Amazon has just gotten more competitive with iTunes on the desktop via a new release of doubleTwist for the Mac and Windows, which now offers an Amazon MP3 front-end as well as integrated media software and support for numerous handheld devices. The software, which launched Wednesday, comes courtesy of Jon Lech Johansen ("DVD Jon"), famed for his own personal war on DRM before dropping DRM in music became en vogue. doubleTwist's goal is clearly to offer a clean and very iTunes-like interface for playing media and buying from Amazon MP3, though our initial experiences left us a little disappointed.

The software

The interface of the software itself is clean and easy to understand, especially if you have ever used iTunes before. After you sign in with a doubleTwist account (which you can create from the software itself if you don't have one), the left-hand column allows you to choose between a variety of options. These include the Music Store (Amazon MP3), your music library imported directly from iTunes, your Photos imported from iPhoto, and your Movies (also imported from iTunes). There's a list of purchases you have made through doubleTwist, as well as any devices you currently have connected.

Because the software lets you access your music and photos from iTunes, it's clear that doubleTwist is aimed at being an iTunes replacement and not just a supplement. Though it doesn't appear to recognize the iPhone on the Mac (that's the device I have plugged in that it can't seem to identify correctly), doubleTwist does support a number of BlackBerrys, the Palm Pre, the PSP, some Android phones, and "hundreds" of other devices. (To be fair, the software does recognize the iPhone under Windows, but only firmware 2.0 for now.) For the users of those devices, this could be a true blessing, since iTunes won't sync with any of those by default (cat-and-mouse between Apple and Palm notwithstanding).

When browsing our music library brought in from iTunes, we noticed that there are no playlists imported along with it. You can easily navigate through a list of artists or a giant list of songs, but if you are married to your previously-created playlists, this is a major downside. Update: DVD Jon contacted Ars and said that the software does support playlists, so perhaps it was a bug that we ran into on our side.

Our other observation about the interface was that switching between items was often quite slow. Clicking between Music and the Music Store, for example, frequently resulted in a beachball on a 2.4GHz iMac with 4GB of RAM—something that would never happen on iTunes itself. The beachball came back many times while we were using the software, resulting in general slowness and annoyance.

The store

The main selling point for doubleTwist is its desktop front-end to Amazon MP3 where you can buy nearly every song you can dream of from the most-used alternative to the iTunes Store.

The home screen is extremely simplified, which many have praised compared to the clutter of the iTunes Store. There's a list of Top Albums, Top Songs, and a search box—and that's pretty much it. This is great if you know exactly what you're looking for and can search for it, or if what you're looking for can be found in the Top lists. If you're a browser (like I am), however, this interface is less than ideal. In fact, in order to find an album to purchase for this writeup, I had to use Amazon's Web interface in order to make my selection—then I went back to doubleTwist to search for the album for purchase. Jon tells us that browsing functionality is coming in the future, however, as well as a recommendation engine.

You can listen to previews without navigating to a new page—just click the little Play arrow on any song and it will begin playing. The nice thing about this is that the preview will keep playing even as you navigate to other parts of the store, something you can't do when browsing the iTunes Store. When you make a purchase, doubleTwist will ask you to log into your Amazon account and begin downloading the songs in its own little window.

Once the songs are downloaded, doubleTwist places them in your Purchases playlist. Here's where things get slightly confusing, only because doubleTwist uses the exact same behavior as iTunes when you make purchases, making veteran iTunes users believe that perhaps their purchases through doubleTwist might also be imported into their iTunes libraries. This is not so—the music is saved to your home directory > Music > doubleTwist > album name, and if you want it in iTunes, you have to drag it yourself. No doubt this detail was left out because doubleTwist is meant to act as an iTunes replacement, but the Amazon MP3 downloader (the one that comes from Amazon) imports directly into iTunes when you buy music from the Web store, so if you're looking for that functionality, you're better off sticking with that instead of doubleTwist.

Once our music was purchased, we (of course) decided to listen to it. Here's where doubleTwist's slowness came back into play—the software skipped every 10 seconds or so, pausing our music every time it decided to burp. We confirmed this wasn't a problem in the files themselves by playing them in iTunes with no hiccups. If doubleTwist's other issues are just annoyances, this is the dealbreaker—how can you possibly use a media player to listen to music if it skips your music all the way through?

We'll stick with the Web interface, thanks

It's the cumulation of these issues—general interface slowness, difficulty in browsing Amazon's selection, and constant song hiccups—that led us to decide that we prefer iTunes and the Web version of Amazon MP3. That doesn't mean we hate doubleTwist, though. The software is still useful for those using Android devices or BlackBerrys, and it has great potential if doubleTwist is able to rectify its performance issues.

For now, though, it's just not for us.