One of Apple’s strongest tools is iTunes, its intuitive music player, which has improved even more with this latest release. Smart Playlists let you create self-updating lists of songs that meet whatever criteria you set. Make a list of five-star songs (the ability to rate songs is also new to iTunes 3) or of songs that were released from 2000 to 2003, for example. Smart Playlists work off a song’s tags, though, and iTunes could use better tagging options. Although this version adds a composer tag, we’d like to see cover art, lyrics, tempo, and conductor tags, as well.

iTunes now works seamlessly with Audible.com, a site that offers users downloadable audio books, which can then be synced with an iPod. A new feature called Sound Check evens out the volumes of songs, preventing some from playing much louder than others. iTunes has always been a strong online radio, and with Version 3.0.1’s Instant On feature, stations play immediately when you click on them, requiring no time to buffer.

It’s a good free tool, but iTunes doesn’t offer the kinds of features we’d expect in a music player you pay for—sound editing and CD label creation, for example. Apple recently announced that iTunes will be part of the company’s iLife suite of media tools (look for our upcoming review), and the player might become even more useful in combination with Apple’s other apps.