Now windows users can have the same awesome music store Mac users have had for months now.

free download - check it out

http://www.apple.com/itunes/

iTunes rocks! Just can't wait until the music store is available in Europe.

Just been having great fun with my wireless network at home - all my Prince music is stored on my Apple G4, but I can listen to it all from anywhere in my street from my Windows laptop! Works seamlessly and is very cool - I'm off to wake up the neighbours and show off my new favourite thing!

I've never used itunes. Is it like a winamp type of program?

alandail said:

I use iTunes everyday (I have a Mac). It's so much better than WinAMP. Apple just does everything better.

Hmmm now let me see. A mac pay product (which probably crashes if it was developed on OS X)...

or

Free music from Kazaa, straight to my XP that never crashes...

Tough one.

SquirrelMeat said:

stealing or being ethical - tough choice, huh?

iTunes is free - it never crashes, Mac OS X never crashes either.

oh, and if you want to turn this into a operating system debate, Mac users don't have to deal with junk like this

http://www.cnn.com/2003/T...index.html

alandail said:

i call it 'try before you buy' which i usually do!

alandail said:

I second that. My iBook has never crashed on me. However, my sh*t for brains, slow a** Hewlett Packard PC used to crash every time I'd click the mouse...same with Dell, Compaq, etc., etc., etc. If iTunes crashes on your comp it's probably because PCs are wack.

some of my favorite quotes

"Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day."

"Windows applications don't look all that great, do they?"
- Bill Gates - 2003

"But more than two years after its introduction, not a single Mac OS X-specific virus has yet appeared."

"There are two kinds of people in New York: Those that have an iPod, and those that want one"
- New York Post - 2003

"... Our products just aren't engineered for security."
- Brian Valentine - Microsoft senior v.p., Windows development.

Another Microsoft executive recently explained they never paid attention
to security "Because customers wouldn't pay for it until recently".

Yep Windows in always attacked by viruses and worms.

Why?

Who is going to bother to try and bring down less than 3% of the market?

It like terrorism. You don't spend a year plotting to crash a plane into Mr Nobody, from the country of Nobody on St Nobody Day do you?

I have an excellent PC and a G5, and the PC craps all over of, for stability, upgrades, and most importantly, choice of software.

I must say, I do like I-movie though!

you don't think that there aren't virus writers out there who wouldn't want to be the first to create a virus for MacOS X? The fact MacOS X has no viruses and Windows has tens of thousands isn't strictly because of market share. Here is your answer, though


"... Our products just aren't engineered for security."
- Brian Valentine - Microsoft senior v.p., Windows development.

This "I-Tunes", do they have anything rare? For exmaple, could I download something like "Apollonia 6"? How about these other programs? That is my biggest problem with company. There is a lot of stuff I want that is out of print!

VinnyM27 said:

install it and browse the store. 300k songs now - 400k by the end of the month - growing all of the time - don't know about out of print stuff, but there are iTunes exclusive tracks. A lot of musicians are excited about iTunes - browsing the store is the best way I know of to find new music - lots of links to get to stuff you wouldn't otherwise find. free 30 second previews of everything - that plays instantly. artist biographies, influences, followers, contemporaries, etc. some artists even have playlists of songs they listen to.

If you like the album, buy it, if you just like the one song, just buy that.

iTunes is one kick ass program. Its been running on my pc since friday, and i gladly kicked Windooze Media Player, said farwell to WinAmp (a good friend for years) and am delighted to finally do some things the apple way on my pc.
It's nicely integrated with the music store, but stands firmly on its own me thinks. I discovered some very nice features, and its neat to have previews of all available songs.
However, since they ported some UI elements of the OS X environment its quite heavy on RAM IMO, so unless u have 256Mb+ in there, it mite be a bit slow.

the thing they ported is double buffered windows along with live redraw. Pull up iTunes music store in one window (which is an embedded web browser), and internet explorer in another. resize windows in both. IE will resize faster, but show all sorts of redrawing artifcacts in the process. iTunes doesn't redraw quite as fast while resizing, but never has any artifacts. On faster machines, the resizing gets smoother for iTunes, but the artifacts never go away on IE.

On MacOS X it works faster anyways and you never see any drawing artifacts on any apps.

I sample music with mp3 on file-sharing networks. I buy on CD - always. I am just not interested in buying nor keeping shitty compressed music files. I must have full uncompressed goodness. Is iTunes for me?

cynicalbastard said:

Well, according to this article at stereophile.com the AAC file format (and certainly AIFF) are almost indistinguishable (sp?) from the original, especially when u'r listening to them on pc speakers.
Also check out this from Apple's website:
New Music Sharing feature
iTunes 4 has a Music Sharing feature that uses Rendezvous to give you remote streaming access to your personal music library from any room in your house. Let’s say, for instance, that you have thousands of AAC and MP3 music files stored on a mac or Windows computer in your home office. The iTunes software works so smoothly on both platforms that you can share music with any combination of Macs and Windows PCs on a local area network — regardless of whether you’re running iTunes off a Mac or PC. And you won’t have to manually configure anything, either.

cynicalbastard said:

you can rip your CD's uncompressed with iTunes. And play them in your iPod that way too. Or you can set the AAC encoding to any bit rate you want.

cynicalbastard said:

No. It sells compressed files and the music you preview is only 30 second clips. Not long enough.

I just uninstalled the stupid thing. It totally renamed, reorganized and changed the tags in my whole music collection. With no warning!
Now I have to redo all the work I did in organizing my files the way I like them.

Raven said:

There are two parts to iTunes, one is a juke box, the other is the music store - iTunes is an excellent juke box even without using the music store. iTunes rips CDs. Long before there even was an iTunes music store, Apple ran the rip/mix/burn ads for iTunes. And you can rip the CDs uncompressed.

As for reorganizing your MP3s, iTunes does ask you if you want it to import your music. Then it sorts them by artist/album. Change the tags from within iTunes and it moves the files to keep things organized. There is a setting to turn the moving of files off.

Other things in iTunes that I think are great include the smart play lists. You can set it up to scan your music library and create playlists by rules you set up - like who the artist is, what rating you gave the song, etc. These playlists are dynamic. You can even do playlists for stuff like "songs I haven't listened to yet", or 60 minutes of my 5 star songs, getting a new random list each time, etc.

It didn't ask me if it was alright to move files around and rename them. They should've gave a warning message for that. Thankfully, my mp3s were tagged properly for the most part, so it wasn't much of a problem re-ordering things. After doing a little searching on the Net, I see others have experienced this.