iTunes for Windows Review

 

 

 

Mac has once again forged new territory with their latest version of iTunes for both Windows and Mac! How cool is that? iTunes for Mac alone controlled 70% of the music download market, and now with it's expansion into the Windows platform, this will surely expand. The interface is elegant, but may take Windows users a little time to get use to. You will also need a broadband connection to get the best experience. I gave it a spin last night and I have to say- it is a wonderful experience. iTunes is a free download, has no monthly fee, and is several products in one. There is a media player, CD burning software, an audio encoder, streaming radio stations, and best if all the iStore!

 

No, not every recording known to man is on there (no significant Madonna for example), but you'll be surprised just how much stuff is actually available, and how addicting it is to buy music! There are many exclusives such as Annie Lennox dance remixes of her latest single, and a decent selection of dance tracks. They even allow you to browse by genre (like a traditional record store), and both Dance and Electronica are well represented. I even found the latest Murk Album, as well as the newer Funky Green Dogs release. However, there's not a huge amount of indie labels in there yet but I did notice that Tommy Boy artists were represented, so there is hope for more to follow. Dance artists like Kristine W are almost represented- and what I mean by that is that her last MCA album is on there, but remixes for "Some Lovin" are not. You do get a 30 second sample of each track before you buy it- although sometimes the section sampled doesn't do the song justice. One particular sample I listened to cut off right before the first verse started, and I was like "what a lovely intro that was...but where's the song?"

 

Personally I feel that $.99 is too much for a single 3 minute song, but I would pay that for an extended remix. Buying albums seems to be a better value because you get 10-15 tracks (and sometimes album only exclusives) for $9.99. My biggest beef is that you will most likely be charged sales tax! What? I would imagine this is due to the proliferation of Mac Stores in malls around the country, but this aspect bothers me greatly. It paves the way for future digital downloads to be taxed, and I'm completely against that. But where ITunes really shines is in its execution. The program is a breeze to install and use. However I would recommend changing where ITunes puts its files BEFORE downloading. For some reason on my computer, iTunes thought that E:\Documents and Settings\Programs\Mark\Settings\iTunes\itunesStore\Music or some ridiculous variation of that, was the best place to dump my music files! But this is easily remedied by going into the setup and telling iTunes where to put your music. My other beef is if there are several users on the same computer, all the files go into the same pool. You would think it would be flexible enough to configure several directories for each user, but that is not the case. The result is you will be sharing your music with everyone in your household, so your country will be swimming with your Seal.

 

Now burning a CD couldn't get any easier. You highlight your playlist, and hit the round "Make CD" button- and voila- it makes a CD right from within the program. Easy! The limitations of these downloaded music files is that you can have it on up to three different computers, and burn the same playlist 10 times, then you have to change the playlist. This essentially means unlimited burning- which is where the other music download services (Rhapsody) have failed in my opinion. One other complaint was that they don't give you downloadable artwork for the albums you buy, or at least I couldn't figure out how to do it. This should be included with the album download. One other area of confusion is the file format itself. I was led to believe that the files were in AAC (Advance Audio Codex) format, which is much better than the MP3, but the files are stored as MP4's on my hard drive. No big deal until you try to load these files into Traktor (see review), they simply wouldn't. Now this troubled me a bit because I had read somewhere that the latest patch to Traktor was capable of handling AAC files. Perhaps this is only on Mac? I have written tech support to try and clarify this. Hopefully this will be sorted out soon.

 

Overall I give a great deal of credit to Mac for doing iTunes, and doing it better than anyone else out there. It's never felt better to download music, and it's never been easier. And as an added bonus, you won't have to worry about the RIAA coming after you! The files sound great (better than MP3's) and they've all been professionally created, so no more crap downloads from KaZaa! Overall a winner! I'll be looking for an iPod in my stocking this year!