Apple iTunes 8.01

Major upgrade to the media player

The popular iTunes has been one of the best audio players on the market. However, its vast music store now gives holders of the video iPod the opportunity to preview and download music videos, TV programmes and now full movies, all at very reasonable prices.

If you want to share your music, iTunes will look for other copies running across a network and you can then listen to other people's music. An Internet radio option is available for broadband users.

Video support comes in the form of an embedded QuickTime player which supports all the video formats that QuickTime supports (AVI, MPEG, Flash etc.). Note that QuickTime is included within the iTunes installer.

Audio can be encoded in the Apple Lossless format, which lets you import music into iTunes at half the original size with no loss of quality. Podcast support is included so that you can subscribe to podcasts from within iTunes and have them automatically synced to your iPod.

This is a brand new version and Apple iTunes 8 now contains support for 'genius' song recommendations, so you can get suggested examples of songs you have in your collection. You can now download HD-based TV programmes and more. Initial feedback is that this version is also much faster under Windows Vista.