Apple iTunes 11.1

Pros Sleek design. Largest catalog of music and video around. Internet radio with large selection of genres. Excellent mini-player. iCloud integration makes all your music more easily available. Support for 1080p HD movies and TV shows. iTunes in the Cloud free for iTunes-bought music. Wi-Fi syncing for mobile devices. Huge store of media for sale and video for rent. HD TV program rentals. iPhone and iPad app organization.

Cons Large disk space requirements for a media player. Pushes you toward purchases a bit too much. Device Authorization limit can be a problem for people with many devices. No music subscription service. Bottom Line Apple iTunes is still the mother of all media applications, with the biggest music and video store, and now a free Internet radio option.

By Michael Muchmore

With each new iPhone or iPad model and iOS update also comes an iTunes update—if for no other reason than to add support for the new device. But this time around, with iTunes 11.1.0, the Swiss army knife of desktop media playing software actually gets a significant new feature of its own—iTunes Radio. Trying to emulate the success of Pandora while leveraging its installed player software, Apple claims that iTunes Radio uses real genre DJs rather than just Pandora-like algorithms alone. Joining Radio, though not as earth-shattering, are a couple more new features: Genius Shuffle, to organize your like-minded tracks and Podcast stations. And those are just what's new in this one-stop-shop for all you media enjoyment needs.

iTunes Radio
When you first take iTunes up on its offer to try Radio, you'll see featured DJ stations across the top, and a box with a big plus sign in the bottom where you can enter your own favorite artist to start a station a la Pandora. Apple's website claims more than 250 curated stations, but I only saw 24. I started by playing DJ @iTunes: Electronic. At first I was worried that there was no Skip button, but, thankfully, the Fast Forward button next to the Pause button in the player does in fact let you skip. It even tells you how many skips you have left when you start running low. After six skips (that's how many you're allowed within an hour), the Fast Forward button became grayed out.

If you have a $25-a-year iTunes Match subscription, you won't hear any ads interrupting your iTunes Radio listening; that compares well with the $47.88 a year you'd pay for an ad-free Pandora One subscription, which doesn't include the cloud-based music locker of iTunes Match (see below). After disconnecting my Match account from iTunes, I did hear one advertisement, for the iTunes Festival in London—far less obnoxious than Pandora's localized ads, but Apple's just starting in this game. Later, I saw a full-window video ad for a Nissan car.

Pressing the star button next to the pause button shows Radio that you'd like to hear more similar tunes, the skip and star buttons take the place of the explicit thumbs up and thumbs down buttons in Pandora and Rdio. There's no reminder that you've previously liked a song, as you get in Pandora's thumb icon, which turns blue. Of course, there's a priced Buy button right next to the song name in the song info panel. The scrubber appears here, too, but you can't use it to advance or rewind within a song, as you can in Rdio.

When you go to create a musician- or song-based station of your own, iTunes actually proposes more genres in a dropdown of thumbnails. Start typing, and you'll see a top hit, then artists, and then songs listed. Once you select the artist or song to base your station on, you'll see a larger album cover and a discreet "Allow Explicit" option button to the right, which you can enable or not, depending on your level of prudery. Clicking on the album cover drops down a colored panel similar to the one iTunes 11 introduced for albums in your library, but for Radio it shows listening history with track info, a buy button, and a share button that generates a link or email.

Unlike when you're playing music from your library, the dropdown that shows the Up Next list only shows history—you don't even get to see the next track in order, as you can in Pandora. I was impressed, though, that you could go back and re-play any song in your history. Most of the Internet radios only show you the next track in line. Clicking the > that appears next to the song name at top offers new, radio-relevant choices—New Station from Artist, and New Station from Song. What you don't get is artist information or lyrics, which other services like Slacker offer.

My custom station, based on British electronica group Orbital, cranked out the expected artists—Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss, Aphex Twin. Less mainstream options such as renaissance choral music and Bix Beiderbecke also engendered some relevant selections, but the library or algorithm played some romantic vocal music on the renaissance channel. I was only mildly impressed with the Apple DJ's electronica selections—they fell short of the excellent SOMAfm Internet radio stations. But the sound quality was all I could have hoped for. In all, iTunes Radio is a feather in iTunes' cap, though it's short of the full subscription service we've long been clamoring for. It's an especially appealing perk for existing Match subscribers.

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