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With a month and a half of using, I am convinced iTunes for Windows is the Music Jukebox app I was always looking for. A combination of simplicity and rich features is what iTunes is all about. After using and dumping Musicmatch, Creative Playcenter and a host of Music and Tag management software, iTunes is here to stay on my Windows desktop for a long time. Read ahead for my detailed opinion on iTunes.
iTunes comes bundled with Apple Quicktime 6.4 and includes Audio ripping & CD burning software for creating Audio/MP3/Data CDs. But the existence of iTunes is only because of iPod, the audio jukebox player from Apple. I have another jukebox player which is cheaper and has better audio output quality. So iTunes was never on my list of jukebox software till recently.

Player
The Player uses Quicktime internally for playing music and the audio output quality is as crisp as you can get. I have never had any AAC files but MP3s play very well and with minimal CPU resources. The controls are minimalistic but adequate for daily use. The only problem I find is that iTunes cannot play video files like WMP or Winamp, inspite of using the Quicktime engine. The 10 band graphic equalizer is adequate as is the visualization unless ofcourse you are a Winamp vis-freak. The audio CD player fetches track info from CDDB if you want it to. Another useful thing is the comprehensive list of Internet Radio stations available. Its nice to find one of my favourites in the list. It have it running at work all the time. Other standard features are crossfade play, sound enhancement (similar to the SRS WOW effect on WMP/Winamp) and auto volume levelling.

Interface
Simplicity is defined by the iTunes interface. The brushed metal skin and blue transluscent controls are a treat to look at. Apple has successfully ported the MacOS Jaguar feel onto Windows with iTunes. And I am hooked. Always wanting to emulate MacOS on my PC, I have gone to the extent of replacing system dlls in the past to get that Jaguar look on my desktop. Once you see it, the aesthetic appeal rubs off on you.

Music Manager
The most interesting part of iTunes is the ease that it lends to managing MP3 tags. You can edit individual track details directly in the library view and changing details of multiple tracks at a time is easily possible. Some advanced ID3 tools like track auto-numbering or a search-replace function are missing but they are rarely required anyway. You can set both ID3v1 as well as ID3v2 tags for a particular MP3 file. You can insert album artwork in the ID3 tag. You can assign Equalizer presets and a rating to each of your songs. You can create dynamic smart playlists using parameters like the most played songs, most recently played songs, etc. When you are ripping songs from an Audio CD, the tags are automatically filled using CDDB information. If you are ripping MP3s from a CD, iTunes automatically creates folders by artists/albums and names the files by the trackname. One grouse I have with iTunes is the inability to control the filenames.

An interesting feature is the Consolidate Library feature. I had my MP3s scattered across tens of folders on the hard drive. After I was done with the ID3 cleanup of almost all MP3s, I simply used this feature to bring all my MP3s to a single folder, autimatically arranging the files by artists and albums. A neat feature, but dangerous also unless your ID3 tags are clean. iTunes changes the filenames without warning you! (You can turn off the moving & renaming feature in Edit—>Preferences—>Advanced) The way I figured out is to fill in your ID3 tags, consolidate your library, rename the files again using a MP3 renaming app and create the library again. That way your MP3 library remains perfectly organised.

CD Extraction and Creation
CD Extraction is fast and clean. You have lot of flexibility in selecting the storing format – WAV, MP3, AAC or AIFF. The one I am concerned about is MP3. iTunes allows you to create both constant bitrate as well as variable bitrate files. The encoding speed is decent enough to ensure high quality MP3 files. iTunes allows you to create Audio CDs as well as MP3 CDs. The third option of creating a Data CD does not mean that. It only means that you can create a CD with a mixture of various audio formats. The process is so simplified that a novice user wont even notice it.

Music Store
I cannot possibly say much about this. One, I stay outside the US so am not eligible to buy music at the iTunes store. Second, I would rather buy an open audio format than a proprietory DRM format. The online music store has been a hit in the US. All said, its a good start for online sale of music, music that is not too expensive. I have heard of people buying hundreds of dollars worth of quality songs from the store, an amount they would never have spent on buying crappy cd albums.

Conclusion
A simple music jukebox is what iTunes is and it is going to improve. With more than a million iTunes downloads, Apple will be compelled to iron out a few bad points – absent dead file management(you have to manually remove a dead file from the library), limited text field for ID3 tags, more flexibility in ID3 management, playing video files. But for its current features, I give an eight to iTunes Windows.