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I used to be the kind of minimalist guy that preferred barebones software. The bells and whistles weren’t that necessary and a shiny graphical interface was even less important than that. For me, a simple text editor was much better than whatever Macromedia Dreamweaver had to offer. The same went for music players. I’ve tried the whole lot and pretty much came to hate them all.
Then along came iTunes. By the time Apple released it to Windows, there was already a decent amount of buzz generated. I was a bit skeptical at first, but decided to give it a whirl since it would help me get some of the music I couldn’t find here in Russia. At first I was just using it to purchase music.
In the last year, though, it’s really grown on me. I’ve got to hand it to the folks at Apple, unlike my experience with WinAmp, the great new features in each update of iTunes have impressed me.
The latest version is no exception. When I bought the latest Dave Matthews Band CD from their music store, it came with a making-of video and a ‘digital booklet’. This was just one more reason to buy this particular album on the net. It turns out that the digital booklet is just the liner notes in PDF format. Starting with version 4.8 it seems that you can add PDFs to your music library. I have a bunch of mp3s of lectures and sermons with accompanying PDF notes/outlines, so this turned out to be a cool little feature for me.
There’s been a great deal of speculation as to what the future holds for iTunes and its video features. Will they sell music videos or even full-length films any time soon? An insider at Slashdot says, “No”. . .
Also, it was just announced this week that the forthcoming version of iTunes will support Podcasting. It’s not clear exactly how this will be done, but it sounds pretty spiffy.
What are your thoughts about Apple iTunes?
Responses to “iTunes”
May 29th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
My only beef with iTunes is that it’s a resource hog. It takes up way too much memory to have it running, even in the background. Once you get past that I think it’s easily the best media player around, it’s capacity to organize your music collection is unrivaled. I’m eager to see how the poscasting features are going to be implimented too.
May 30th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
I really like the concept of an online music store. You buy only what you like, and you’re not stuck paying for a full CD that might not be very good outside of one or two songs.
I also like the iTunes application, its methods of sorting music, and the crisp interface. It is a resource hog, though, and playback is “jittery” at times on my XP box.
iTunes is a good innovation, and Apple seems to be full of this lately. OS X, while still incredibly glitchy on the desktop, is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows in the server arena. The iPod was marketed brilliantly. The hardware is generally very reliable, and Apple products tend to make solid Linux boxes because of Apple’s standardized hardware.
I’m no Apple fanboi (well, not any more, I used to be), but I think the company is headed in the right direction.
June 13th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
I have a love-hate relationship with iTunes. I’ve tried buying an album this weekend, and everything went fine. But I’m stuck with only being able to buy songs from the Portuguese store… and most of the things I really would like to buy, are only available on the USA store.
To me it’s a bit stupid, because if I go to Amazon or other web store, I can buy whatever music I want. So why there’s a limitation of buying online music? It’s silly!
May 29th, 2005 at 7:15 am
Me? I love my Itunes, I don’t know how I’d get along without it, much better than ANY of its competitors.