I use and enjoy iTunes. It’s something I readily admit, despite the rabidly anti-apple sentiments of some of my friends. “iTunes? It’s huge! It uses tons of memory! Just use fucking Winamp!” they complain. I’m also accused of just liking it because it’s Apple, which is only around a third true. The fact of the matter is, it just does what I want much better:

• It has a complete and blazingly fast media library. The search feature is instant. Winamp’s attempts at media libraries are slower and the results are hard to read.
• It’s simple. Simple is always good.
• Smart Playlists. They’re a lot cooler than they sound.
• Party Shuffle. Even cooler than smart playlists, which are already cooler than they sound.
• Shared Music. This is especially great on a college campus, where you can see the music of anyone else running iTunes. I can listen to the 60gb of music on my desktop from my laptop—wirelessly, from across the house, and it sounds excellent.
• Rating your music.
• The iTunes Music Store. It’s now easier to buy some obscure, independent record from the 90s than it is to search the internet for it.
• Perfect iPod support. Syncing playlists makes it easy to trim out what you’re tired of and adding what you just bought or downloaded.
• Just really goddamned polished. No skins, minimal options, but what’s there looks great—and you can just keep it minimized and it will chug away.

There are some downsides, like not minimizing to Windows’ system tray, and using a moderate amount of memory, but those are minor; the memory issue is so minor as to be irrelevant. Anyway, I just felt like blathering about why iTunes was cooler than the rest, and now I’m done.