ATunes
Encyclopedia
aTunes is a free audio player
Audio player (software)
An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, audio files and streaming audio....

 with MPlayer as its playback engine. aTunes supports MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and other formats. aTunes allows users to edit tags, organize music and rip audio CDs easily.

Media Library

According to its wiki, aTunes is able to support large playlists with thousands of songs. A filtering option allows looking for particular artists, albums or genres. Drag-and-Drop feature is available to drag songs the navigator or the computer file system. "Smart" playlists are supported.

The library is organized by multiple columns such as title, artist, album and genre which can be sorted or hidden. The navigator could be displayed as a hierarchy tree, folders, or covers.

Supported formats

aTunes can read the following formats: MP3
MP3
MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression...

, Ogg
Ogg
Ogg is a free, open container format maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The creators of the Ogg format state that it is unrestricted by software patents and is designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of high quality digital multimedia.The Ogg container format can multiplex...

 and Vorbis
Vorbis
Vorbis is a free software / open source project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation . The project produces an audio format specification and software implementation for lossy audio compression...

, WMA, WAV
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...

, FLAC
FLAC
FLAC is a codec which allows digital audio to be losslessly compressed such that file size is reduced without any information being lost...

, MP4, APE
Monkey's Audio
Monkey's Audio is a file format for audio data compression. Being a lossless format, Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack....

, MPC
Musepack
Musepack or MPC is an open source lossy audio codec, specifically optimized for transparent compression of stereo audio at bitrates of 160–180 kbit/s...

, cue files, mac. Online radio is also supported. Furthermore, M3U
M3U
M3U is a computer file format that stores multimedia playlists. It is supported by many applications.An M3U file is a plain text file that specifies the locations of one or more media files. Each line carries one specification...

 playlists can be opened and saved.

Tagging

aTunes uses a tag editor window to edit MP3, OGG, FLAC, WMA, MP4, ra, rm tags. It is able to show pictures included in ID3
ID3
ID3 is a metadata container most often used in conjunction with the MP3 audio file format. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself....

v2 tags.

Statistics

Users are able to view various statistics about their music playing habits such as songs most played and songs never played. These data are displayed as graphs and pie charts.

Audio CDs

Music can be ripped
Ripping
Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data is damaged after extraction....

 from Audio CDs and encoded into WAV, MP3, FLAC and OGG formats. The Nero
Nero
Nero , was Roman Emperor from 54 to 68, and the last in the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Nero was adopted by his great-uncle Claudius to become his heir and successor, and succeeded to the throne in 54 following Claudius' death....

 AAC encoder is optionally supported. aTunes has the feature to automatically retrieve track names from Amazon
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

.

Internet

aTunes has a tool to look up artists on different websites such as YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, Google Video
Google Video
Google Videos is a video search engine, and formerly a free video sharing website, from Google Inc. Before removing user-uploaded content, the service allowed selected videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provided the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube...

 and Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...

. It also integrates with Last.fm
Last.fm
Last.fm is a music website, founded in the United Kingdom in 2002. It has claimed 30 million active users in March 2009. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for UK£140m ....

 and AudioScrobbler.

Interface Views

In addition to the standard view with all controls, and features, there is a multi-window view allowing each element (navigator, playlist, context information) to be shown in a separate window which can be located and arranged individually. A full-screen mode is available and the player could also be sent to the notification area. aTunes colors can be changed by switching themes.

Software Translations

aTunes is available in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.
  • Tags
    • Auto tag edition tools: set track number automatically, set genre automatically.
    • Some auto tag tools for all repository.
  • Device view
    • Connect your portable player or anything that could be mounted as a file system, and view in aTunes, copy to repository, synchronize, etc. It can’t synchronize with iPods.
  • Favorites
    • Songs, albums or artists can be selected as favorites.
    • Favorite elements are shown in the “Favorites” tab in Navigator.
  • Podcasts
    • Subscribe to your favorite podcasts and listen in aTunes.

See also

  • Comparison of audio player software
    Comparison of audio player software
    The following comparison of audio players compares general and technical information for a number of software media player programs.For the purpose of this comparison, "audio players" are defined as any media player which can only play audio files...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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