iTunes (iTunes)

Member Name: jennikitten

Product:	iTunes
Date:	28/11/08 (57 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Convenient, easy to use

Disadvantages: Hogs resources

iTunes is the 'library' program which Apple invented for the iPod, so users could use it to store music files on their comuters and browse them easily, and of course upload and download to their iPod. I use mine primarily for songs, but you canalso store other media forms as well, such as podcasts etc.

The iTunes program also allows you to listen to music on your computer and sort it by artist, album, song name, play count and song length. One of its most interesting features is its ability to shuffle songs (same as the iPod), so you can set it to cycle through all the songs in a playlist or in your library in a random order, if you're less of a control freak than some people and want surprising.

Playlists are lists of songs you can choose to group together so you can play a set - you might want to theme it by a particular genre, or decade, or whatever you like really. I personally like to order my songs by whether they're relaxing, happy, etc. to suit my mood and what I'm doing.

iTunes also has a search function so you can search for a particular song name or artist if you can't be bothered browsing or remember the full information. It's also good for playing songs by a certain person or with a certain title or from a particular album if you're too lazy to make a playlist. For example, if I search for 'lavigne', all my avril lavigne songs will appear and then I can play/shuffle through them.

The main disadvantage of iTunes is that it's a real hog on system resources. It uses a lot of processes which will carry on running after you've closed it unless you manually end them, and it takes a long time to open and close on my laptop, and slows everything else right down.

Summary: Average

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