is still DRM locked. When Apple discontinued DRM, they made user spend $0.30 per song to unlock them (seriously). Now, it appears you can spend $25 for iTunes Match, ensure the affected songs are available, delete the local DRM-infected ones, and it will download proper ones to replace them.

iTunes Match brings its own issues to the party. I've had songs that I own, with 'explicit content', that I've hand-ripped, converted into radio friendly abominations that are, frankly, unlistenable. Maybe that's just Apple's 'family-friendly' values shining through; that might be appropriate for some, but I don't have a Big Brother in real life, and I don't want one messing with my music collection either!

You can redownload DRM-free versions for free:

http://www.wired.com/2014/03/kill-itunes-drm/

There were programs for removing the DRM from iTunes files. I used one successfully. Maybe they don't work anymore? I don't know.

Or you can burn your DRM songs to CD, then rip to DRM-free MP3.

Encoding music that has lossy compression with a lossy compressor? Not a good idea ;).

Know a good music player for Windows? And don't tell me Windows Media Player. :)

http://www.foobar2000.org/ is a fantastic piece of software. Extremely efficient/powerful/customizable (and closed-source). I sorely miss it under Linux, Rhythmbox/Quodlibet/Amarok/Clementine don't even come close.

What powerful features does one need in music player? Or, what features do you miss in OSS players?

WMP actually isn't that bad these days, though all I use it for is ripping CDs (yep, those shiny plastic things for you young'uns) since it's great at that. For playback in Windows, I've stuck with Winamp through the years as I haven't found anything that works the way it does without a bunch of features I don't need. I tried Foobar2000 and couldn't get into it, and MediaMonkey just seemed like overkill.

By the way, a great site for finding apps in specific genres is alternativeto.net. Here's a list of alternatives to iTunes:

http://alternativeto.net/software/itunes/?platform=windows

I'll never understand this community...downvoted because I use WMP (oh the horror), or downvoted because I was trying to be helpful?

I moved to Linux (Ubuntu) and migrated a HUGE iTunes library along with it. I now use Clementine as my music management / player. I believe there's a way to import an iTunes library, but the iTunes metadata is all in one big XML file. So I wrote a script that loads all my metadata into Clementine's sqlite database.

I can't tell you in words how awesome this is.

http://www.jriver.com/

But I have used it for 10 years and it's the only reason I still have Windows machines in my house. It's that good.

Winamp is still my preference.

Cygwin

I use Cygwin on a regular basis. It's basically indispensible, because it's the only thing that does what it does. But I get the strong impression that it was designed to punish Windows users. Just off the top of my head:

* It has no idea about Windows file system conventions. IIRC, the default install directory is "C:\Cygwin".

* The "default" install is super bare-bones, and missing a lot of pretty basic Unix utils. This would be a minor complaint, except:

* The installer--the bit that you download--is also the package manager. This means that if you install it and then delete the installer like a responsible, space-conserving user, then the first time you realize that you don't have, I dunno, rsync, you have to download the installer again. And then, unless you having to manually navigate to your Downloads folder every time you want to install a damn package, you have to find a place for it to live on your drive and set up a start-menu shortcut for it. These things are why we invented installers, so why doesn't the installer do them?

* And, as you may have guessed from that last bit, there is no way to install packages from within the Cygwin terminal. In fact, you have to close all open terminals every time you want to run the package manager. You can imagine how much fun that is. The excuse for this is "such a program would need full access to all of Cygwin's POSIX functionality. That is, however, difficult to provide in a Cygwin-free environment, such as exists on first installation." In other words, they can't provide a proper package manager because then they couldn't make the installer and the package manager the same program which they shouldn't be fucking doing anyway.

* Every time you run the installer/package manager, you have to click "Okay" seven times (yes, I counted) to confirm a load of options that you will almost certainly never change after first install.

This ran way longer than I intended. Apparently I am fussed. :-/ The thing that really gets me is that this isn't even a case of Unix grognards not knowing or caring about Windows standards. There is no modern OS where installing an application off of the root directory is acceptable. I don't get it.

I think Cygwin is trying to be an Operating system ontop another operating system. Windows is in C:\Windows, so there is some logic behind Cygwin being in C:\Cygwin. It's not ideal, but I wouldn't call it all together illogical.

The package management is indeed a mass. The install.exe should literally install ONLY the barebones system plus some kind of terminal app, like Putty (because CMD is a pain to use), and then open the terminal to continue installation from there.

I look in on the Cygwin users' mailing list every now and again and I have a lot of respect for the devs and how they run their project, finding a usable middle ground between Windows and Linux (Cygwin at its core is a DLL that emulates POSIX and Linux-specific system calls).

The installer being the package manager threw me when I first started using Cygwin. However, when I researched the issue, I can see how the choice made sense. Unlike a Linux system, you can't upgrade the Cygwin DLL in-place while it's running.

apt-cyg [1] is a nice simple bash script for managing Cygwin packages. I find very useful for avoiding the GUI installer when I just need to add or remove a few packages. For software that doesn't require an upgrade of the Cygwin DLL, they can be installed / removed from inside Cygwin itself.

[1] https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg

I used Cygwin when I was on Windows but my advice is to use Windows for the client programs and run a headless Linux VM for everything else. Export its filesystem so you can use Windows to edit files but ssh to Linux to work with a terminal. You'll get a real package manager too.

So? Who cares about Windows conventions? You're using Cygwin to escape Windows.

I only use Cygwin because its the only way to use certain tools. I run a tidy Windows install otherwise. I wouldn't use it at all if I didn't need to.

Did you stop reading after the third sentence? I addressed that specifically later on. A lot of Cygwin's behavior is no more acceptable in Unix than in Windows.

And no, I don't use Cygwin to "escape" Windows. Windows is a perfectly functional GUI for casual daily use. I use Cygwin because it provides useful tools and utilities that aren't available in Windows.

Still runs in the Windows terminal, right? Small as it seems, one of the first things to push me to OSX from Windows was the ease of copying and pasting in and out of the terminal.

For the past couple of years, it uses mintty (based on the same code as putty) as its default terminal. I find mintty to be a very fine terminal emulator and is easily configurable; its default colour for rendering ANSI Blue was too dark for my liking but I was able to change it to the same colour that xterm uses.

It supports UTF8, 256 colours; copy-pasting is simple and easy. I suppose the only mainstream feature it's lacking is tabs -- but that doesn't bother me.

This is fixed for Windows 10 thankfully, along with a few other features that have been missing a while [1]. Multi-line copy, paste good paste support (correct formatting), newlines following resizes, transparency, etc.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/window...

No, it has it's own terminal. Pretty nice too. I use it at work when I have to use Windows.

You cannot get better. About as close to Bash as you can get on Windows.

Git bash is better.