Good in most aspects (iTunes)

Member Name: dajack36

Product:	iTunes
Date:	11/06/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good ipod sync, looks fantastic, movie rentals, many other features

Disadvantages: DRM and high song prices

The Ipod music player is extremely popular, and is the best selling mp3 player world wide. The original ipod, which kicked off the whole series, was popular not just because of its good looks and innovative click wheel, but also because of the software that comes supplied with them, Itunes.

Itunes offers a sleek and quick way to connect an ipod up to a computer, and syncs perfectly almost every time. It allows for a quick transfer of any songs stored on a pc straight to the ipod. I believe that this is the reason that ipods became so popular around the world in the first place, compared to the alternatives, like for example Windows Media Player, in terms of syncing capabilities, Itunes breezes past the competition.

Another feature of Itunes is the ever prominent Itunes store, which has now sold over one billion songs. It features almost every song imaginable, in every type of genre. And the store is very popular among consumers. It has also more recently started to features ipod games, and movies. It now even features a movie rental service, I have tried this myself and in my experience it has been a joy to use, it works very well, annoyingly though the movie can only be watched once.

The prices of Itunes songs are competitive, in comparison to the price of CDs, but when compared to some of the other online music competition, it falls short. Amazon UK for example offer songs for 20p cheaper than its Itunes counterpart, much better value. Itunes songs are also annoyingly encrypted in DRM format, so you cannot put them on another device, like say your mobile phone, and unbelievably, you have to pay an extra 20p per song to have it DRM free, a format Amazon offers for 30p less, per song!!!!

Other than these faults, Itunes does have other good sides. It is a very good MP3 player on a computer, and has an easy to use and pleasing graphical interface. It is very easy to use, and does not get too complicated for the more amateur user. It can also import any other song on the computer, provided it is in the right format, just by doing an automated search, so that all songs are in the right place, I have found this feature to be very helpful.

So in summary, I think that Itunes is a very good piece of music software, it is very popular, and partially because of it, so is the ipod. It looks fantastic, syncs with ipods easily, and has plenty of other features. But on the downside, the store can be expensive and songs come locked in the DRM format. But I would still recommend that you use Itunes as a pc mp3 player, as it works very well playing all of your CD collection and storing them on the computer.

Summary: Recommended dispite its flaws

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