Managing your iTunes library is a piece of cake. You can view extended information about each track, edit their tags and rate them. Also, iTunes lets you comfortably browse through your library with the amazing Cover Flow system or the grid view, which displays cover artwork sorted by album, artist, genre or composer. And for those of you who work in a LAN environment, the great news is that you can share your music libraries with your network mates. If your family at home all have iTunes, you can activate Home Sharing, which allows you to combine your libraries, and keep them all up to date with new purchases and added music.
One thing we particularly like about iTunes as music manager is its ability to create playlists. The Smart Playlist tool enables you to create almost any kind of playlist based on just about any criteria you set: artist, genre, date added, star rating or even the number of times you've played each song. Another great playlist is the so called Party Shuffle, which comes in very handy when you invite some friends over to your place.
Regarding playlists, iTunes includes another great feature called Genius. Just like other popular music sharing tools, Genius learns from the tracks you play on iTunes and recommends similar songs, either from your own library or from the iTunes Store. This means you can easily build thematic playlists by grouping similar songs, and also discover new bands you may not know about. The only drawback is that Genius needs to gather information about your music library and send it to Apple in order to work, something that privacy freaks won't be happy about.
However, if there's something where iTunes is not perfect yet, that's the player function. You may disagree here, but we think the iTunes player falls short, especially when compared to its music manager side. It does have some interesting features, like the Smart shuffle function and crossfading playback, but it's too simple. We also missed the ability to control iTunes from anywhere with global hotkeys, which is great if you listen to music while you're working on the PC with other apps. Fortunately there are some plug-ins that cover this need.
Despite some slight flaws, iTunes is probably the best choice to manage your music collection – and that includes Windows users.
Languages:
English
Recent changes in iTunes:
- Sync with iPhone 4 to enjoy your favorite music, movies, TV shows, books and more on-the-go
- Sync and read books with iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4 and iBooks 1.1
- Organize and sync PDF documents as books. Read PDFs with iBooks 1.1 on iPad and any iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
- Organize your apps on your iOS 4 home screens into folders using iTunes
- Faster back-ups while syncing an iPhone or iPod touch with iOS 4
- Album artwork improvements make artwork appear more quickly when exploring your library
OS requirements for iTunes:
- OS: WinXP/2003/Vista/7
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Minimum requirements:
- Windows XP SP2
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