Thinkcage

Finally, Apple has done it. They took their fantastic MP3 player/organizer/music store, iTunes, to Windows. I am user of both Mac and Windows computers — in fact I have both side-by-side at work and at home. I use each for its strengths, though the PC is getting used less and less each passing day. Music is one thing I do only on the Mac and iTunes is the reason.

Not only is it a fantastic MP3 player with neat playlist management, but iTunes also is great for organizing your collection. Using the MP3 format’s ID3 tags, iTunes automatically and behind the scenes organizes your music into folders on your hard drive based by artist and album. Change the artist field of a song within iTunes and it will automatically reorganize your music folder to reflect the change. This is a really under-discussed feature that is now available on Windows computers, too.

And of course having one-click access to hundreds of thousands of songs for $0.99 is great. Apple, combined with its marketing partners, AOL and Pepsi, is sure to own the online music download market.

After downloading the Windows version of iTunes I was thrilled to see it is a complete and identical port — feature-by-feature, the same user experience as the Mac version. Look for many shared playlists in the office very soon!

Now, if I only had an iPod.