iTunes for Windows

**Sho0tyz** · October 17th, 2003, 02:44 PM

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. iTunes for Windows was released yesterday. You can get it at http://www.apple.com

I have been waiting for this for a while, and I have to say even I was pleasantly surprised. The music store doesn't interest me at all, and I was happy to find that there is an option where you can completely disable it. No need to see ads for music you most likely don't want to buy anyway. Most of the media-hype has been about the music store, but I think iTunes is a great mp3 player by itself.

iTunes makes it very easy to keep your music organized, especially if you have a large collection. The tagging features are as good or better than any of the stand alone mp3 tagging programs I have tried. Creating playlists, and searching for music within your playlists is so much simpler than Winamp (which I had previously been using).

The "smart playlist" feature is really nice. I haven't seen anything like this on any other players I have tried. It allows you to create playlists based on certain rules and continuously updates them. For instance, if you want to create a list of music you haven't heard in a while, you can tell it to create a smart playlist of music that hasn't been listened to in the past 30 days. Where the smart part comes in is as soon as you listen to any of these songs they automatically get removed from the list and as 30 days go by they are automatically re-added. If you wanted to create a list of your current favorites you could tell it to create a list of all music you have listened to more than 10 times in the past 2 weeks, and it will be similarly auto-updated. The amount of rules you can choose from and combine to make very specific and complex playlists is amazing. You can tell it to list all rap songs that are at least 4 minutes long which were recorded in the year 1999 that were not by Snoop Dogg and that you have listened to at least once in the past month. You have pretty much endless sorting possibilities.

The built in cd ripping works well. The default is for 128 bit aac, but it's easy to change to mp3 at whatever bitrate you might desire. It automatically tags each track and adds it to your library, including any smart playlists you have created. I haven't tried the cd burning yet, I rarely ever burn audio cd's.

There is another feature which is interesting, automatic LAN streaming. If you have iTunes running on more than one computer on your network (Mac or Windows), music can be streamed from one machine to the other. If you have streaming enabled, your music library simply shows up on the other computer. No configuration required at all, everything is automatically detected.

It is a bit slow when I load 60 gigs of mp3's all at once, but just about every player I've tried is the same way. One other downpoint, it installs quicktime and places an auto-starting icon in your system tray without asking you. It can be easily disabled, but it's still annoying. Overall, I'm happy with it. I'm sure some people prefer minimalist-type players, if so this is not for you. If you want to have a lot of control over your music and be able to organize it quickly and easily you might want to give it a try.