iTunes
Downloaded the program (which I was very familiar with, given the Macs I used to use) and fed the program my credit card. Here are the thoughts:
1) I’ve always liked the iTunes interface. It’s elegant in a way that Windows Media Player and Winamp are not. I’m going to use this as my primary music player and uninstall all the other stuff. The sort features are amazing and it’s all clean and bright. The bad thing: iTunes does not support WMA files. I used WMA to encode a lot of albums because it maintains sound quality with pretty good compression. Now I have to rip everything again into the (granted, slightly better) AAC format. Phooey.
2) iTunes is a bit bloated. It takes up a lot of memory – I don’t like this.
3) As far as the music store (the whole point of downloading the damn thing anyway), I give the selection an 8 out of 10. There’s some great choices and some glaring omissions. Given the success that I expect iTunes will experience since moving to the PC however, I believe other labels will jump on the bandwagon.
I bought three songs and it was as easy as could be. The service has the distinct advantage of allowing impulse buys as well as experimentation.
Huzzah for iTunes