Ah, iTunes: the veritable Swiss Army Knife of digital music. It encodes MP3s from your CD collection and stores them in a handy searchable catalog. It lets you tune in to Internet radio stations. It lets you create and manage custom playlists of your favorite songs. Provided you've got the hardware, it lets you burn those songs on new audio CDs. If you've got a supported portable MP3 player, it lets you load it up with music to take on the go. And it even offers you a built-in hippy-trippy light show so you can spend your hard-earned cash on blank CD-R media instead of expensive hallucinogenic controlled substances. It slices, it dices, it cuts through this steel can and still slices this tomato! Is there anything iTunes can't do?

Answer: yes-- for now. For one thing, for some arcane reason known only to Steve and his closest acolytes, iTunes still doesn't have an equalizer, so forget about adjusting treble and bass settings. While you can certainly burn custom CDs, iTunes doesn't magically make them look as good as they sound. There's also the slightly worrisome matter of Kerbango (the service by which iTunes tracks Internet radio stations) having gone kerblammo, which throws a wrench in the works. And lastly, no matter how hard we try or what buttons we press, we've been utterly unable to persuade iTunes to fix us even the most basic of sandwiches. But iTunes is only at version 1.1 (or 1.1.1 for Mac OS X), and you can bet that Apple isn't stopping there.

For example, while we're not in the habit of believing everything that floats into our inbox, reports from a couple of anonymous stoolies claim that Macworld Expo will mark the debut of iTunes 1.2, which, in addition to sporting improved support for third-party CD-RW drives, will also include a module that will automate the printing of attractive custom CD labels (and possibly jewelcase trayliners and inserts) according to several pre-determined "themes." (Die-cut cardstock and label paper for this function will allegedly be available via the iTunes Accessories page at the Apple Store.)

On the Kerbango front, as faithful viewer and self-appointed Mac OS Rumors watchdog The M@d H@tter points out, MOSR claims that Apple is working on its own Internet radio tracking system to replace 3Com's ill-fated service in an update to iTunes due "in several months." That's for the short-term. Further down the road, Apple is supposedly getting much more ambitious; the company is said to be building its own virtual record store, through which iTunes users will be able to "search for their favorite music and buy it in a QuickTime-based MP3 audio format that includes digital rights protection." Imagine shelling out six virtual bucks for an album that then appears conveniently in your iTunes music library-- all from within iTunes itself. How very "digital hub."

We don't know how much (if any) of this is true, but hey, it's nice to dream. Oh, and various shadowy sources are pretty sure that, yes, the next version of iTunes will even include an equalizer (it's about freakin' time!), but the sandwich-maker plugin isn't expected until a later release. What? But we're hungry now!