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iTunesMar 10 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Software
The Bottom Line Simply put, this is the best music management software program available. It categorizes, plays, rips, and burns all from one cool looking interface.
If you don't already know about it, let me introduce you to the easiest, most versatile, and elegant mp3 management software available: iTunes. Hmmm, a lower-case i. Where have you seen that before? Oh yea! iMac! Exactly. iTunes is Apple's entrance to the mp3 world, and it sure came in with a bang. iTunes is really an amazing piece of software, and best of all, it's free. Oh, one more thing: it only works on a Mac. iTunes follows the same interface and look as does all of Apple's latest software, like QuickTime and iMovie. That beautiful brushed steel look. When you install iTunes, it automatically scans your hard drive for all available mp3s, and places a reference to them in the central "library", which is shown at the start of iTunes. All your songs are categorized and alphabetized, and the software even recognizes that santana-smooth.mp3 means the song Smooth by the artist Santana. It replaces this mp3 notation with something much easier to read and categorize. Best of all, it does this automatically. Some songs, of course, iTunes cannot discern. So for those you can manually enter information, such as title, artist, album, track number, and genre. Once you have all of this information, you can find any song you want by selecting it from those categories. If you have a really huge collection that takes too long to manually look through to find the correct song, iTunes includes a live search feature. Just type in the name, part of the name, artist, or any relevent information, and a list of matching songs appears. Ok, so iTunes organizes songs great, but it is also a basic player as well. Push the big arrow on the top left, and one of your songs will start. I keep iTunes on random so that it keeps playing a nice mix of all of my available music. If you have some songs that you like to store on your computer, but don't like to listen to them every day, simply uncheck the little box next to the title, and it will be skipped over when iTunes is playing music. And this is convenient. I usually keep iTunes in the background so I can work with other programs and listen to music at the same time. Included in the latest version is a control strip module that lets you have playback control from any program. What else can it do? you ask. It can rip music from cds like several other mp3 management programs. Just pop in a cd, and iTunes automatically connects to an internet site that finds the data for every song on the cd. So if I insert a Beatles cd, iTunes shows it as a cd, and its list of tracks show every song title on it. To rip any songs, just select the songs you want by their little checkbox and click import. iTunes automatically rips the music at the speed you can select in the preferences. Now here's the really cool thing about iTunes. Apple just released version 1.1, which lets you burn music onto cds with a usb or firewire burner (or the new internal drives). Just compile a list by dragging and dropping from your main library. Pick whatever order you want, and hit burn. It's that simple. Note:For support for external drives, make sure you have OS 9.1 installed. When you install iTunes, click on custom install to make sure you're getting the authoring package. Then you'll be ready to fully enjoy the best music management software available.  |
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by texas-swede
