I thought it was pretty great around roughly 2004-2015.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.
What won me over compared to Winamp was iTunes' smart playlists. I'm actually surprised they haven't borked, neutered, or removed that feature. It's still the same and it's still good.
It did a lot of other things right too. It was convenient to edit metadata for multiple files. CD ripping was painless and used a high quality mp3 encoder at a time when that was not a given. In general, it was one of those apps that just behaved logically to me and rarely if ever surprised me in a bad way.
When iTunes introduced "iTunes in the cloud" or whatever it was called -- the ability to have your files mirrored in the cloud -- I was more or less in heaven for a while. I had a few moans and niggles but nothing much.
I actively kind of hate it now though. Too many media types (with different paradigms) crammed into one app. The result is a mess. Not sure it could be any other way.