Itunes is a must have for any ipod owner or indeed anyone who wishes to purchase music online and create a legal library for themselves. If you already own an ipod you’ll have found that you get a free disk containing itunes but it can also be downloaded for free from their website. So what is it exactly? It’s basically a place that you can use to store all your music files on your computer as well as giving you the additional options of buying music from the itunes store and other gimmicks such as making play lists, loading music onto blank CDs, etc. It’s only available to those that support Windows 98 or a later version, no earlier!

Navigation of the programme is largely through the menu on the left hand side of the page which allows you to easily jump to the relevant area you want. It’s a relatively easy programme to find your way around as everything can be found on the left hand side of the page which is a refreshing change to some programmes I’ve used in the past. The headings found on this menu are described below in more detail and relevance also.

! Library !

Once you’ve loaded itunes onto your computer and opened it you’ll be presented with your library which contains all the music files on your computer as well as any downloads you have or CDs you have copied onto your computer. Each track is shown on the screen by the name, artist name, length, album name as well as genre, play count and the date it was last played. You can play music directly on itunes by just double clicking on a track or searching for an artist which will then play all the tracks found. Within the library you can also store music videos that you have chosen to download or upload onto your computer.

The other two headings that follow library will both be discussed here as they are quite similar to the library. The first one is podcasts which are something I’m not personally overly familiar with; they’re basically radio shows that you can download over the internet or even over itunes. I’m not quite sure why you’d want to listen to the same radio show again and again but I suppose if you’re a huge fan then you could! The third option on the left hand side menu is that of videos. This is quite similar to the library except than rather storing songs it stores music videos which again can be downloaded over the internet and then played through this screen.

! Playing Options !

Itunes also offers you the option to play random tracks or recent tracks save you searching through you library for them. First up is the party shuffle which will randomly select between 10 and 200 songs that you have either recently played or are upcoming tracks to shuffle up and play for you. Variety is the spice of life after all! There’s also the option to play your top rated songs, you’re recently added songs, you’re recently played ones and lastly, your top 25 most played songs. It’s often interesting to see which songs you play the most, sad I know! Lastly there’s also the option to connect to a various radio station sported on itunes. They are all listed by their genre and itunes will connect you to them which is fairly useful!

! Shop !

The big advantage with itunes is that it is not only a place to store all your music in one handy place but that you can also buy singles and albums direct from the programme itself. To do this all you need to do is access the “Music Store” which is located in the left hand menu of the main page and you will be connected to their website via the programme. This typically takes about 30 seconds so it is quite a fast running programme. Once in the Music Store you can search for any album, artist or song name that you want. It’s very similar to a site such as Amazon in that it shows you popular purchases and new releases on the home page as well as allowing you to browse music available by a certain genre. A search takes about 5 seconds to complete and you will then be presented with a list of possible matches, once you’ve found the right one, for example, “Robbie Williams,” you’ll be taken to a page showing all the releases they have of his on offer to buy. You can also preview any track you want which enables you to hear a 20-30 second clip of it before buying. The majority of albums can be found on itunes, popular ones are certainly there that feature in the Top 40 chart although there is limited availability with certain albums especially ones not well known over here in the UK.

In order to buy anything you will need to set up an account which takes about 5 minutes and just requires the typical information. It also means that if you want to buy songs on a second occasion you don’t need to enter all your card details so it’s a much smoother process the second time around. Of course this does have its disadvantages as you can be sat there clicking away and before you know it you’ll have bought 5 albums! Prices on the site are very competitive indeed with many popular and modern albums being priced between £7.99 and £9.99 so would rival the majority of music shops today. Single songs are typically priced at 79p whereas singles can be bought from £1.49 (the actual CD so you technically get 3-4 tracks on a single CD). The only negative of course is that you don’t have a hard copy on CD but once you’ve downloaded the album you can burn it onto CD in a matter of minutes. Downloads typically take around 10 minutes for a complete album but of course vary on the size of the tracks. Once you’ve downloaded the album it will be stored in both your library and also under “Purchased” on the left hand menu.

! Ipod !

The main reason that itunes has found such huge success in the past few years is largely down to Apple introducing the ipod and other MP3 players too. Itunes is the only library that allows you to transfer music onto your ipod so without it you wouldn’t have any music. Firstly you have to set your ipod up to accept music from itunes which takes about 10-15 minutes to do but after that all you need to do is plug in the ipod connector to a USB port on your computer and itunes will automatically load any music/podcasts/videos it holds onto your ipod – magic! However be warned, if you plug your ipod into someone else’s itunes (i.e. one that doesn’t hold all your music) then your ipod memory will be wiped!

So there we have it, everything you could ever want to know about itunes. Would I recommend it? Certainly! It’s a great way of storing all your music files in one place as well as being invaluable if you own an ipod. The added extra of being able to purchase albums direct from the programme is another bonus as it saves all the searching around. It’s free to download from the Apple site – www.apple.com/uk/itunes by clicking on the download button at the top of the page so why not go check it out!

Thanks for reading.