Yesterday day Apple released iTunes, its highly acclaimed application for managing/playing mp3's and also buying legal mp3's from their online store. I too downloaded it the very first day and here is my take, after playing with it yesterday and a little bit in the morning when I booted the laptop:-

The good:-

The installation was painless and with a simple reboot of the computer I was ready to go. First impression was the looks, it wins in that department hands down, amazing and at the same time simple enough for someone to maneuver their way through it. It also looked just like the iTune on Mac right down to the little check marks next to the songs , very nice. A little messing with the equalizer settings and the sound was perfect. Recording songs was also very simple, and the aac format( the default ripping format) was surprisingly very good though I didn't see any difference between audio quality or file size for that matter between mp3's or wma's. It takes up hardly any hard disk space, about 7 mb which is quite appealing.

The bad:-

Now for the downside, I found it to be a very intrusive and pushy application. During the install it doesn't prompt you that it will add itself and quick time tasks to the start up folder and also makes itself the default cd player. Even the player options there is no way to turn it off and I had to remove them from the start up folder using RegCleaner. Being a small application it took up a lot of ram and played songs choppy even though my machine is quite powerful with a 1.6 GHz processor and 256mb of ram and when you would close the application it would still keep ipod services and gearsec services running in the background. Only way to get rid of them was to use the 3 finger salute and kill them individually. It also makes it self the default player for various audio files and default player for the cd's everytime you started the application , a major pet peeve for me.

Verdict:-

A lot of work is needed in the port, especially the memory bugs and it assuming default player every time you start it up. Hopefully it should be patched up soon. CD and file associations broke the deal for me and I uninstalled it right before making this entry. I would definitely stick with music match or windows media player for ripping and burning cd's until any radical changes are made to iTunes.For people having issues with iTunes, you guys should visit the discussion board at apple's website and hopefully you can find a solution to your problem.