There are enough of them already, but I’m going to add another one regardless. Yes, a review of Apple’s new version of iTunes – more specifically the way it runs on windows.

I was actually kind of excited to see this program. IÂ’ve heard great things about it from Mac users, iPod owners and not. So needless to say when I first heard it was available I ran to the site and downloaded it.

At first glance it’s kind of bulky looking. Ringing in at 20MB for a music player and organizer I guess its ok. But it also includes QuickTime 6.4 I wish they’d have left as separate downloads – I already had QuickTime installed. And many people will, so this is a waste. Oh well, on with the app.

“Best Windows App Ever”

 

Apple claims this is “the best windows app ever.” I find it hard to believe, but we’ll see. At first run it says “hey, you want me to look for music?” I said no, I don’t trust these things – and for good reason. I poked around, added an album and thought it was ok. So I imported my entire library. This was a mistake. I made the fatal mistake of setting iTune’s music folder to the same place as my where my mp3s were located. iTunes then proceeded to rearrange every single folder I had. Egad. You know I have 9173 songs totalling 29.7 days of play? It made a huge mess. But that was ok; I fixed it using my mad PHP skills (thanks to mostly proper id tags on my mp3s). After that sloppy mess I left my iTunes music folder separate from my actual mp3 folder – this time when I imported it merely pointed to their real location – Awesome (That’s how it’s supposed to work).

Now that my library is imported, and in the proper locations I get a real chance to dive into the user interface. It’s easy. It looks nice (if you’ve seen quick time, you’d have seen the ‘style’) It’s not overloaded with bloated and useless options (although some will see this as a downfall) I see it as a bonus for most users. Adding albums, songs, play lists is easy – click click done. Modifying song information is easy, burning a CD is easy. The only problem is that the interface is slow. Apple made it out of probably 90% non-standard components, so they have to include all that extra stuff just to make it look pretty. I’m sure it works a lot better given more hardware- although my system meets and exceeds all their actual requirements. All this also leads to slow loading and unloading of the application. The task-bar icon is mostly useless, too. Don’t forget there’s also no ‘Maximize’ button.

Song Management

 

As I’ve sort of mentioned already, making play lists is easy. You can either drop an entire folder into the sources list and it will create the play list for you, or you can manually pick and chose songs and just drag them to the lists. However, the best feature of the play lists is the ‘smart play list’ feature. This feature allows you to specify a query (pardon my jargon) and iTunes will automatically update it whenever you add new songs that match. For example, I can set one to match the genre ‘Rock’ and every time new rock is added to my library it will automatically be in this play list. You can match anything and multiple items. This feature is extremely handy and well done. Two thumbs up for that action.

Ripping and Burning Songs

 

You can rip songs, fast to either AAC (a very good mpeg 4 codec) MP3 (the getting-stale mpeg-2 codec), AppleÂ’s old AIFF format and standard WAV format. (Why youÂ’d want to use an uncompressed format from a purchased CD is beyond me, but hey those are your options). ItÂ’s easy to do though, stick in the cd and let it go.

Burning a song or twenty is as easy as making a play list and clicking the ‘burn’ button. However, as much as I’d love to test both of these features – iTunes doesn’t seem to give a rats ass about my SCSI Burner(s). So, testing this is out of the question – oh well.

Buying Songs

 

Well, since I’m in Canada and Apple doesn’t have distribution rights for music in Canada – I can’t buy anything to test it out. But here’s how it goes. You buy music, it goes in your library. You can listen to it all you want, you can transfer it to your iPod (if you have one) and listen all you want. You can burn it to a CD 10 times. People seem huffy and puffy about this 10 burn limit. But, seriously, you can burn it to a CD as an mp3, or audio – in which case you’re free to listen to it as much as you want – or even re-rip it for unconditional use. What’s the big deal? This sounds ok to me. Besides, if you burn the same track over and over again you may have a problem :)

Naturally it’s highly recommended that you have high speed to buy and download music – but dialup can be used too without problems. Just don’t expect to be streaming videos. What videos? Yes, there are videos too. Only a few so far that I’ve found, but for free to watch – no problem!

In The End

 

Well, hate to say it but this isn’t the best windows app ever. And hell didn’t freeze over. (The cliché was more used because of apple releasing a windows program; but QuickTime has been running on windows for close to a decade.)

Even though IÂ’m sure IÂ’ve scared most of you off already, overall the program is quite nice. I will find myself using it for its library and jukebox type features. It by far blows away any other library/cataloging application IÂ’ve used. To use it as a regular, quick play/default player though is somewhat a tedious task. Since its load time is quite substantial to Winamp 2.x itÂ’s just not feasible to use as a default player. It doesnÂ’t like my CD Burner(s), so IÂ’ll have to stick with retarded Nero to make my audio cds.

IÂ’ll still use it; although IÂ’d like to see a few of the quirks fixed. And I must applaud apple for at least making an effort to make something cross-platform (that works on multiple system types for you non geeks) that actually functions the same in the different environments. Perhaps a Linux version is in store soon? ItÂ’d be an amazing day when all software developers can see what they can do when they abide by standards (see: Mozilla).