Apple iTunes 7 user reviews

Pros Nice new features

Cons Woeful Performace

Summary When Apple bring out each new release of iTunes with a fanfare, I am usually not too bold over but I update anyway and I am rewarded with a solid new build and a few more features.

With iTunes 7 I was impressed with the promise of gapless playback (about time too) and automatic album art retrieval. The new album art interface looked useful too. And to be fair, these features are quite good in the new release.

But somehow Apple have managed to make a nice nippy simple program into a judering sluggish monster. Not impressed. I have a 3.6GHz P4, and iTunes 6 just flew on my computer, but this is terrible.

Also, for some reason if I move the iTunes shortcut in my start menu iTunes re-adds a shortcut everytime it is opened. pah!

Sort it out Apple!

When they release a slicker version I will update, as gapless playback is good, but untill then I'm going back to version 6.

Pros -Great organization options, fantastic audio quality

Cons -Resource hungry

Summary I'll keep it short. This is the best audio player available these days. I've been using iTunes since it was released and haven't switched since.

But it uses up resources like no other. I have a fairly new system (AMD X2 3800+ AM2, 2x 1GB DDR2 800 )2GB total), 320GB 7200.10 HD) and every time Apple releases a new version, it just seems to get slower and slower. Rather than putting in so many features, most of which a majority of non-iPod using people won't use, they should find ways to make it more efficient. Everything on my system runs blazing fast... except for iTunes (and Quicktime). I need my background apps (like music) to use as little resource as possible because I do some heavy Photoshopping and Premiere work.

Really, it's not much of a draw but the very first iTunes used less resources and had everything feature I wanted and ran faster on my old desktop (P3 733MHz, 512MB PC133, 30GB 5400RPM HD).

I used the new WMP11 beta and found it to be quicker but came back to iTunes because WMP11 wasn't stable enough and was missing some features (it is a beta after all). But if Microsoft can get it right, I might be switching soon.

But all in all, there really isn't an alternative to iTunes. The low score is only due to it's resource requirements.

Pros Nicely cleaned up interface, Cover search is pretty, but completely useless

Cons 98% CPU Usage, rendered my computer useless when I used it.

Summary iTunes 6 cpu usage averaged < 10%, iTunes 7 barely let me move the mouse. Obviously there are some bugs to work out, I'm hoping that Apple fixes it soon.

Love the latest interface updates, though I'll still probably just stick with the original browse, the cover shot feature was nice to look at but completely useless, in my opinion. I'd rather have a solid perfoming product.

Thought the product was going to be excellent, loved that Apple incorporated the iPod utilities into iTunes. So far I had to uninstall 7 and go back to 6 so I could acutally use my computer when iTunes is running.

Pros Stable, fast, excellent new features, still easy to use

Cons Album view mode - sluggish to dynamically load album covers

Summary I must disagree with several of the reviews so far. I have now loaded iTunes 7 onto 3 XP machines, 2 of them being now old and cruddy. I have a Gig of RAM on each, so maybe that's the difference.

The initial download was somewhat painful because (I can only imagine) there were 28 million humans trying to simultaneously download it after it was announced. Once the Akamai-hosted download was complete however, it has performed great both in terms of stability and speed. The usability of iTunes never ceases to amaze me, especially in relation to Window Meida Player.

I have downloaded and used WMP 11 now for a couple weeks and while it's a big improvement on version 10 and before, it pales in comparison to iTunes 7 (would not pass the wife test in other words).