now i’m not an apple zealot, but ever since i used itunes for mac, i’ve been looking for a windows program that can organize my mp3 collection and playlists as well as itunes can. i have my collection sorted into folders with playlists that are comprised of various permutations of these folders, so when i add one song to a folder, i’d have to manually create several playlists again. that was a pain in the ass. so last week i finally found a program that would do this in windows; itunes … for windows.

actually, i was kinda expecting to be disappointed by itunes; quicktime, apple’s other offering on the windows’ platform is kind of clunky. i wanted an app that had a small footprint since i keep my mp3 player running most of the time. i was also afraid that apple would limit the functionality, you don’t want the windows world to have all the benefits of the mac world right? anyways, it’s a little more resource intensive than i would’ve wanted but at least it does everything that itunes for mac would do.

but the killer feature in itunes is its dynamic playlists. once you’ve imported all your music into your music database,you can create smart playlists such as… all your pop and metallica songs from your 10,000 song collection in about twenty seconds. basically they slapped on an interface to query your database and generate views as playlists. the downside is that you have to meticuously keep your mp3s tagged properly so that your playlists will generate properly. aside from that, it’s a great benefit for me as i can add new songs once to my database and it’ll automatically update my existing playlists with them.