Apple had a great thing going with iTunes but as with anything that gets too popular and too big, the latest version of iTunes is just too bloated and uses way too much memory to be an effective media player. When I first started using iTunes a few years ago the application was less than 20mb and didn’t use much memory at all. Now, it’s almost 40mb and a complete memory hog. Apple is trying to make iTunes your one stop shopping program. Not only music, but podcasts and video and now it’s also incorporated with Apple TV. All this just makes iTunes impractical if you just want to play music and nothing else.

Every so often I get update messages for the latest version of iTunes, and I tried updating to version 5.0 when that came out and it just totally messed up my computer. My drivers were all messed up and I couldn’t burn a cd in iTunes or with Record Now. I tried to delete 5.0 but deleting the program didn’t fix the issue with my drivers. I ended up having to do a clean install which was a complete pain in the ass. Anyway, after all the hassles I put iTunes 4.9 back on my computer and never had a problem again.

I hardly ever buy any songs from iTunes because of the crappy DRM and AAC format they use, but I found something recently that was only available on iTunes and I couldn’t purchase it because Apple wants me to have the latest version of iTunes to be able to download songs from their store. That’s completely preposterous! Now they are forcing consumers into using their latest software. I wonder if that’s even legal?

Anyway, if you have a new computer and you want to download iTunes, do not go past version 4.9 if you want a problem free media player. If you want all the other functionality and you have a lot of RAM, go for it, but I tell you……it’s a dog.

You can still get iTunes 4.9 from filehippo