iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, launched by Apple Computer , for playing and organizing digital music and video files. Of course, iTunes is in a different league from Mail. You could almost argue that it is Apple's single most important piece of software after OS X, its flagship digital product.

iTunes is the easiest way to organize, share and listen to music on your computer. Find new favorites. Manage your growing library. Enjoy the best friend an iPod ever had.

Importing your existing music is merely a matter of inserting a CD, while the iTunes Music Store offers something for everyone. Buy songs and albums by your favorite musicians. Download exclusive tracks — from artists such as Eminem and Franz Ferdinand — you won’t find anywhere else. Or jumpstart your digital music collection with iTunes Essentials organized by mood, artist or theme.

iTunes is the software hub that makes the iPod such a successful device. And since it was made available for Windows as well as Mac OS X, iTunes has become the first piece of Apple software many people ever see. As such, it acts as a representative, a means for Apple to show off its wares to potential new customers.

What's more, iTunes does so many things. From its beginnings as a humble audio player, iTunes has now become a central point for downloading and enjoying all manner of multimedia content. Podcasts, music videos, online radio, TV shows, and audio books have all got a place in the iTunes Sources bar.

 iTunes is also a store. For many people, the iTunes Music Store is the first thing they try out when using iTunes for the first time

Automated Option: If you're someone who likes to sleep in the same room as your Mac, then it makes sense to use it as a sophisticated alarm clock. Better yet, fix it so that iTunes wakes you up with your favorite songs each morning. AlarmThingy should do the trick.

In OS X, iTunes comes with a decent stack of Automator actions (including several designed for use with iPods) you might like to play around with.

Explore Your Music: One of my favorite add-ons for iTunes is Clutter, a free, open source app that lets you look at your music collection the old-fashioned way: by seeing the sleeves. Clutter gives you the chance to put music CDs anywhere you like on your Desktop. You can drag them into whatever patterns or piles you like. To play an album, double-click the sleeve. It's nice.

Sharing: You probably know that libraries and play lists within iTunes can be shared over a network. Anyone else on the network can listen to the music directly from your Mac. With hardware extras like Airport Express, you can use AirTunes to distribute shared music to audio-video devices too. It's all very simple to set up.

  It is always your one-stop music shop , the iTunes Music Store now features music videos and TV shows to buy and own forever. So while you browse more than 3 million songs, 35,000 podcasts and more than 16,000 audiobooks, you can also preview and download that classic '80s video or the latest episode of "The Office."