| Product: |
iTunes |
| Date: |
20/02/08 (79 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Easy to use, v. good music store
Disadvantages: Rubbish toolbar feature
Using this as my default PC music player, it has a very good usability for playing music, whilst also allowing me to synchronise music to my iPod. The software also allows you to download music, podcasts, videos, and listen to the radio. The main user interface consists of two parts - the toolbar down the left which allows you to navigate to different parts of the program which I have listed below:
Library: Music, Radio, TV Shows, Party Shuffle, Podcasts, Ringtones, Audio books, and Movies
Store: iTunes store & shopping Cart
Playlists: Party Shuffle, 90s Music, Music Videos, My Top Rated, Recently Played, Recently Rated, Top 25 Most Played.
The places you can go to located in the Library (such as music and podcasts etc.) can hidden be hidden in preferences, allowing you to remove the ones you don't use. The default playlists can also be deleted (except for party shuffle) allowing more room to create your own).
The music list (when clicked on in the left window) is displayed on the right section of your screen, which can be viewed in a variety of different ways: in a list, in a list grouped via artist, or with cover flow (an interactive screen allowing you to flow through the different albums stored). I tend to simply use the list on my player, as I find it to be the quickest way to locate to the tracks I want; the list can also be sorted by whatever details you want it to be (such as song name, artist name etc.).
The iTunes store is probably the best store that exists for finding and previewing tracks, although I wouldn't recommend it for downloading your music, as the tracks are often protected, allowing you to only play them on a certain number of machines in iTunes. On searching for artists, I am yet to have not found the band I am after, and once it is displayed, you can view most popular songs by that band, listen to 30 second previews of each track, and also view artists similar to the current (a god way of finding new bands you haven't heard). One feature I particularly like in iTunes music store is iMix, on which users who own iTunes accounts can create playlists and share them - another good way of finding new bands.
Overall iTunes is a very good media player, which uses simple controls, although I must concede: I prefer windows media player; it uses much more eye candy, and although it is much more complicated to use, it provides a much larger amount of features, whilst also enabling you to sync with almost any external media player (except the iPod of course). The toolbar (which is displayed when the player is minimised) is also much more useful in windows media player than iTunes, as it doesn't automatically think your blind, letting you know what song it is you're playing.
Overall, despite this, iTunes is still my default media player due to the fact that I own an iPod, and also its ease of use outperforms any other in its class.
Thanks for reading.
Summary: a very easy to use music player for use with or without an iPod
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