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3 stars
Version: iTunes 8.0.1
"Good music player. Not as good as iTunes 7."
Pros: Plays many standard (and proprietary) media formats. iTunes Store is easy to navigate and purchase music from. Equalizer with presets best in industry. Excellent sound quality. User-friendly interface.
Cons: Can't get rid of Apple Store links in music library view. Library backup allowed only to CD/DVD. BLOATWARE! Requires QuickTime. Installs and launches 7 hidden processes at startup. Monstrous TSR. Huge resource hog.
Summary: Like its predecessors, iTunes 8 is more than able to play the music in your library and do it well. It features many options for grouping your music, editing ID3 tags, re-encoding, and sorting, among other things. You can't remove the iTunes Store links from your playlist view in this version, however, which is quite annoying, as it takes up valuable space that cuts into long song and album titles. Once again, the graphic equalizer included (with optional automatic selection, based on the song's ID3 tag) is the best in the business, reproducing the sound exquisitely.
This version of iTunes is definitely bloatware. A huge system resource hog, it kidnaps 150 MB of RAM while it's running. It also activates seven processes in the background when you start your computer, the memory requirements of which are a combined 17 MB. These processes will run even if you do not use iTunes. They can be switched off, but be aware that parts of iTunes will no longer work. It also hogs processor cycles. If you're using iTunes 8, don't count on getting any processor-intensive work done. I-t... w-i-l-l... g-o... s-l-o-w... This version also acts as a TSR (Terminate but Stay Resident) for quick reloading later. It ties up approximately 32 MB of memory just for this. This cannot be turned off (short of a core dump, very bad idea in Windows).
Backing up your library is a pain in the patella. iTunes provides backup support only to CDs or DVDs, and doesn't back up your library's ITDB, XML, or album artwork files. When you reload your music and videos from these discs back to your computer, iTunes has to rebuild the library, which takes a long time, depending on the size of your library (a few thousand songs can take up to an hour to rebuild).
In conclusion, iTunes 8 remains one of the best players out there for your music and video library, but Apple needs to go back to the simplicity and elegance that was iTunes 5. They have many "features" that need to go. Unfortunately, if history is a good indicator of future performance, Apple will likely ignore user demands and do whatever they want.
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