You’ve heard about iTunes- I can almost guarantee it. If not, then you’ve heard about the iPod, and if you’ve heard about the iPod, you’ve heard about iTunes.

Okay, so why does that matter? Well, iTunes is arguably the largest and most successful music download site in existence. In fact, iTunes has a library which exceeds 3.5 million songs from both professional and armature bands. iTunes is now also offering movies, TV shows, and games for the iPod.

iTunes has become somewhat of a legend in its own right, and it almost seems as if it will always be number one. If you’ve never used iTunes before, read on to find out why.

Initial Impression

We have seen iTunes transform several times during the last few years, and with each change it became easier to use, more intuitive, and more feature laden. The iTunes interface has always been slick, and the latest version is no exception. The menu is easy to navigate and a plethora of music, from indie to pop, can be discovered in a matter of moments by anyone.

You are able to listen to the first 20 seconds or so of every song on iTunes, making the decision to buy it or not a bit easier to make. This, along with other nice touches, make iTunes an incredibly powerful and user friendly program. In fact, many people place iTunes as the standard by which all other competing services are measured.

Using iTunes

At no point during our testing did iTunes crash or become unstable. It always ran quickly, and everything loaded without hassle. Putting the Windows jokes aside, iTunes is as stable as anything we’ve ever seen. This is a good thing, considering that we certainly don’t want any program that has our credit card information crashing in the middle of a transaction.

One small beef that we have is that iTunes immediately begins to import all of the music that you have on your computer, regardless of where you got it from. In our case, we were using iTunes to replace music of poor or questionable quality. It does us no good if iTunes immediately reintegrates those poor quality files into our music library. A few clicks and adjustments, however, and we were back in business.

All of the music we downloaded took just a few seconds (man did that progress bar ever fill up quick), and all of the songs were of exceptional quality. Very important to us as, like many other people, we enjoy listening to our music on big stereos- we don’t want the low nuts trumped or cut short.

The best thing about iTunes, however, is that each song that we download we own. We can put them onto as many MP3 players, CD’s, or computers as we want. There’s no messing around with rights or additional fees. Each song might be a bit more expensive than with some other services, but for the ease of use iTunes offers, it’s well worth the price.

Conclusion

Is iTunes the most inexpensive service on the market? No, but at $0.99 per song it’s still a bargain. We can pick and choose which songs we want and which ones we don’t, and then we never have to deal with the record label. You can do whatever you want with the songs (except distribute them), and that’s a big plus for us.

Bottom line - go and use it… now.