Apple iTunes Review

Disclaimer: This review was based off version 7.6.2.9. Later versions of iTunes may pender some of this review inaccurate.

iTunes is a music program that has been around since the release of the first iPod generation in 2001. However, it wasn't until version 4.1 where Windows became a supported operating system, allowing Windows users to also own iPods.

While iTunes was mostly aimed towards syncing music, videos, and games to your iPod, it can also be used as a media jukebox for your computer. iTunes scrobbles your computer for audio files, videos, and songs that you can play in iTunes. iTunes supports most common audio and video file extensions, as well as Apple's AAC format. WMA (Windows Media Audio) and WMV (Windows Media Video) are not supported.

Some of iTunes most notable features aside from playing audio and video files are podcasts, internet radio, playlist, shuffling and mixing, rating music, visualizers, as well as using a "cover flow" that displays all of the album artwork in your music collection. The cover flow is a memory intensive program, however. It may slow down your computer. You can download album artwork through the iTunes store with a store account. The interface of the program is sleek and smooth. Nothing feels jagged or too out-of-place.

iTunes also has the iTunes Store, where you can purchase music, music videos, movies, iPod games, audiobooks and more. There are also some free goodies such as the "Single of the Week" as well as plenty of free podcasts. The store also allows you to enter in iTunes gift cards that are avaliable in most major grocery and convience stores. The only downfall of purchasing music in iTunes is that the files are encoded in M4P format, which will be difficult or impossible to play in other music jukeboxes. This M4P format is also unsupported by most MP3 players other than the Apple iPod. The store has a solid selection of music, but movie selection is a bit weak.

One thing that hurts iTunes is the speed of the program. It's sloooowwww, and is one of the most non-game memory-intensive applications on my computer. My desktop PC can handle it fine, but on my laptop that is a good five years old, it's difficult to run many applications over it.

Syncing the iPod is simple and nothing more than plugging it in and following a few directions.

All around iTunes is a program that iPod owners should download. It's free, easy to use and is a good way to not only sync media to your iPod, but also organize your media library. The programs shortfalls of being slow and the store only offering Apple-encoded files may not make it a suitable media player replacement for some. But it's certainly worth a shot.