iTunes iOS

iTunes iOS

iTunes is an audio and video player that lets you manage your iOS devices as well as download content from the iTunes store and use Apple Music. It's an all-in-one home for your music and video, although it's music where it really excels.

Better than ever

Firstly, iTunes lets you import and manage your music files. It's a great music library, giving you lots of ways to browse and organize your music. You can easily make playlists manually, and set up automatic ones like 'recently added', that shows you what you imported over a set period of time. While iTunes doesn't support some formats like FLAC, it's still probably the best way to organise your music.

You can also browse and buy from the iTunes store. Here you can find music, podcasts, and video, plus anything you purchase is immediately available from any device where you sign into iTunes with your Apple account.

Apple Music is a streaming service inside iTunes. With a subscription, you have access to over 30 million songs in the Apple music library. It’s comparable to Spotify, although it doesn’t have the same social features of that app. Apple Music also features radio stations, from the live streaming Beats 1with famous DJs, to auto-generated stations based on genre. You can start a station from any song you play too, and Apple Music’s algorithms will create a station starting from that. Read more about it here.

Manage your devices

iTunes is also a tool for managing your iOS devices; iPhones, iPads, and iPods. You can choose what music from iTunes you want to sync to your device, as well as books, movies, TV Shows, podcasts, and more. Once you get used to how iTunes sync works with iOS it's okay, but there are some annoyances.

The main problem is that you can't quickly plug in your device and update just the music, for example. As soon as you want to sync, that means doing a backup, copying apps from your device to your Macand so on. When you're in a hurry, and just want to stick the latest album you’ve bought on your iPhone, this is really frustrating.

Despite this, backups are effective, and when you plug in a new device, you can quickly import your backup to it without any problems.

The complete package

While some people complain that iTunes does too much and is bloated, it's still a fast, efficient, and well organised media library. The movie and TV areas feel somewhat underdeveloped compared to music, but elsewhere iTunes excels. As a place to keep your music collection, it's reliable and really useful. With the addition of Apple Music, iTunes is pretty much the complete package.

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