Joshua Weisbuch, 33, of Jamaica Plain says he's visited the iTunes
Music Store about 30 times since it opened less than three weeks ago.

Peter Wood, 24, of Beverly says he's gone at least once a day.

Barbara Mende, a grandmother from Waltham, says she's been only
three times. "I'm staying away from it," she says. "It's addictive."

Is it possible that one day, one of the results of Apple's pay-
for-download music service will be iA, as in iTunes Anonymous? Maybe
not, but a sampling of Greater Boston users reveals that the deep,
intense feelings typical of Macintosh users have migrated to Apple's
newest wrinkle, the online music store.

With it, Macintosh users who've established an account through new
iTunes software, itself a few-click process, can purchase electronic
copies of more than 200,000 songs for 99 cents each, or $9.99 for most
albums. User after user invokes glowing terms to describe their new
toy: "No logging in, no hoops to jump through. You open iTunes and
click on the Music Store like any other playlist," said Doug Alexander,
29, of Cumberland, R.I. "The transaction is 95 percent done all in one
step."

It's not just the act of buying that is drawing Macintosh users to
the Music Store. Abraham Wu, 24, of Boston said he has been visiting
the site a couple of times a day since it opened April 28 but has
bought only one song, "just to see how it works." He said he too likes
the simplicity and compares it favorably with free download systems
such as Kazaa or Limewire.

"I never used a lot of the file-sharing services, partially because
it's ethically questionable, but it also wasn't very convenient. The
stuff I was looking

for often wasn't available, and usually it would take several times
to get a usable download." Like others, he is unimpressed by the
selection, which derives exclusively from the Big Five recording
companies: EMI, Warner Bros., Sony, BMG, and Universal. Even so, most
users were reluctant to find too much fault. When asked to identify the
store's worst feature, Wood said, "I would hesitate to say a `worst
thing,' but the least good thing is that the selection hasn't quite
evolved yet." Alexander allowed that the selection is "fairly thin, but
I expect that to change, and it's an admirable start."

From Apple's perspective, Alexander's start could be said to be less
admirable: In about a dozen visits, he's bought one album. But Pat
Faldetta, 52, of Northborough is doing her part, having bought about 50
tunes, and Weisbuch has downloaded about 30. It took the store a week
to sell its first million songs, and nine more days to sell its second
million.

The original iTunes software enables users to store, organize, and
play music on their computers. Though the Music Store is the headline
feature of the iTunes upgrade, another of its tweaks has quickly become
a loophole that Apple may not have intended (and won't comment on). The
plan was to allow music to be shared on local networks - from the
living room to the bedroom, perhaps, or within an office. But Web users
have co-opted the function, creating websites where anyone can post
their playlists and where anyone else can import them to their
desktops.

Though only the song names, not the songs themselves, are imported,
iTunes will send a stream of each song on demand, making the experience
almost the same as having the song itself. Several sites quickly sprang
up after the software was released, but some were taken down when
shareware (example: the aptly named iLeech) that could capture the song
permanently began appearing on the Internet; among those still
operating is shareitunes.com.

A saving grace for Apple, in the eyes of its new music-business
allies, is that only MP3-format songs, which make up the vast majority
of electronically coded music, can be shared in this way. Songs in the
AAC format, which is all the Music Store offers, are limited to three
computers, each of which must be declared within iTunes. Users who have
compared the formats report that AACs match the sound quality of MP3s
at a smaller size, saving on disc space.

So far, although a Windows version is promised by year's end, only
Macintosh users have access to the Music Store, which is a twist for
computer users used to having the vast majority of software written for
the Windows platform. A few of the users interviewed are reveling in
their exclusivity, but many more are eager to share the experience with
the Windows masses.

Arnold Reinhold, 58, of Cambridge concedes a vested interest: He's
an Apple shareholder who "would be just as happy if they got onto
Windows really quickly, because they found a real need in the
marketplace." Besides, he said, he "has never felt a great lack of
software. Quite the contrary."

But even those without a financial stake still have their Apple
chauvinism. Weisbuch has noted that iTunes "is one of the features that
PC users I talk to are truly slathering over . . . and I look foward to
the day that iTunes works with PCs so that PC users can see the quality
of hardware-software combinations that Apple users have used for
years."