Software Resource Bloat

I don’t understand why it takes over 50% CPU to play an audio CD in ITunes. That’s just absurd. Even the “bloated” windows media player takes less than 20%. What is it doing with those other 30+% of my CPU cycles?? It doesn’t look like ITunes has any performance preferences that I can identify in options to speed it up either….Of course, now that I look at it, it uses an absurd amount of system resources when its not even playing anything. Is my system/itunes configured wrong? Or were itunes and windows never meant to run on the same machine? It’d make my day if Itunes had a “lite” version that isn’t so absurdly slow and resource hogging…