ITunes
Encyclopedia
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod
, iPhone
, iPod Touch
and iPad
.
iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store
to purchase and download music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, podcast
s, movies and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and ringtones (only available on iPhone and iPod Touch 4th Generation). It is also used to download application software
from the App Store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. iTunes has been criticized for not being able to transfer music from one portable device to another.
iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001. The latest version, which is currently version 10.5.1, is available as a free download for Mac OS X
v10.5 or later, as well as Windows XP
or later. In June 2010, Apple released a new privacy policy
pertaining to the capture and collection of users' real-time location information. The information had been included in various device-specific EULAs since 2008, but was not included in Apple's general privacy policy until 2010. In 2012 Brazil will be the first country in South America to have a local version of the program.
, developed by Jeff Robbin
and Bill Kincaid
and released by Casady & Greene
in 1999, was renamed iTunes
when Apple purchased it in 2000. Robbin, Kincaid, and Dave Heller moved to Apple as part of the acquisition, where they continue to work today as the software's original developers. They simplified SoundJam's user interface, added the ability to burn CDs, and removed its recording feature and skin
support. On January 9, 2001, iTunes
1.0 was released at Macworld San Francisco. Macintosh users immediately began poking through iTunes's resource fork
, where they discovered numerous strings
and other resources that indicated iTunes was a re-engineered SoundJam MP. Casady & Greene ceased distribution of SoundJam MP on June 1, 2001 at the request of the developers.
Originally a Mac OS 9
-only application, iTunes began to support Mac OS X when version 2.0 was released nine months later, which also added support for the original iPod. Version 3 dropped Mac OS 9 support but added smart playlists and a ratings system. In April 2003, version 4.0 introduced the iTunes Store; in October, version 4.1 added support for Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Version 7.0 introduced gapless playback
and Cover Flow in September 2006. In March 2007, iTunes 7.1 added support for Windows Vista, and 7.3.2 was the last Windows 2000 version. iTunes lacked support for 64-bit versions of Windows until the 7.6 update on January 16, 2008. iTunes is currently supported under any 64-bit version of Windows Vista, although the iTunes executable is still 32-bit. The 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
are not supported by Apple, but a workaround has been devised for both operating systems. Version 8.0 added Genius playlists, grid view, and a new default visualizer. iTunes 9 added "Home Share" enabling automatic updating of purchased items across other computers on the same subnet and offers a new iTunes Store . Genius Mixes were added, as well as improved App synchronization abilities. It also adds iTunes LP
s to the store, which gives additional media with an album. Apple added iTunes Extras as well to the store, which adds content usually reserved for films on DVD
and Blu-ray
discs. Both iTunes LPs and Extras use web-standards HTML
, JavaScript
and CSS
.
A version of iTunes was shipped with cell phones from Motorola
, which included the ability to sync music from an iTunes library to the cellphone, as well as a similar interface between both platforms. Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has stopped distributing iTunes with other manufacturers' phones. In the absence of support from Apple, Nokia
has released a Mac application called Nokia Multimedia Transfer that supports transferring data from iTunes and iPhoto onto some Nokia devices. Palm however reverse engineered iTunes to allow its Pre device to sync directly with iTunes. It did this by fooling iTunes into thinking the device was an iPod.
In late March 2010, Apple released version 9.1, which has support for the iPad and its iBooks application.
In late June 2010, Apple released version 9.2, which brought support for the new iPhone 4, as well as any iDevices running iOS 4, included support for the new iPhone and iPod Touch version of the iBooks app. It can now install and run on Windows Server 2008 R2.
On September 1, 2010, Apple held their annual music press event where they unveiled an updated version: iTunes 10. The new version was available for download later that day. One major feature include the integration of "iTunes Ping
", which brings a social factor to the iTunes experience. Apple CEO Steve Jobs
also announced a new logo, one without a CD in the background because of the increasing popularity of iTunes digital downloads.
iTunes is an application that allows the user to purchase and manage audio and video on a personal computer, acting as a front end for Apple's QuickTime
media player. Officially, using iTunes is required in order to manage the audio of an Apple iPod portable audio player, although alternative software
does exist. Users can organize their music into playlist
s within one or more libraries, edit file information, record Compact Disc
s, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store (iTunes Store
), download free podcast
s, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats. There is also a large selection of free internet radio stations to listen to.
Additionally, users can add PDF files to their library (to add digital liner notes
to their albums, for example), but the PDFs cannot be transferred to or read on an iPod, but can be read on the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. However, iPhone/iPod Touch apps exist to sync any type of file to and from the device to an "iDisk
" using Apple's MobileMe
service.
In iTunes 8.0, the Preferences window was given a complete makeover. The result added very few new options, but instead removed several options. For example, iTunes once gave users the option to display arrows beside the selected song's title, artist, album, and genre that link directly to the iTunes Store. Now these arrows are not removable, except through the direct editing of a preferences file.
, are stored in two separate library files. The first is a binary file called iTunes Library and it uses a proprietary file format ("ITL"). It caches information like artist and genre from the audio format's tag capabilities (the ID3
tag, for example) and stores iTunes-specific information like play count and rating. iTunes typically reads library data only from this file. The second file, iTunes Music Library.xml, is refreshed whenever information in iTunes is changed. It uses an XML
format, allowing developers to easily write applications that can access the library information (including play count, last played date, and rating, which are not standard fields in the ID3v2.3 format). Apple's own iDVD
, iMovie
, and iPhoto
applications all access the library. If the first file exists but is corrupted, such as by making it zero-length, iTunes will attempt to reconstruct it from the XML file. Detailed third-party instructions regarding this are documented elsewhere. There have been some concerns, voiced by Mark Pilgrim
, that this feature will create an "undocumented binary blackhole" because the recovery from the XML file may not work.
It has also been noted that iTunes does not automatically track changes to actual files in the library. If a file is moved or deleted, iTunes will display an exclamation mark
beside the library entry and the user will need to manually amend the library record. Several third party tools address this problem.
iTunes supports ripping
from CDs, but not from DVDs. However, in 2008, Apple and select film studios introduced "iTunes Digital Copy
", a bonus feature on some DVDs that provides a copy-protected and iTunes-compatible file for select films.
, AIFF, WAV
, MPEG-4
, AAC
(.m4a) and Apple Lossless
.
iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime
can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC
files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com
audio books. There is limited support for Vorbis
and FLAC enclosed in an Ogg
container (files using the Ogg container format are not naturally supported) or Speex
codecs with the Xiph QuickTime Components
. Because tag editing and album art is done within iTunes and not QuickTime, these features will not work with these QuickTime components. As of Snow Leopard, iTunes 9 (Mac) will play HE-AAC / AAC+ internet streams. The latest version of iTunes (Win/Mac) supports importing audio CDs with the default iTunes standard file format of AAC at 256 kbit/s, but users can choose from 16 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s constant bit rates (CBR) in either AAC or MP3.
Importing of audio CDs into MP3 or AAC formats can also be accomplished using variable bitrate
(VBR) encoding. However, a double-blind experiment conducted in January 2004 of six MP3 encoders noted that the iTunes encoder came last, in that the quality of the files produced by iTunes was below par. It was stated in the final results that these tests only covered VBR encodings, thus iTunes might have performed better with a constant bitrate
(CBR). In a follow-up test performed in October, 2008, iTunes' results were similar to those of the four other MP3 encoders being compared.
The Windows version of iTunes can automatically transcode DRM-free WMA
(including version 9) files to other audio formats, but does not support playback of WMA files and will not transcode DRM protected WMA files. Telestream, Inc.
provides free codecs for Mac users of QuickTime to enable playback of unprotected Windows Media files. These codecs are recommended by Microsoft.
In addition to importing CDs into your iTunes library, users can also import non Apple mp3 files from Amazon.com
and other sources. This can be accomplished by right clicking on the file, selecting open with, and then selecting iTunes. The user can also drag your file into the open iTunes window. The Amazon program will automatically import your mp3 files to their iTunes library.
Advanced Audio Coding and Apple Lossless files support Unicode metadata, stored in the MPEG-4 Part 14 container as so-called "atoms". The QuickTime plugin that supports the OGG container format has no support for tag editing or album art.
iTunes uses the Gracenote
interactive audio CD database to provide track name listings for audio CDs. The service can be set to activate when a CD is inserted into the computer and an Internet connection is available. Track names for albums imported to iTunes while not connected to the Internet can be obtained during a later connection, by a manual procedure. For any album loaded into iTunes for which there is not an existing Gracenote track listing, the user can choose to submit track name data to Gracenote.
Information is written down in columns, the information being the number of plays, the date last played, the genre of the music, the album, the composer, the number and the name of the song, but if a song cannot be found on Gracenote iTunes will leave the spaces empty, except the name of the song and the information relating to the plays. These "mystery songs" have been frequently removed from playlists by iTunes users, because they know little about the songs.
a playlist of songs from the user's library which are similar to the selected song. Genius playlists are created by the ratings system and collaborative filtering
. An iTunes Store
account is required because information about the user's library must first be sent anonymously
to Apple's database
. Algorithm
s determine which songs to play based on other users' libraries, and Genius becomes more intelligent given a larger data set
. The resulting Genius playlist can contain 25, 50, 75, or 100 songs and can be refreshed for new results or saved. The iTunes Sidebar recommends selections for purchase from the iTunes Store based on the selected library track. Once Genius becomes active in iTunes, it can be used on current generations of the iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Touch or the iPhone. iTunes 9 added Genius Mixes, where the Genius software finds similar music and automatically puts them into mixes.
iTunes Genius creates playlists from the user's existing iTunes library based on the song they have selected, the Genius Mixes create playlists based on the genre or theme of the theme of the music in their library, and it suggests new music at the iTunes store based on the music they like. iTunes Genius takes the following into account when creating a playlist: what songs they have in their library, the play counts of the songs, and the star ratings of the songs. The Genius playlists also considers what songs will sound good in a specific order whereas the Mixes create playlists based on genre rather than on a song selected by the user. The Genius feature can also either be hidden or turned off.
(DAAP), created by Apple for this purpose. DAAP relies on the Bonjour
network service discovery framework, Apple's implementation of the Zeroconf open network standard. Apple has not made the DAAP specification available to the general public, only to third-party licensees such as Roku
. However, the protocol has been reverse-engineered
and is now used to stream audio from non-Apple software (mainly on the Linux
platform).
DAAP allows shared lists of songs within the same subnet
to be automatically detected. When a song is shared, iTunes can stream the song but won't save it on the local hard drive, in order to prevent unauthorized copying. Songs in Protected AAC
format can also be accessed, but authentication is required. A maximum of five users may connect to a single user every 24 hours. The multiple, alternate "View" options normally available to iTunes users including "Cover Flow" are disabled when viewing a shared library over a network.
Library sharing was first introduced with iTunes 4.0, where users could freely access shared music anywhere over the Internet, in addition to one's own subnet, by specifying IP address
es of remote shared song libraries. Apple quickly removed this feature with version 4.0.1, claiming that users were violating the End User License Agreement
.
With the release of iTunes 7.0, Apple changed their implementation of DAAP. This change prevents any third-party client, such as a computer running Linux, a modified Xbox
, or any computer without iTunes installed, from connecting to a remote iTunes repository. iTunes will still connect as a client to other iTunes servers and to third-party servers.
iTunes libraries can also be shared using the “Home Share” option. This option enables users to share both video and audio files through the application. This allows users to also look for items that they don’t already have. Like network sharing, it allows users to share over the same network to up to five computers. The media can then be transferred to any type of iPod or iPad. To set up home sharing, the two computers being used must be on the same network as well as set up using the same Apple ID
.
Another option to share music files is to burn CDs. To do this the user needs to create a playlist with the songs the user wishes to share. If the playlist exceeds roughly twenty songs it is likely they will need to make multiple CDs. By inserting a disk into the disk drive a button on the bottom of the window should give the option to burn a disk. The files are automatically downloaded to the disk and may be uploaded onto another computer or saved as a backup for the user’s computer.
iTunes has four different views for music and video libraries – a song list, an album list, Grid View or Cover Flow.
The standard song list view displays library files with several detail fields.
Album lists are much the same as the standard list view, only the list is broken up by albums, with the artwork as the header of the list. Album lists were introduced in iTunes 10.0, and although this view allows users to browse content more visually, sorting the list view by name will accordingly break up the library into redundant instances of each album.
Cover Flow was introduced in iTunes 7.0 and it displays the album art as CD covers in a sliding format at the top of the screen. Under the album art is a small list of all the songs in that album. Compilation albums are only shown as a single album cover. If there is no album artwork, iTunes will display the default music note pictures.
Grid View is similar to Cover Flow, displaying the user's cover art in a grid rather than a side-scrolling format. While using this view mode, music can be grouped into album, artist, genre, or composer. Grid View was introduced in iTunes 8.0.
iTunes can also sort albums by artist or year, to make its artwork-centered interfaces more intuitive.
. Smart playlists are playlists that can be set to automatically filter the library based on a customized list of selection criteria, much like a database
query. Multiple criteria can be entered to manage the smart playlist.
Some automatic smart playlists that are added to the user’s library that may include Top 25 Most Played, Recently Played, Recently Added, My Top Rated, Music Videos, Classical Music, Purchased, and 90’s Music. While creating Smart Playlists the user has to choose whether they want the playlist to be based on genre, whether or not the songs have album artwork, date added, etc. and if they want it to contain or not contain certain genres or artists i.e. country music
, songs added in January, or Lady Gaga
. The user can also limit the amount of songs you want in the playlist or you can leave it as unlimited. The Live Updating option will automatically update their new playlist as their library changes.
Any user of iTunes can publish a playlist to the iTunes Store with his or her own preferences, which is called an iMix.
Introduced in iTunes 4.5, the "Party Shuffle" playlist was intended as a simple DJing
aid. By default, it selects tracks randomly from other playlists or the library, but users can override the automatic selections by deleting tracks (iTunes will choose new ones to replace them) or by adding their own via drag-and-drop
or contextual menu
. This allows a mixture of both preselected and random tracks in the same meta-playlist. The playlist from which Party Shuffle drew could be changed on the fly by the computer user, but doing so will cause all randomly chosen tracks to disappear and be replaced.
Party Shuffle was renamed iTunes DJ in iTunes 8. When iTunes was updated to 8.1, quite a few features were added to iTunes DJ. The free Apple Remote application for the iPhone and iPod Touch was also update at this time that added a new iTunes DJ option in the settings screen when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi
network and a new song request feature is enabled in iTunes DJ on the hosts. Along with the song request feature voting on songs in the queue was added, the more votes a song gets the high in the queue it will be and sooner it will be played. Song voting can only be done when song requesting is enabled and in two ways: the first by right clicking on a song in the iTunes DJ queue on the hosts computer in iTunes, the second is in the Remote application ether connected with the iTunes DJ option by a guest or by the host in the full playlist section. When song requesting is enabled a customizable welcome message is displayed below the host's shared library name in the button used to connect to iTunes DJ.
Playlists can be played randomly
or sequentially
. The randomness of the shuffle algorithm can be biased for or against playing multiple tracks from the same album or artists in sequence (a feature introduced in iTunes 5.0, and later discontinued in iTunes 8.0). iTunes DJ can also be biased towards selecting tracks with a higher star rating.
, "sound enhancement" and crossfade. There is also a feature called "Sound Check" which automatically adjusts the playback volume of all songs in the library to the same level; this is usually called volume leveling or audio normalization
. Like "sound enhancement" and crossfade, this can be turned on in the 'Playback' section of iTunes' preferences.
. The high definition feature on TV shows was added in July of 2008. iTunes also offers the ability to buy a season pass for television shows. This allows viewers to buy an entire season that automatically downloads new episodes around twenty-four hours after they air. In the iTunes library, these shows are then categorized by season of the particular show. iTunes also gives the option of ordering shows based on: series, genre
, or whether or not the episodes are unwatched. In fall of 2010 iTunes offered TV show rental options, but as of August 2011 this option is no longer offered.
. iTunes also gives the option of renting movies, which began in January of 2008. The price for renting
a movie can range from $0.99 if the movie is on sale, $3.99, and $4.99 if the rental is HD. Once a rental is downloaded the viewer has thirty days to watch the movie before it expires. Once the viewer begins to watch the movie he/she has twenty-four hours to finish the movie before it expires. Movies can be organized in the iTunes library by title, genre
, or unwatched.
On October 12, 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0, which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music Store initially offered a selection of thousands of Music Videos and five TV
shows, including most notably the ABC network's Lost
and Desperate Housewives
. Disney Channel
shows (The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and That's So Raven
) were also offered 24 hours after airing, as well as episode packs from past seasons. Since then, the collection has expanded to include content from numerous television networks. The iTunes Music Store also gives the ability to view Apple's large collection of film trailers.
As of September 5, 2006, the iTunes Store offers over 550 television shows for download. Additionally, a catalog of 75 feature-length films from Disney-owned studios was introduced. As of April 11, 2007, over 500 feature-length films are available through iTunes.
Originally, films and TV shows were only available to U.S. customers, with the only video content available to non-U.S. customers being music videos and Pixar's short films. This feature is being extended to other countries as licensing issues are resolved.
Video content available from the store used to be encoded as 540 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4
video (H.264
) with an approximately 128 kbit/s AAC audio track. Many videos and video podcasts currently require the latest version of QuickTime, QuickTime 7, which is incompatible with older versions of Mac OS (only v10.3.9 and later are supported). On September 12, 2006, the resolution of video content sold on the iTunes Store was increased from 320×240 (QVGA) to 640×480 (VGA
). The higher resolution video content is encoded as 1.5 Mbit/s (minimum) Protected MPEG-4
video (H.264
) with a minimum 128 kbit/s AAC audio track.
. The application performs two functions. The first function is as a direct link to the iTunes book store, called eponymously iBooks, which can be accessed on iOS devices and computers (Mac or PC). The second was as a storage place for downloaded books (whether free or purchased) from the iBooks store. The format of books from the Apple store (and the only one users could use with iBooks, until PDF functionality was added later) is ePub
.
Additional functions were later added in mid-2010 to include annotations and placeholder/bookmarks in any book being read. Also PDF documents were able to be added, and were stored under their own tab in a user's iBooks library, with the same functionality. The iBooks app for the other two iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) was released when iOS 4 was distributed shortly before the release of the iPhone 4.
One current limitation of books (though not PDF documents) is that they can only be read using the app on any iOS device and cannot be read inside iTunes on a user's Mac or PC. PDF documents can be read using Preview or any other PDF reader/editor application the user has on their machine.
service, which would synchronize non-iTunes-purchased media across multiple devices.
, then named the iTunes Music Store, from which iTunes users can buy and download songs for use on a limited number of computers and an unlimited number of iPods. In previous years, purchased music from the iTunes Store were copy protected with Apple's FairPlay
digital rights management
(DRM) system which allows protected songs to be played on up to five computers at one time, as well as unlimited devices (iPod, AppleTV, etc.). DRM protected songs cannot be played on computers not authorized to the purchaser's iTunes account. At the 2009 Macworld Conference & Expo
, it was announced that the iTunes Music Store would be DRM-free, with all songs digital rights management
(DRM)-free by April 2009.
Apple also announced changes in their price tier. They announced that songs will now cost $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29, but did not elaborate on how they will be priced. Observers expected new hits to be $1.29 while older songs will be the cheaper $0.99 or $0.69 tier, however many record labels have listed whole catalogs by artists with nothing but $1.29 songs, taking advantage of the price option. Due to this, there are very few songs in the iTunes store with a $0.69 price tag.
In the years since, film
s, television program
s, music video
s, podcast
s, and the App Store (for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) have been added to iTunes' extensive store catalog.
On January 6, 2009, Phil Schiller
announced in his Macworld
2009 keynote speech that over 6 billion songs had been downloaded since the service first launched on April 28, 2003, making it the largest online music store
in the world.
At the previous Macworld Expo 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated that the service had set a new single day record of 20 million songs on December 25, 2007. He also announced that the iTunes Store will offer over 1,000 movies for rental by the end of February. The iTunes movie catalog includes content from 20th Century Fox
, Warner Bros.
, Walt Disney Pictures
, Paramount Pictures
, Universal Studios
, and Sony Pictures Entertainment
. These movies will also be transferable to all 6th generation iPods.
On the February 24, 2010, Apple announced that over 10 billion tracks had been downloaded from the iTunes store.
As of Tuesday, November 16, 2010, Beatles fans could download their entire catalog digitally via iTunes. Artists whose music remains largely unavailable include Garth Brooks
, AC/DC
, Kid Rock
, Tool
, and Bob Seger
. Def Leppard
albums are no longer available through iTunes.
Right around the end of 2009/start of 2010, new members' institutions no longer have the capability to upload content to Apple's servers. Any member institutions before that are grandfathered in.
iTunes U has collected materials from a variety of locations around the world, including colleges, universities, museums, libraries and other cultural institutions of educational value. There are currently more than 75,000 files available for download. The Open University in the UK set the record for the most downloads as of October 3rd, 2011 having reached 40 million downloads.
In late August 2010, iTunes U surpassed 300 million downloads from more than 800 institutions.
Version 4.9 of iTunes, released on June 28, 2005, added built-in support for podcasts.
Users can subscribe to any podcast by entering its RSS
feed URL
, but also by browsing the podcast
directory within iTunes Music Store. The front page of this displays high-profile podcasts from commercial broadcasters and independent podcasters and allows searching by category or popularity. Once subscribed, the podcast can be set to download manually, or automatically — and as with other audio, content can be listened to directly or synced to a portable hardware device like an MP3 player.
The addition of podcasting functionality to such a widespread audio application like iTunes greatly helped podcasting enter the mainstream. Within days after iTunes 4.9 was released, podcasters were reporting that the number of downloads of their audio files had tripled, sometimes even quadrupled, and iTunes is considered the dominant podcast client.
ing, although video and RSS
support was already unofficially there in version 4.9.
Users can subscribe to RSS feeds through the iTunes Store or by directly entering the feed URL
. Video podcasts can contain downloadable video files (in MOV
, MP4
, M4V
, or MPG
format), but also streaming sources and even IPTV
.
Downloadable files can be synchronized to a video-capable iPod, or downloadable files and streams can be shown in Front Row.
its music and video library with an iPod or iPhone every time it is connected. New songs and playlists are automatically copied to the iPod, and songs and playlists that have been deleted from the library on the host computer are also deleted from the iPod
. Ratings awarded to songs on the iPod will sync back to the iTunes library and audiobooks will also remember the current playback position.
Automatic synchronization can be turned off in favor of manually copying individual songs or complete playlists. iTunes supports copying music to an iPod; however, only music and videos purchased from the iTunes store can be transferred from the iPod back to iTunes. This functionality was added after third-party software was written which allowed users to copy all content back to their computer. It is also possible to copy from the iPod using ordinary Unix
command line tools, or by enabling hidden file viewing in Windows Explorer
, then copying music from the iPod drive to a local disk for backup. Doing this can be confusing because the files are arranged in such a way that their folders and (depending on iPod and iTunes versions) file names are seemingly picked at random as they are put on the iPod. It is worth noting, however, that the files (along with their embedded title and artist information) remain unchanged. It is therefore less confusing to let iTunes reimport, reorganize, and rename all of the files after they are backed up. When music or video purchased through the iTunes Store is copied from an iPod, it will only play on computers that are authorized with the account that was used to purchase them. Several third party utilities can remove this limitation by stripping iTunes DRM
from protected files. The legality of using such software in the United States is currently the subject of active debate.
When an iPod is connected that does not contain enough free space to sync the entire iTunes music library, a playlist will be created and given a name matching that of the connected iPod. This playlist can then be modified to the user's preference in song selection to fill the available space.
The Mac OS X version of iTunes can also synchronize with a small number of discontinued digital music players, while the Windows version supports only the iPod. The synchronization is limited, however, in that the iPod is the only digital music player compatible with Apple's proprietary FairPlay
digital rights management technology, and thus most music purchased through the iTunes Store (before the introduction of iTunes Plus) can only be played on an iPod. The remaining ability to synchronize with a limited number of legacy digital music players is likely a remnant of Apple's history in the music industry: iTunes was released in January 2001, nine months prior to the iPod's unveiling, and slightly more than two years before the introduction of the iTunes Music Store. When iTunes was released, compatibility with other music players was critical. Since iPod has now become the dominant digital music player, Apple no longer considers that compatibility to be a necessity.
In June 2009, Palm Inc released the Palm Pre
, which has the ability to sync with both the Windows and Mac OS X version of iTunes by identifying itself to iTunes as an iPod. The Pre is able to sync only DRM-free music. However, on July 14, 2009, Apple released iTunes version 8.2.1, which prevented the Palm Pre from syncing directly with iTunes. Then on July 23, 2009, Palm Inc released WebOS 1.1, re-enabling syncing between iTunes 8.2.1 and the Palm Pre
. But Apple again prevented Palm Pre syncing with the release of iTunes 9.
A number of unsupported third-party applications have been created to assist synchronization of songs with any music player that can be mounted as an external drive. Though iTunes is the only official method for synchronizing with the iPod, there are other applications available that allow the iPod to sync with other software players.
As of iTunes 7, purchased music can be copied from the iPod onto the computer. The computer must be authorized by that iTunes account. iTunes currently allows up to 5 computers to be authorized on one account. To de-authorize and register new computers thereafter, all accounts must be deleted, followed by registering the live one. This can be done only once a year.
iTunes does not feature any transfer facility for importing music files between computers directly. This is being addressed in September 2011 by iCloud
, but only tracks that Apple sell in their iTunes Store are available (in 256 kbit/s AAC format) without uploading them to iCloud first. Any other tracks, that are either not available in the Store or that the user wants in different encoding can be uploaded to the iCloud with 5 GB of free space and the, as yet undisclosed, potential to purchase more storage. Though what audio formats will be accepted for upload has not been confirmed.
iTunes managed content can also be accessed via the Apple TV set-top box. Files in the iTunes library can either be synchronized with the Apple TV unit, which results in their being copied to the Apple TV's hard drive (for the first generation Apple TV), or streamed
to the Apple TV directly from a Macintosh or PC. Apple TV does not require the use of iTunes (as of the 'Take Two' software update) and can now import files from the iTunes Store
directly over the internet.
As of iTunes 9.1, it is possible to sync the iPad to iTunes, allowing music, movies, applications and iBooks
to be synced to the iPad. As of 10.5, iTunes supports syncing the iPhone using both Wi-Fi
and Bluetooth
.
on June 19, 2009, iTunes at home activation was available for people purchasing their iPhone from AT&T
and Apple. This allowed them to activate their new iPhone 3G/iPhone 3GS at home when they arrived.
and iLife
suites. These applications can access the iTunes Library directly, allowing access to the playlists and songs stored within (including encrypted music purchased from the iTunes Store). Music files from iTunes can be embedded directly into Pages
documents and can supply the score for iDVD, iMovie, and Keynote productions. iTunes is also integrated with Front Row, compiling its information from the user's iTunes and iPhoto libraries. In addition, any song exported from GarageBand
, Apple's basic music-making application, is automatically added to the user's iTunes music library. iTunes's Artwork.saver is a screen saver included in Mac OS X v10.4
that displays album artwork as a screen saver. iTunes widget is a Dashboard Widget that controls iTunes.
In Windows, Adobe Photoshop Elements can connect to iTunes in order to stream its photo library on Apple TV.
Moreover, iTunes can be scripted, using AppleScript
for Mac OS X or using the Apple-provided SDK for iTunes on Windows allowing many other applications to integrate themselves into iTunes. A common use is to relay the title and artist of what the user is currently listening to into their instant messenger, or social networking service
. LimeWire
, which closed on October 26, 2010, was a peer-to-peer
program that provided integration with iTunes, adding songs from LimeWire directly to your iTunes library without sharing your iTunes purchased songs.
In addition, visualizer plugins and device plugins are supported. Visualizer plugins allow developers to create music-driven visual displays and free software development kits are available for Mac and Windows can be from Apple.
Device plugins allow support for additional music player devices, but the API
s is only licensed to authentic OEM
s who sign a non-disclosure agreement
.
Apple Inc. also offers a free iOS application that allows the user to remotely control their iTunes library or Apple TV over DACP
. This can be downloaded from iTunes itself or directly from one's iOS device. It is only compatible with iOS v2.0 and above. In terms of usage, it is very similar to the iPod application that is included with all iPhones, with the only difference is the lack of Cover Flow support.
Though iTunes itself can be installed where the user desires, ancillary applications such as Bonjour which are part of the iTunes installation cannot be placed in a user-desired directory.
After burning a CD from a playlist, one can select that playlist and bring up a dialog box with several print options. The user can choose to print either a single album cover (for purchased iTunes albums) or a compilation cover (for user-created playlists). iTunes then automatically sets up a template with art on one side and track titles on the other.
. iMixes were first introduced in iTunes version 4.5. However, they are limited to 100 songs, must feature content available on the iTunes Store, and are active for one year from their original published date. iMixes are public and searchable by any iTunes user, and can be rated using a five-star system. Users can publish their iTunes iMix to their blog
, profile page, or website.
Internet radio
tuner service, giving users a selection of some of the more popular online radio streams
available. When Kerbango went out of business in 2001, Apple created its own Internet radio service for use with iTunes 2.0 and later. As of February 2008, the iTunes radio service features 1795 "radio stations", mostly in MP3 streaming format. Programming covers many genres of music and talk, including streams from both internet-only sources and traditional radio stations. iTunes also supports the .pls and .m3u stream file formats used by Winamp
and other media players.
Since the release of iTunes 7, Apple no longer promotes the Internet radio feature, though it remains in the application. Some third-parties offer iTunes plugins that add additional radio stations.
In addition, users are able to enter additional stream feeds to listen to in their own music libraries. This is done by selecting the menu item "Advanced" > "Open Audio Stream..." or by the hotkey Ctrl-U (PC) or Command-U (Mac).
Ping lets users follow artists to see the photos and videos they have posted, their tour dates, playlists they have created, and their comments on other artists’ albums. Users can create a profile so their friends can see who they are following, what they’re listening to and what concerts they are going to. Ping also shows users top 10 lists of songs and albums among the people they follow. It also gives you artist recommendations to follow based on their library and preference options.
The revised policy states that Apple has the right to share this information with 3rd parties who provide services to the customer, including advertising and promotion services. Apple also states that "it may be necessary" to provide this [real-time] information in response to "requests from public and governmental authorities within or outside your country of residence or if [Apple] determines that for purposes of national security, law enforcement, or other issues of public importance, disclosure is necessary or appropriate.... Additionally, in the event of a reorganization, merger, or sale we may transfer any and all personal information we collect to the relevant third party."
The revised policy does not make any distinction between warrant-based and warrantless searches, nor provide what criteria would trigger the sharing of personal real-time information with government entities, nor allow an opt-out for the location-based information.
The revised policy prompted the co-chairs of the Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus of the United States House of Representatives
to request that Apple respond to nine basic privacy questions out of concern of possible violation of that country's Federal Communications Act. The Caucus stated it was pleased with Apple's prompt written explanations, and stated they would continue to monitor the issue.
reported in November 2011 that Apple had been aware of a security flaw since 2008, that would let unauthorized third parties to install "updates" to end-user's itunes' software.
They reported that a security writer named Brian Krebs
had informed Apple of the vulnerability in 2008.
They reported that the flaw was only closed in November 2011.
They reported that United Kingdom
security software firm Gamma International developed a program named FinFisher
, intended to covertly spy on computer uses, which can be clandestinely installed via bogus updates to itunes' software.
Der Spiegel
reported Gamma International had advertized the capability to clandestinely install FinFisher by exploiting this itunes' vulnerability.
Macintosh software
Windows hardware
Windows software
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
, iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, iPod Touch
IPod Touch
The iPod Touch is a portable media player, personal digital assistant, handheld game console, and Wi-Fi mobile device designed and marketed by Apple Inc. The iPod Touch adds the multi-touch graphical user interface to the iPod line...
and iPad
IPad
The iPad is a line of tablet computers designed, developed and marketed by Apple Inc., primarily as a platform for audio-visual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, and web content. The iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010 by Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs. Its size and...
.
iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store
ITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
to purchase and download music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s, movies and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and ringtones (only available on iPhone and iPod Touch 4th Generation). It is also used to download application software
Application software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
from the App Store for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. iTunes has been criticized for not being able to transfer music from one portable device to another.
iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001. The latest version, which is currently version 10.5.1, is available as a free download for Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
v10.5 or later, as well as Windows XP
Windows XP
Windows XP is an operating system produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops and media centers. First released to computer manufacturers on August 24, 2001, it is the second most popular version of Windows, based on installed user base...
or later. In June 2010, Apple released a new privacy policy
Privacy policy
Privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses and manages a customer or client's data...
pertaining to the capture and collection of users' real-time location information. The information had been included in various device-specific EULAs since 2008, but was not included in Apple's general privacy policy until 2010. In 2012 Brazil will be the first country in South America to have a local version of the program.
History
SoundJam MPSoundJam MP
SoundJam MP was an early MP3 player for the Mac OS, bought in 2000 by Apple and renamed iTunes. The program was written by Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid, published by Casady & Greene.-History and launch:...
, developed by Jeff Robbin
Jeff Robbin
Jeffrey L. "Jeff" Robbin is the vice president of consumer applications at Apple, Inc. He is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur notable for creating the MP3 player SoundJam MP with Bill Kincaid that was eventually bought by Apple and renamed iTunes...
and Bill Kincaid
Bill Kincaid
William S. "Bill" Kincaid is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur notable for creating the MP3 player SoundJam MP with Jeff Robbin that was eventually bought by Apple and renamed iTunes....
and released by Casady & Greene
Casady & Greene
Casady & Greene, founded in 1984 by Robin Casady, was a software publisher of shareware products, primarily for the Macintosh. C&G published fonts in the earlier days of desktop publishing; founder Casady partnered with Michael Greene, founder of Greene Inc who developed QuickDex. An expansion into...
in 1999, was renamed iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
when Apple purchased it in 2000. Robbin, Kincaid, and Dave Heller moved to Apple as part of the acquisition, where they continue to work today as the software's original developers. They simplified SoundJam's user interface, added the ability to burn CDs, and removed its recording feature and skin
Skin (computing)
In computing, a skin is a custom graphical appearance achieved by the use of a graphical user interface that can be applied to specific software and websites to suit the purpose, topic, or tastes of different users....
support. On January 9, 2001, iTunes
ITunes
iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....
1.0 was released at Macworld San Francisco. Macintosh users immediately began poking through iTunes's resource fork
Resource fork
The resource fork is a construct of the Mac OS operating system used to store structured data in a file, alongside unstructured data stored within the data fork. A resource fork stores information in a specific form, such as icons, the shapes of windows, definitions of menus and their contents, and...
, where they discovered numerous strings
String (computer science)
In formal languages, which are used in mathematical logic and theoretical computer science, a string is a finite sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet....
and other resources that indicated iTunes was a re-engineered SoundJam MP. Casady & Greene ceased distribution of SoundJam MP on June 1, 2001 at the request of the developers.
Originally a Mac OS 9
Mac OS 9
Mac OS 9 is the final major release of Apple's Mac OS before the launch of Mac OS X. Introduced on October 23, 1999, Apple positioned it as "The Best Internet Operating System Ever," highlighting Sherlock 2's Internet search capabilities, integration with Apple's free online services known as...
-only application, iTunes began to support Mac OS X when version 2.0 was released nine months later, which also added support for the original iPod. Version 3 dropped Mac OS 9 support but added smart playlists and a ratings system. In April 2003, version 4.0 introduced the iTunes Store; in October, version 4.1 added support for Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Version 7.0 introduced gapless playback
Gapless playback
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks without intervening silence or clicks at the point of the track change. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed...
and Cover Flow in September 2006. In March 2007, iTunes 7.1 added support for Windows Vista, and 7.3.2 was the last Windows 2000 version. iTunes lacked support for 64-bit versions of Windows until the 7.6 update on January 16, 2008. iTunes is currently supported under any 64-bit version of Windows Vista, although the iTunes executable is still 32-bit. The 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 is a server operating system produced by Microsoft, introduced on 24 April 2003. An updated version, Windows Server 2003 R2, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005...
are not supported by Apple, but a workaround has been devised for both operating systems. Version 8.0 added Genius playlists, grid view, and a new default visualizer. iTunes 9 added "Home Share" enabling automatic updating of purchased items across other computers on the same subnet and offers a new iTunes Store . Genius Mixes were added, as well as improved App synchronization abilities. It also adds iTunes LP
ITunes LP
iTunes LP is a format for interactive album artwork introduced by Apple Inc. on the 9 September 2009. It is similar to the CMX format being developed by the 4 major record labels, and operates within the iTunes 9 software, allowing the user to view multimedia elements alongside the music...
s to the store, which gives additional media with an album. Apple added iTunes Extras as well to the store, which adds content usually reserved for films on DVD
DVD
A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....
and Blu-ray
Blu-ray Disc
Blu-ray Disc is an optical disc storage medium designed to supersede the DVD format. The plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the norm for feature-length video discs...
discs. Both iTunes LPs and Extras use web-standards HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
, JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
and CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language...
.
A version of iTunes was shipped with cell phones from Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
, which included the ability to sync music from an iTunes library to the cellphone, as well as a similar interface between both platforms. Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has stopped distributing iTunes with other manufacturers' phones. In the absence of support from Apple, Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
has released a Mac application called Nokia Multimedia Transfer that supports transferring data from iTunes and iPhoto onto some Nokia devices. Palm however reverse engineered iTunes to allow its Pre device to sync directly with iTunes. It did this by fooling iTunes into thinking the device was an iPod.
In late March 2010, Apple released version 9.1, which has support for the iPad and its iBooks application.
In late June 2010, Apple released version 9.2, which brought support for the new iPhone 4, as well as any iDevices running iOS 4, included support for the new iPhone and iPod Touch version of the iBooks app. It can now install and run on Windows Server 2008 R2.
On September 1, 2010, Apple held their annual music press event where they unveiled an updated version: iTunes 10. The new version was available for download later that day. One major feature include the integration of "iTunes Ping
ITunes Ping
iTunes Ping, also known simply as Ping, is a software-based, music-oriented social networking and recommender system service developed and operated by Apple. It was announced and launched on 1 September 2010 as part of the tenth major release of iTunes...
", which brings a social factor to the iTunes experience. Apple CEO Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution. He was co-founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Apple Inc...
also announced a new logo, one without a CD in the background because of the increasing popularity of iTunes digital downloads.
Features
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
media player. Officially, using iTunes is required in order to manage the audio of an Apple iPod portable audio player, although alternative software
Comparison of iPod Managers
This article is about alternative software applications to manage iPod contents. This includes the transferring of music, photos, and videos between an iPod and a computer....
does exist. Users can organize their music into playlist
Playlist
In its most general form, a playlist is simply a list of songs. They can be played in sequential or shuffled order. The term has several specialized meanings in the realms of radio broadcasting and personal computers.-In radio:...
s within one or more libraries, edit file information, record Compact Disc
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
s, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store (iTunes Store
ITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
), download free podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats. There is also a large selection of free internet radio stations to listen to.
Additionally, users can add PDF files to their library (to add digital liner notes
Digital booklet
Digital booklets are the digital equivalent of liner notes that often accompany digital music purchases. They are most commonly distributed in Portable Document Format. One well-known distributor of digital booklets with digital purchases is the iTunes Store; the first instance of this on the...
to their albums, for example), but the PDFs cannot be transferred to or read on an iPod, but can be read on the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad. However, iPhone/iPod Touch apps exist to sync any type of file to and from the device to an "iDisk
IDisk
iDisk is a file hosting service offered by Apple to all MobileMe members that enables them to store their digital photos, movies and personal files online so they can be accessed remotely. With a standard subscription, MobileMe users receive a 20 GB iDisk.iDisk integrates with Mac OS X,...
" using Apple's MobileMe
MobileMe
MobileMe was a subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. Originally launched on January 5, 2000, as iTools, a free collection of Internet-based services for users of Mac OS 9, Apple relaunched it as .Mac on July 17, 2002, when it became a paid subscription...
service.
In iTunes 8.0, the Preferences window was given a complete makeover. The result added very few new options, but instead removed several options. For example, iTunes once gave users the option to display arrows beside the selected song's title, artist, album, and genre that link directly to the iTunes Store. Now these arrows are not removable, except through the direct editing of a preferences file.
Media management
iTunes keeps track of songs by creating a virtual library, allowing users to access and edit a song's attributes. These attributes, known as metadataMetadata
The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...
, are stored in two separate library files. The first is a binary file called iTunes Library and it uses a proprietary file format ("ITL"). It caches information like artist and genre from the audio format's tag capabilities (the 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....
tag, for example) and stores iTunes-specific information like play count and rating. iTunes typically reads library data only from this file. The second file, iTunes Music Library.xml, is refreshed whenever information in iTunes is changed. It uses an XML
XML
Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
format, allowing developers to easily write applications that can access the library information (including play count, last played date, and rating, which are not standard fields in the ID3v2.3 format). Apple's own iDVD
IDVD
iDVD is a DVD creation software application made by Apple Inc. for Mac OS X. iDVD allows the user to add QuickTime Movies, MP3 music, and digital photos to a DVD that can then be played on a commercial DVD player. It is often considered the last step of Apple's iLife suite, bringing together all...
, iMovie
IMovie
iMovie is a proprietary video editing software application which allows Mac, iPod Touch 4th generation, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2 users to edit their own home movies. It was originally released by Apple in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-enabled consumer Apple...
, and iPhoto
IPhoto
iPhoto is a digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. and released with every Macintosh personal computer as part of the iLife suite of digital life management applications...
applications all access the library. If the first file exists but is corrupted, such as by making it zero-length, iTunes will attempt to reconstruct it from the XML file. Detailed third-party instructions regarding this are documented elsewhere. There have been some concerns, voiced by Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim
Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authors a popular blog, and has written several books including Dive into Python, a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Documentation License...
, that this feature will create an "undocumented binary blackhole" because the recovery from the XML file may not work.
It has also been noted that iTunes does not automatically track changes to actual files in the library. If a file is moved or deleted, iTunes will display an exclamation mark
Exclamation mark
The exclamation mark, exclamation point, or bang, or "dembanger" is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or high volume , and often marks the end of a sentence. Example: “Watch out!” The character is encoded in Unicode at...
beside the library entry and the user will need to manually amend the library record. Several third party tools address this problem.
iTunes supports ripping
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 CDs, but not from DVDs. However, in 2008, Apple and select film studios introduced "iTunes Digital Copy
Digital copy
Digital Copy provides consumers who purchase a film on DVD or Blu-ray Disc with an additional, digital copy of the movie for devices capable of operating with a file in contrast to a DVD.-Features:...
", a bonus feature on some DVDs that provides a copy-protected and iTunes-compatible file for select films.
File format support
iTunes 10 can currently read, write and convert between MP3MP3
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...
, AIFF, WAV
WAV
Waveform Audio File Format , is a Microsoft and IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs...
, MPEG-4
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a method of defining compression of audio and visual digital data. It was introduced in late 1998 and designated a standard for a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group under the formal standard ISO/IEC...
, AAC
Advanced Audio Coding
Advanced Audio Coding is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates....
(.m4a) and Apple Lossless
Apple Lossless
Apple Lossless Apple Lossless Apple Lossless (also known as ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), or ALE (Apple Lossless Encoder) is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music. After initially being proprietary for many years, in late 2011 Apple open sourced...
.
iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC
FairPlay
FairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...
files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com
Audible.com
Audible.com is an Internet provider of spoken audio entertainment, information, and educational programming.Audible sells digital audiobooks, radio and TV programs, and audio versions of magazines and newspapers....
audio books. There is limited support for 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...
and FLAC enclosed in an 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...
container (files using the Ogg container format are not naturally supported) or Speex
Speex
Speex is a patent-free audio compression format designed for speech and also a free software speech codec that may be used on VoIP applications and podcasts. It is based on the CELP speech coding algorithm. Speex claims to be free of any patent restrictions and is licensed under the revised BSD...
codecs with the Xiph QuickTime Components
Xiph QuickTime Components
The Xiph QuickTime Components are Xiph.org's implementation of the Ogg container along with the Speex, Theora, FLAC and Vorbis codecs for QuickTime...
. Because tag editing and album art is done within iTunes and not QuickTime, these features will not work with these QuickTime components. As of Snow Leopard, iTunes 9 (Mac) will play HE-AAC / AAC+ internet streams. The latest version of iTunes (Win/Mac) supports importing audio CDs with the default iTunes standard file format of AAC at 256 kbit/s, but users can choose from 16 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s constant bit rates (CBR) in either AAC or MP3.
Importing of audio CDs into MP3 or AAC formats can also be accomplished using variable bitrate
Variable bitrate
Variable bitrate is a term used in telecommunications and computing that relates to the bitrate used in sound or video encoding. As opposed to constant bitrate , VBR files vary the amount of output data per time segment...
(VBR) encoding. However, a double-blind experiment conducted in January 2004 of six MP3 encoders noted that the iTunes encoder came last, in that the quality of the files produced by iTunes was below par. It was stated in the final results that these tests only covered VBR encodings, thus iTunes might have performed better with a constant bitrate
Constant bitrate
Constant bitrate is a term used in telecommunications, relating to the quality of service. Compare with variable bitrate.When referring to codecs, constant bit rate encoding means that the rate at which a codec's output data should be consumed is constant...
(CBR). In a follow-up test performed in October, 2008, iTunes' results were similar to those of the four other MP3 encoders being compared.
The Windows version of iTunes can automatically transcode DRM-free WMA
Windows Media Audio
Windows Media Audio is an audio data compression technology developed by Microsoft. The name can be used to refer to its audio file format or its audio codecs. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. WMA consists of four distinct codecs...
(including version 9) files to other audio formats, but does not support playback of WMA files and will not transcode DRM protected WMA files. Telestream, Inc.
Telestream
Telestream, Inc. is a privately held provider of software and hardware products for video capture, encoding, transcoding, and network-based delivery. Products include desktop components, screencasting, video streaming, cross-platform encoding software and transcoding applications to automate...
provides free codecs for Mac users of QuickTime to enable playback of unprotected Windows Media files. These codecs are recommended by Microsoft.
In addition to importing CDs into your iTunes library, users can also import non Apple mp3 files from Amazon.com
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...
and other sources. This can be accomplished by right clicking on the file, selecting open with, and then selecting iTunes. The user can also drag your file into the open iTunes window. The Amazon program will automatically import your mp3 files to their iTunes library.
File metadata
For MP3 files, iTunes writes tags in ID3v2.2 using UCS-2 encoding by default, but converting them to ID3v2.3 (UCS-2 encoding) and ID3v2.4 (which uses UTF-8 encoding) is possible via its "Advanced" > "Convert ID3 Tags" toolbar menu. If both ID3v2.x and ID3v1.x tags are in a file, iTunes ignores the ID3v1.x tags.Advanced Audio Coding and Apple Lossless files support Unicode metadata, stored in the MPEG-4 Part 14 container as so-called "atoms". The QuickTime plugin that supports the OGG container format has no support for tag editing or album art.
iTunes uses the Gracenote
Gracenote
Gracenote, Inc., formerly called CDDB , is a company that maintains and licenses an Internet-accessible database containing information about the contents of audio compact discs and vinyl records. It provides software and metadata to businesses that enable their customers to manage and search...
interactive audio CD database to provide track name listings for audio CDs. The service can be set to activate when a CD is inserted into the computer and an Internet connection is available. Track names for albums imported to iTunes while not connected to the Internet can be obtained during a later connection, by a manual procedure. For any album loaded into iTunes for which there is not an existing Gracenote track listing, the user can choose to submit track name data to Gracenote.
Information is written down in columns, the information being the number of plays, the date last played, the genre of the music, the album, the composer, the number and the name of the song, but if a song cannot be found on Gracenote iTunes will leave the spaces empty, except the name of the song and the information relating to the plays. These "mystery songs" have been frequently removed from playlists by iTunes users, because they know little about the songs.
Genius
The Genius feature, introduced in iTunes 8, automatically generatesRecommendation system
Recommender systems, recommendation systems, recommendation engines, recommendation frameworks, recommendation platforms or simply recommender form or work from a specific type of information filtering system technique that attempts to recommend information items Recommender systems, recommendation...
a playlist of songs from the user's library which are similar to the selected song. Genius playlists are created by the ratings system and collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering is the process of filtering for information or patterns using techniques involving collaboration among multiple agents, viewpoints, data sources, etc. Applications of collaborative filtering typically involve very large data sets...
. An iTunes Store
ITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
account is required because information about the user's library must first be sent anonymously
Anonymity
Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...
to Apple's database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
. Algorithm
Algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...
s determine which songs to play based on other users' libraries, and Genius becomes more intelligent given a larger data set
Data set
A data set is a collection of data, usually presented in tabular form. Each column represents a particular variable. Each row corresponds to a given member of the data set in question. Its values for each of the variables, such as height and weight of an object or values of random numbers. Each...
. The resulting Genius playlist can contain 25, 50, 75, or 100 songs and can be refreshed for new results or saved. The iTunes Sidebar recommends selections for purchase from the iTunes Store based on the selected library track. Once Genius becomes active in iTunes, it can be used on current generations of the iPod Classic, iPod Nano, iPod Touch or the iPhone. iTunes 9 added Genius Mixes, where the Genius software finds similar music and automatically puts them into mixes.
iTunes Genius creates playlists from the user's existing iTunes library based on the song they have selected, the Genius Mixes create playlists based on the genre or theme of the theme of the music in their library, and it suggests new music at the iTunes store based on the music they like. iTunes Genius takes the following into account when creating a playlist: what songs they have in their library, the play counts of the songs, and the star ratings of the songs. The Genius playlists also considers what songs will sound good in a specific order whereas the Mixes create playlists based on genre rather than on a song selected by the user. The Genius feature can also either be hidden or turned off.
Library sharing
One way of sharing a library is over the network, known as network sharing. A user's iTunes Library can be shared over a local network using the closed, proprietary Digital Audio Access ProtocolDigital Audio Access Protocol
The Digital Audio Access Protocol is the proprietary protocol introduced by Apple in its iTunes software to share media across a local network....
(DAAP), created by Apple for this purpose. DAAP relies on the Bonjour
Bonjour (software)
In computing, Bonjour is Apple Inc.'s trade name for its implementation of Zeroconf, a group of technologies that includes service discovery, address assignment, and name resolution...
network service discovery framework, Apple's implementation of the Zeroconf open network standard. Apple has not made the DAAP specification available to the general public, only to third-party licensees such as Roku
Roku
Roku , is an American, privately held, consumer electronics company that sells home digital media products. The Company is based in Saratoga, California.- Company profile and products :...
. However, the protocol has been reverse-engineered
Reverse engineering
Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object, or system through analysis of its structure, function, and operation...
and is now used to stream audio from non-Apple software (mainly on the Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
platform).
DAAP allows shared lists of songs within the same subnet
Subnetwork
A subnetwork, or subnet, is a logically visible subdivision of an IP network. The practice of dividing a network into subnetworks is called subnetting....
to be automatically detected. When a song is shared, iTunes can stream the song but won't save it on the local hard drive, in order to prevent unauthorized copying. Songs in Protected AAC
FairPlay
FairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...
format can also be accessed, but authentication is required. A maximum of five users may connect to a single user every 24 hours. The multiple, alternate "View" options normally available to iTunes users including "Cover Flow" are disabled when viewing a shared library over a network.
Library sharing was first introduced with iTunes 4.0, where users could freely access shared music anywhere over the Internet, in addition to one's own subnet, by specifying IP address
IP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
es of remote shared song libraries. Apple quickly removed this feature with version 4.0.1, claiming that users were violating the End User License Agreement
Software license agreement
A software license agreement is a contract between the "licensor" and purchaser of the right to use software. The license may define ways under which the copy can be used, in addition to the automatic rights of the buyer including the first sale doctrine and .Many form contracts are only contained...
.
With the release of iTunes 7.0, Apple changed their implementation of DAAP. This change prevents any third-party client, such as a computer running Linux, a modified Xbox
Xbox
The Xbox is a sixth-generation video game console manufactured by Microsoft. It was released on November 15, 2001 in North America, February 22, 2002 in Japan, and March 14, 2002 in Australia and Europe and is the predecessor to the Xbox 360. It was Microsoft's first foray into the gaming console...
, or any computer without iTunes installed, from connecting to a remote iTunes repository. iTunes will still connect as a client to other iTunes servers and to third-party servers.
iTunes libraries can also be shared using the “Home Share” option. This option enables users to share both video and audio files through the application. This allows users to also look for items that they don’t already have. Like network sharing, it allows users to share over the same network to up to five computers. The media can then be transferred to any type of iPod or iPad. To set up home sharing, the two computers being used must be on the same network as well as set up using the same Apple ID
Apple ID
Apple ID is an authentication system that Apple Inc. introduced for many of its products, such as iWork, the iTunes Store and the Apple Store. Apple ID serves as an all-in-one account that allows users access to a variety of Apple’s resources...
.
Another option to share music files is to burn CDs. To do this the user needs to create a playlist with the songs the user wishes to share. If the playlist exceeds roughly twenty songs it is likely they will need to make multiple CDs. By inserting a disk into the disk drive a button on the bottom of the window should give the option to burn a disk. The files are automatically downloaded to the disk and may be uploaded onto another computer or saved as a backup for the user’s computer.
Library viewing modes
The standard song list view displays library files with several detail fields.
Album lists are much the same as the standard list view, only the list is broken up by albums, with the artwork as the header of the list. Album lists were introduced in iTunes 10.0, and although this view allows users to browse content more visually, sorting the list view by name will accordingly break up the library into redundant instances of each album.
Cover Flow was introduced in iTunes 7.0 and it displays the album art as CD covers in a sliding format at the top of the screen. Under the album art is a small list of all the songs in that album. Compilation albums are only shown as a single album cover. If there is no album artwork, iTunes will display the default music note pictures.
Grid View is similar to Cover Flow, displaying the user's cover art in a grid rather than a side-scrolling format. While using this view mode, music can be grouped into album, artist, genre, or composer. Grid View was introduced in iTunes 8.0.
iTunes can also sort albums by artist or year, to make its artwork-centered interfaces more intuitive.
Playlists
In addition to static playlist support, version 3 of iTunes introduced support for smart playlistsVirtual folder
In computing, a virtual folder generally denotes an organizing principle for files that is not dependent on location in a hierarchical directory tree...
. Smart playlists are playlists that can be set to automatically filter the library based on a customized list of selection criteria, much like a database
Database
A database is an organized collection of data for one or more purposes, usually in digital form. The data are typically organized to model relevant aspects of reality , in a way that supports processes requiring this information...
query. Multiple criteria can be entered to manage the smart playlist.
Some automatic smart playlists that are added to the user’s library that may include Top 25 Most Played, Recently Played, Recently Added, My Top Rated, Music Videos, Classical Music, Purchased, and 90’s Music. While creating Smart Playlists the user has to choose whether they want the playlist to be based on genre, whether or not the songs have album artwork, date added, etc. and if they want it to contain or not contain certain genres or artists i.e. country music
Country music
Country music is a popular American musical style that began in the rural Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from Western cowboy and folk music...
, songs added in January, or Lady Gaga
Lady GaGa
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta , better known by her stage name Lady Gaga, is an American singer and songwriter. Born and raised in New York City, she primarily studied at the Convent of the Sacred Heart and briefly attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts before withdrawing to...
. The user can also limit the amount of songs you want in the playlist or you can leave it as unlimited. The Live Updating option will automatically update their new playlist as their library changes.
Any user of iTunes can publish a playlist to the iTunes Store with his or her own preferences, which is called an iMix.
Introduced in iTunes 4.5, the "Party Shuffle" playlist was intended as a simple DJing
Disc jockey
A disc jockey, also known as DJ, is a person who selects and plays recorded music for an audience. Originally, "disc" referred to phonograph records, not the later Compact Discs. Today, the term includes all forms of music playback, no matter the medium.There are several types of disc jockeys...
aid. By default, it selects tracks randomly from other playlists or the library, but users can override the automatic selections by deleting tracks (iTunes will choose new ones to replace them) or by adding their own via drag-and-drop
Drag-and-drop
In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop is the action of selecting a virtual object by "grabbing" it and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object...
or contextual menu
Context menu
A context menu is a menu in a graphical user interface that appears upon user interaction, such as a right mouse click or middle click mouse operation...
. This allows a mixture of both preselected and random tracks in the same meta-playlist. The playlist from which Party Shuffle drew could be changed on the fly by the computer user, but doing so will cause all randomly chosen tracks to disappear and be replaced.
Party Shuffle was renamed iTunes DJ in iTunes 8. When iTunes was updated to 8.1, quite a few features were added to iTunes DJ. The free Apple Remote application for the iPhone and iPod Touch was also update at this time that added a new iTunes DJ option in the settings screen when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
network and a new song request feature is enabled in iTunes DJ on the hosts. Along with the song request feature voting on songs in the queue was added, the more votes a song gets the high in the queue it will be and sooner it will be played. Song voting can only be done when song requesting is enabled and in two ways: the first by right clicking on a song in the iTunes DJ queue on the hosts computer in iTunes, the second is in the Remote application ether connected with the iTunes DJ option by a guest or by the host in the full playlist section. When song requesting is enabled a customizable welcome message is displayed below the host's shared library name in the button used to connect to iTunes DJ.
Playlists can be played randomly
Randomness
Randomness has somewhat differing meanings as used in various fields. It also has common meanings which are connected to the notion of predictability of events....
or sequentially
Sequence
In mathematics, a sequence is an ordered list of objects . Like a set, it contains members , and the number of terms is called the length of the sequence. Unlike a set, order matters, and exactly the same elements can appear multiple times at different positions in the sequence...
. The randomness of the shuffle algorithm can be biased for or against playing multiple tracks from the same album or artists in sequence (a feature introduced in iTunes 5.0, and later discontinued in iTunes 8.0). iTunes DJ can also be biased towards selecting tracks with a higher star rating.
Apps
The App section on iTunes keeps track of all of the apps the user has downloaded or purchased. It also organizes their apps by genre and there is another tab that lets the user see all of their apps. It also informs the user when they have updates available for their apps.Sound processing
iTunes includes sound processing features, such as equalizationEqualization
Equalization, is the process of adjusting the balance between frequency components within an electronic signal. The most well known use of equalization is in sound recording and reproduction but there are many other applications in electronics and telecommunications. The circuit or equipment used...
, "sound enhancement" and crossfade. There is also a feature called "Sound Check" which automatically adjusts the playback volume of all songs in the library to the same level; this is usually called volume leveling or audio normalization
Audio normalization
Audio normalization is the application of a constant amount of gain to an audio recording in order to bring the average or peak amplitude to a target level ....
. Like "sound enhancement" and crossfade, this can be turned on in the 'Playback' section of iTunes' preferences.
Television Shows
In October of 2005 the iTunes store began to offer the option of downloading television shows. iTunes offers the option of buying individual episodes of TV shows for $1.99 in standard definition or $2.99 in High DefinitionHigh-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
. The high definition feature on TV shows was added in July of 2008. iTunes also offers the ability to buy a season pass for television shows. This allows viewers to buy an entire season that automatically downloads new episodes around twenty-four hours after they air. In the iTunes library, these shows are then categorized by season of the particular show. iTunes also gives the option of ordering shows based on: series, genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
, or whether or not the episodes are unwatched. In fall of 2010 iTunes offered TV show rental options, but as of August 2011 this option is no longer offered.
Movies
In September of 2006 iTunes progressed to selling full-length films. This entails downloading movies from the iTunes store. The prices for these range from: $9.99, $14.99 if it is a new release, and $19.99 if it is in High DefinitionHigh-definition video
High-definition video or HD video refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition video, and most commonly involves display resolutions of 1,280×720 pixels or 1,920×1,080 pixels...
. iTunes also gives the option of renting movies, which began in January of 2008. The price for renting
Renting
Renting is an agreement where a payment is made for the temporary use of a good, service or property owned by another. A gross lease is when the tenant pays a flat rental amount and the landlord pays for all property charges regularly incurred by the ownership from landowners...
a movie can range from $0.99 if the movie is on sale, $3.99, and $4.99 if the rental is HD. Once a rental is downloaded the viewer has thirty days to watch the movie before it expires. Once the viewer begins to watch the movie he/she has twenty-four hours to finish the movie before it expires. Movies can be organized in the iTunes library by title, genre
Genre
Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...
, or unwatched.
Video support
On May 9, 2005, video support was introduced to iTunes with the release of iTunes 4.8. Users can drag and drop video clips from the computer into the iTunes Library for cataloguing and organization. They can be viewed in a small frame in the main iTunes display, in a separate window, or fullscreen. Before version 7 provided separate libraries for media types, videos were only distinguished from audio in the Library by a small icon resembling a TV screen and grouped with music in the library, organized by the same musical categories (such as "album" and "composer").On October 12, 2005, Apple introduced iTunes 6.0, which added support for purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store. The iTunes Music Store initially offered a selection of thousands of Music Videos and five TV
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
shows, including most notably the ABC network's Lost
Lost (TV series)
Lost is an American television series that originally aired on ABC from September 22, 2004 to May 23, 2010, consisting of six seasons. Lost is a drama series that follows the survivors of the crash of a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney and Los Angeles, on a mysterious tropical island...
and Desperate Housewives
Desperate Housewives
Desperate Housewives is an American television comedy-drama series created by Marc Cherry and produced by ABC Studios and Cherry Productions. Executive producer Cherry serves as Showrunner. Other executive producers since the fourth season include Marc Cherry, Bob Daily, George W...
. Disney Channel
Disney Channel
Disney Channel is an American basic cable and satellite television network, owned by the Disney-ABC Television Group division of The Walt Disney Company. It is under the direction of Disney-ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney. The channel's headquarters is located on West Alameda Ave. in...
shows (The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and That's So Raven
That's So Raven
That's So Raven is an American cable television teen sitcom/fantasy series. The show premiered on the Disney Channel on January 17, 2003, and ended on November 10, 2007. The show spawned Disney Channel's first spin-off series: Cory in the House...
) were also offered 24 hours after airing, as well as episode packs from past seasons. Since then, the collection has expanded to include content from numerous television networks. The iTunes Music Store also gives the ability to view Apple's large collection of film trailers.
As of September 5, 2006, the iTunes Store offers over 550 television shows for download. Additionally, a catalog of 75 feature-length films from Disney-owned studios was introduced. As of April 11, 2007, over 500 feature-length films are available through iTunes.
Originally, films and TV shows were only available to U.S. customers, with the only video content available to non-U.S. customers being music videos and Pixar's short films. This feature is being extended to other countries as licensing issues are resolved.
Video content available from the store used to be encoded as 540 kbit/s Protected MPEG-4
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a method of defining compression of audio and visual digital data. It was introduced in late 1998 and designated a standard for a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group under the formal standard ISO/IEC...
video (H.264
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
) with an approximately 128 kbit/s AAC audio track. Many videos and video podcasts currently require the latest version of QuickTime, QuickTime 7, which is incompatible with older versions of Mac OS (only v10.3.9 and later are supported). On September 12, 2006, the resolution of video content sold on the iTunes Store was increased from 320×240 (QVGA) to 640×480 (VGA
Video Graphics Array
Video Graphics Array refers specifically to the display hardware first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, but through its widespread adoption has also come to mean either an analog computer display standard, the 15-pin D-subminiature VGA connector or the 640×480 resolution...
). The higher resolution video content is encoded as 1.5 Mbit/s (minimum) Protected MPEG-4
MPEG-4
MPEG-4 is a method of defining compression of audio and visual digital data. It was introduced in late 1998 and designated a standard for a group of audio and video coding formats and related technology agreed upon by the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group under the formal standard ISO/IEC...
video (H.264
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...
) with a minimum 128 kbit/s AAC audio track.
Books / PDF support
In February 2010, Apple announced the release of the iPad, and along with it a new app for it called iBooksIBooks
iBooks is an e-book application by Apple Inc. It was announced in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. At that time, it was described by Apple as being available only in the United States...
. The application performs two functions. The first function is as a direct link to the iTunes book store, called eponymously iBooks, which can be accessed on iOS devices and computers (Mac or PC). The second was as a storage place for downloaded books (whether free or purchased) from the iBooks store. The format of books from the Apple store (and the only one users could use with iBooks, until PDF functionality was added later) is ePub
EPUB
EPUB is a free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum...
.
Additional functions were later added in mid-2010 to include annotations and placeholder/bookmarks in any book being read. Also PDF documents were able to be added, and were stored under their own tab in a user's iBooks library, with the same functionality. The iBooks app for the other two iOS devices (iPhone and iPod Touch) was released when iOS 4 was distributed shortly before the release of the iPhone 4.
One current limitation of books (though not PDF documents) is that they can only be read using the app on any iOS device and cannot be read inside iTunes on a user's Mac or PC. PDF documents can be read using Preview or any other PDF reader/editor application the user has on their machine.
iTunes in the Cloud
On June 7, 2011, iTunes in the Cloud was debuted as part of iTunes 10.3.1. The free feature allows for the wireless synchronization of iTunes Store purchases across multiple devices. This was announced alongside the forthcoming iCloudICloud
iCloud is a cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple Inc. announced on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference . The service allows users to store data such as music files on remote computer servers for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and...
service, which would synchronize non-iTunes-purchased media across multiple devices.
iTunes Store
Version 4 of iTunes introduced the iTunes StoreITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
, then named the iTunes Music Store, from which iTunes users can buy and download songs for use on a limited number of computers and an unlimited number of iPods. In previous years, purchased music from the iTunes Store were copy protected with Apple's FairPlay
FairPlay
FairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...
digital rights management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
(DRM) system which allows protected songs to be played on up to five computers at one time, as well as unlimited devices (iPod, AppleTV, etc.). DRM protected songs cannot be played on computers not authorized to the purchaser's iTunes account. At the 2009 Macworld Conference & Expo
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
, it was announced that the iTunes Music Store would be DRM-free, with all songs digital rights management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
(DRM)-free by April 2009.
Apple also announced changes in their price tier. They announced that songs will now cost $0.69, $0.99, or $1.29, but did not elaborate on how they will be priced. Observers expected new hits to be $1.29 while older songs will be the cheaper $0.99 or $0.69 tier, however many record labels have listed whole catalogs by artists with nothing but $1.29 songs, taking advantage of the price option. Due to this, there are very few songs in the iTunes store with a $0.69 price tag.
In the years since, film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
s, television program
Television program
A television program , also called television show, is a segment of content which is intended to be broadcast on television. It may be a one-time production or part of a periodically recurring series...
s, music video
Music video
A music video or song video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings...
s, podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
s, and the App Store (for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad) have been added to iTunes' extensive store catalog.
On January 6, 2009, Phil Schiller
Philip W. Schiller
Philip W. Schiller is the senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple Inc. He is a prominent figure in Apple's public presentations. He aids Apple CEO Tim Cook and has been a member of the company's executive leadership team since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.-Early life:Schiller...
announced in his Macworld
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
2009 keynote speech that over 6 billion songs had been downloaded since the service first launched on April 28, 2003, making it the largest online music store
Online music store
An online music store is an online business which sells audio files, usually music, on a per-song and/or subscription basis. It may be differentiated from music streaming services in that the music store offers the actual music file, while streaming services offer partial or full listening without...
in the world.
At the previous Macworld Expo 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stated that the service had set a new single day record of 20 million songs on December 25, 2007. He also announced that the iTunes Store will offer over 1,000 movies for rental by the end of February. The iTunes movie catalog includes content from 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
, Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
, Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures is an American film studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Pictures and Television, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios and the main production company for live-action feature films within the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, based at the Walt Disney...
, Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...
, Universal Studios
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
, and Sony Pictures Entertainment
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc. is the television and film production/distribution unit of Japanese multinational technology and media conglomerate Sony...
. These movies will also be transferable to all 6th generation iPods.
On the February 24, 2010, Apple announced that over 10 billion tracks had been downloaded from the iTunes store.
As of Tuesday, November 16, 2010, Beatles fans could download their entire catalog digitally via iTunes. Artists whose music remains largely unavailable include Garth Brooks
Garth Brooks
Troyal Garth Brooks , best known as Garth Brooks, is an American country music artist who helped make country music a worldwide phenomenon. His eponymous first album was released in 1989 and peaked at number 2 in the US country album chart while climbing to number 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart...
, AC/DC
AC/DC
AC/DC are an Australian rock band, formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. Commonly classified as hard rock, they are considered pioneers of heavy metal, though they themselves have always classified their music as simply "rock and roll"...
, Kid Rock
Kid Rock
Robert James "Bob" Ritchie , known by his stage name Kid Rock, is an American singer-songwriter, musician and rapper with five Grammy Awards nominations...
, Tool
Tool (band)
Tool is an American rock band from Los Angeles, California. Formed in 1990, the group's line-up has included drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones, and vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Since 1995, Justin Chancellor has been the band's bassist, replacing their original bassist Paul D'Amour...
, and Bob Seger
Bob Seger
Robert Clark "Bob" Seger is an American rock and roll singer-songwriter, guitarist and pianist.As a locally successful Detroit-area artist, he performed and recorded as Bob Seger and the Last Heard and Bob Seger System throughout the 1960s...
. Def Leppard
Def Leppard
Def Leppard are an English rock band formed in 1977 in Sheffield as part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement. Since 1992, the band have consisted of Joe Elliott , Rick Savage , Rick Allen , Phil Collen , and Vivian Campbell...
albums are no longer available through iTunes.
iTunes U
On May 30, 2007, Apple announced the launch of "iTunes U" via its digital content Store iTunes which delivers university lectures through a format called iTunesU. The service was created to manage, distribute, and control access to educational audio and video content for students in a college or university. Member institutions have the opportunity to have their own iTunes U site, which facilitates searching for material. The online service is free for uploading or downloading these documents. iTunes U includes lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports, and campus tours provided by many colleges and universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand.Right around the end of 2009/start of 2010, new members' institutions no longer have the capability to upload content to Apple's servers. Any member institutions before that are grandfathered in.
iTunes U has collected materials from a variety of locations around the world, including colleges, universities, museums, libraries and other cultural institutions of educational value. There are currently more than 75,000 files available for download. The Open University in the UK set the record for the most downloads as of October 3rd, 2011 having reached 40 million downloads.
In late August 2010, iTunes U surpassed 300 million downloads from more than 800 institutions.
Podcasting
Users can subscribe to any podcast by entering its RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
feed URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
, but also by browsing the podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...
directory within iTunes Music Store. The front page of this displays high-profile podcasts from commercial broadcasters and independent podcasters and allows searching by category or popularity. Once subscribed, the podcast can be set to download manually, or automatically — and as with other audio, content can be listened to directly or synced to a portable hardware device like an MP3 player.
The addition of podcasting functionality to such a widespread audio application like iTunes greatly helped podcasting enter the mainstream. Within days after iTunes 4.9 was released, podcasters were reporting that the number of downloads of their audio files had tripled, sometimes even quadrupled, and iTunes is considered the dominant podcast client.
Managing podcasts on an iPod
iTunes offers the ability to create "Smart Playlists" that can be used to control which podcasts are in the playlist, using multiple criteria such as date, number of times listened to, type, etc. It is also possible to set up iTunes so that only certain playlists will be synced with the iPod. By using a combination of the two techniques, it is possible to control exactly which music and/or podcasts will be transferred to the iPod. A user may configure a smart playlist to display only podcasts less than two weeks old or removing any podcast that the iPod user has already listened to. This smart playlist is synced with the iPod every time the iPod is plugged into the PC, ensuring that the user does not have to listen to the same show more than once. Once a podcast has been listened to, it will be removed from this list as soon as the iPod is synced with the PC. There are many criteria which can control what goes in a smart playlist, such as "name", "artist", "category", "grouping", "kind", "last played", "play count", "rating", "last skipped", and "playlist" and these can be combined with functions such as "equals", "is greater than", "is less than", "contains", "does not contain", "is true", "is false", "is", "is not", "starts with", "ends with", "is in the range", "is before", and "is after". As a result, it is possible to control exactly which podcasts are transferred to the iPod.Video podcasting
Version 6 of iTunes introduced official support for video podcastVideo podcast
Video podcast is a term used for the online delivery of video on demand video clip content via Atom or RSS enclosures...
ing, although video and RSS
RSS
-Mathematics:* Root-sum-square, the square root of the sum of the squares of the elements of a data set* Residual sum of squares in statistics-Technology:* RSS , "Really Simple Syndication" or "Rich Site Summary", a family of web feed formats...
support was already unofficially there in version 4.9.
Users can subscribe to RSS feeds through the iTunes Store or by directly entering the feed URL
Uniform Resource Locator
In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....
. Video podcasts can contain downloadable video files (in MOV
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
, MP4
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...
, M4V
MPEG-4 Part 14
MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...
, or MPG
MPEG-1
MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...
format), but also streaming sources and even IPTV
IPTV
Internet Protocol television is a system through which television services are delivered using the Internet protocol suite over a packet-switched network such as the Internet, instead of being delivered through traditional terrestrial, satellite signal, and cable television formats.IPTV services...
.
Downloadable files can be synchronized to a video-capable iPod, or downloadable files and streams can be shown in Front Row.
Synchronizing iPod and other MP3 players
iTunes 2 was the first version of the software to be able to sync with an iPod. iTunes can automatically synchronizeSynchronization
Synchronization is timekeeping which requires the coordination of events to operate a system in unison. The familiar conductor of an orchestra serves to keep the orchestra in time....
its music and video library with an iPod or iPhone every time it is connected. New songs and playlists are automatically copied to the iPod, and songs and playlists that have been deleted from the library on the host computer are also deleted from the iPod
IPod
iPod is a line of portable media players created and marketed by Apple Inc. The product line-up currently consists of the hard drive-based iPod Classic, the touchscreen iPod Touch, the compact iPod Nano, and the ultra-compact iPod Shuffle...
. Ratings awarded to songs on the iPod will sync back to the iTunes library and audiobooks will also remember the current playback position.
Automatic synchronization can be turned off in favor of manually copying individual songs or complete playlists. iTunes supports copying music to an iPod; however, only music and videos purchased from the iTunes store can be transferred from the iPod back to iTunes. This functionality was added after third-party software was written which allowed users to copy all content back to their computer. It is also possible to copy from the iPod using ordinary Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...
command line tools, or by enabling hidden file viewing in Windows Explorer
Windows Explorer
This article is about the Windows file system browser. For the similarly named web browser, see Internet ExplorerWindows Explorer is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface...
, then copying music from the iPod drive to a local disk for backup. Doing this can be confusing because the files are arranged in such a way that their folders and (depending on iPod and iTunes versions) file names are seemingly picked at random as they are put on the iPod. It is worth noting, however, that the files (along with their embedded title and artist information) remain unchanged. It is therefore less confusing to let iTunes reimport, reorganize, and rename all of the files after they are backed up. When music or video purchased through the iTunes Store is copied from an iPod, it will only play on computers that are authorized with the account that was used to purchase them. Several third party utilities can remove this limitation by stripping iTunes DRM
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
from protected files. The legality of using such software in the United States is currently the subject of active debate.
When an iPod is connected that does not contain enough free space to sync the entire iTunes music library, a playlist will be created and given a name matching that of the connected iPod. This playlist can then be modified to the user's preference in song selection to fill the available space.
The Mac OS X version of iTunes can also synchronize with a small number of discontinued digital music players, while the Windows version supports only the iPod. The synchronization is limited, however, in that the iPod is the only digital music player compatible with Apple's proprietary FairPlay
FairPlay
FairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...
digital rights management technology, and thus most music purchased through the iTunes Store (before the introduction of iTunes Plus) can only be played on an iPod. The remaining ability to synchronize with a limited number of legacy digital music players is likely a remnant of Apple's history in the music industry: iTunes was released in January 2001, nine months prior to the iPod's unveiling, and slightly more than two years before the introduction of the iTunes Music Store. When iTunes was released, compatibility with other music players was critical. Since iPod has now become the dominant digital music player, Apple no longer considers that compatibility to be a necessity.
In June 2009, Palm Inc released the Palm Pre
Palm Pre
The Palm Pre is a multimedia smartphone designed and marketed by Palm with a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard. The smartphone was the first to use Palm's Linux based mobile operating system, webOS...
, which has the ability to sync with both the Windows and Mac OS X version of iTunes by identifying itself to iTunes as an iPod. The Pre is able to sync only DRM-free music. However, on July 14, 2009, Apple released iTunes version 8.2.1, which prevented the Palm Pre from syncing directly with iTunes. Then on July 23, 2009, Palm Inc released WebOS 1.1, re-enabling syncing between iTunes 8.2.1 and the Palm Pre
Palm Pre
The Palm Pre is a multimedia smartphone designed and marketed by Palm with a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard. The smartphone was the first to use Palm's Linux based mobile operating system, webOS...
. But Apple again prevented Palm Pre syncing with the release of iTunes 9.
A number of unsupported third-party applications have been created to assist synchronization of songs with any music player that can be mounted as an external drive. Though iTunes is the only official method for synchronizing with the iPod, there are other applications available that allow the iPod to sync with other software players.
As of iTunes 7, purchased music can be copied from the iPod onto the computer. The computer must be authorized by that iTunes account. iTunes currently allows up to 5 computers to be authorized on one account. To de-authorize and register new computers thereafter, all accounts must be deleted, followed by registering the live one. This can be done only once a year.
iTunes does not feature any transfer facility for importing music files between computers directly. This is being addressed in September 2011 by iCloud
ICloud
iCloud is a cloud storage and cloud computing service from Apple Inc. announced on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference . The service allows users to store data such as music files on remote computer servers for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and...
, but only tracks that Apple sell in their iTunes Store are available (in 256 kbit/s AAC format) without uploading them to iCloud first. Any other tracks, that are either not available in the Store or that the user wants in different encoding can be uploaded to the iCloud with 5 GB of free space and the, as yet undisclosed, potential to purchase more storage. Though what audio formats will be accepted for upload has not been confirmed.
iTunes managed content can also be accessed via the Apple TV set-top box. Files in the iTunes library can either be synchronized with the Apple TV unit, which results in their being copied to the Apple TV's hard drive (for the first generation Apple TV), or streamed
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
to the Apple TV directly from a Macintosh or PC. Apple TV does not require the use of iTunes (as of the 'Take Two' software update) and can now import files from the iTunes Store
ITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
directly over the internet.
As of iTunes 9.1, it is possible to sync the iPad to iTunes, allowing music, movies, applications and iBooks
IBooks
iBooks is an e-book application by Apple Inc. It was announced in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. At that time, it was described by Apple as being available only in the United States...
to be synced to the iPad. As of 10.5, iTunes supports syncing the iPhone using both Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
and Bluetooth
Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a proprietary open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks with high levels of security...
.
iPhone activation
Beginning with the introduction of the original iPhone, iTunes can activate their phone through their mobile carrier. The original plan for the iPhone 3G was to have the carrier authenticate it at the point of sale, either through iTunes or through the carrier's own activation interface. However, a worldwide crash of iTunes' authentication servers on July 11, 2008, the day that the iPhone 3G was released, caused major issues. In some cases, AT&T and Apple Store employees told iPhone buyers to attempt to activate it at home. Also affected were original iPhone users attempting to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware. UK Apple, O2 and Carphone Warehouse stores were further impacted, as carrier O2's contract processing servers (known as Gateway) could not handle the amount of new contracts and upgrades happening on launch day. Some stores reverted to hand written contracts, while others held stock. With the launch of the iPhone 3GSIPhone 3GS
-Camera:The iPhone 3GS features an improved 3 megapixel camera manufactured by OmniVision. In addition to the higher megapixel count, it also features auto-focus, auto white balance and auto macro and is capable of capturing VGA video...
on June 19, 2009, iTunes at home activation was available for people purchasing their iPhone from AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
and Apple. This allowed them to activate their new iPhone 3G/iPhone 3GS at home when they arrived.
Integration with other applications
In Mac OS X, iTunes is tightly integrated with Apple's iWorkIWork
iWork is an office suite of desktop applications created by Apple for the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. The first version of iWork, iWork '05, was released in 2005. The suite originally bundled Keynote, a presentation program which had previously been sold as a standalone application, and...
and iLife
ILife
iLife is a suite of software applications developed by Apple for organizing, editing, and publishing photos, movies, and music. The suite comprises five applications: iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb, all of which run on the Mac OS X operating system....
suites. These applications can access the iTunes Library directly, allowing access to the playlists and songs stored within (including encrypted music purchased from the iTunes Store). Music files from iTunes can be embedded directly into Pages
Pages
Pages is a word processor and page layout application developed by Apple. It is part of the iWork productivity suite and runs on the Mac OS X & iOS operating systems. The first version of Pages was announced on January 11, 2005, and was released one month later. The most recent Macintosh version,...
documents and can supply the score for iDVD, iMovie, and Keynote productions. iTunes is also integrated with Front Row, compiling its information from the user's iTunes and iPhoto libraries. In addition, any song exported from GarageBand
GarageBand
GarageBand is a software application for Mac OS X and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. It is developed by Apple Inc. as a part of the iLife software package on Mac OS X.-Audio recording:...
, Apple's basic music-making application, is automatically added to the user's iTunes music library. iTunes's Artwork.saver is a screen saver included in Mac OS X v10.4
Mac OS X v10.4
Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger is the fifth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Tiger was released to the public on 29 April 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X Panther , which had been released 18 months earlier...
that displays album artwork as a screen saver. iTunes widget is a Dashboard Widget that controls iTunes.
In Windows, Adobe Photoshop Elements can connect to iTunes in order to stream its photo library on Apple TV.
Moreover, iTunes can be scripted, using AppleScript
AppleScript
AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. and built into Macintosh operating systems since System 7. The term "AppleScript" may refer to the scripting system itself, or to particular scripts that are written in the AppleScript language....
for Mac OS X or using the Apple-provided SDK for iTunes on Windows allowing many other applications to integrate themselves into iTunes. A common use is to relay the title and artist of what the user is currently listening to into their instant messenger, or social networking service
Social network service
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social...
. LimeWire
LimeWire
LimeWire is a free peer-to-peer file sharing client program that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and other operating systems supported by the Java software platform. LimeWire uses the gnutella network as well as the BitTorrent protocol. A free software version and a purchasable "enhanced"...
, which closed on October 26, 2010, was a peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
program that provided integration with iTunes, adding songs from LimeWire directly to your iTunes library without sharing your iTunes purchased songs.
In addition, visualizer plugins and device plugins are supported. Visualizer plugins allow developers to create music-driven visual displays and free software development kits are available for Mac and Windows can be from Apple.
Device plugins allow support for additional music player devices, but the API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
s is only licensed to authentic OEM
Original Equipment Manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, manufactures products or components that are purchased by a company and retailed under that purchasing company's brand name. OEM refers to the company that originally manufactured the product. When referring to automotive parts, OEM designates a...
s who sign a non-disclosure agreement
Non-disclosure agreement
A non-disclosure agreement , also known as a confidentiality agreement , confidential disclosure agreement , proprietary information agreement , or secrecy agreement, is a legal contract between at least two parties that outlines confidential material, knowledge, or information that the parties...
.
Apple Inc. also offers a free iOS application that allows the user to remotely control their iTunes library or Apple TV over DACP
Digital Audio Control Protocol
Digital Audio Control Protocol is a protocol used by the Apple Remote application on iOS mobile devices to control iTunes running on a remote computer....
. This can be downloaded from iTunes itself or directly from one's iOS device. It is only compatible with iOS v2.0 and above. In terms of usage, it is very similar to the iPod application that is included with all iPhones, with the only difference is the lack of Cover Flow support.
Though iTunes itself can be installed where the user desires, ancillary applications such as Bonjour which are part of the iTunes installation cannot be placed in a user-desired directory.
Printing
To compensate for the lack of a physical CD, iTunes can print custom-made jewel case inserts as well as song lists and album lists.After burning a CD from a playlist, one can select that playlist and bring up a dialog box with several print options. The user can choose to print either a single album cover (for purchased iTunes albums) or a compilation cover (for user-created playlists). iTunes then automatically sets up a template with art on one side and track titles on the other.
iMix
An iMix is a free user-created playlist published in the iTunes StoreITunes Store
The iTunes Store is a software-based online digital media store operated by Apple. Opening as the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with over 200,000 items to purchase, it is, as of April 2008, the number-one music vendor in the United States...
. iMixes were first introduced in iTunes version 4.5. However, they are limited to 100 songs, must feature content available on the iTunes Store, and are active for one year from their original published date. iMixes are public and searchable by any iTunes user, and can be rated using a five-star system. Users can publish their iTunes iMix to their blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, profile page, or website.
Internet radio
When iTunes was first released, it came with support for the KerbangoKerbango
Kerbango was both a company acquired by 3Com and its lead product. Kerbango was founded in 1998 in Silicon Valley by former executives from Apple Computer and Power Computing Corporation. On June 27, 2000, 3Com announced it was acquiring the Kerbango company in an $80 million deal...
Internet radio
Internet radio
Internet radio is an audio service transmitted via the Internet...
tuner service, giving users a selection of some of the more popular online radio streams
Streaming media
Streaming media is multimedia that is constantly received by and presented to an end-user while being delivered by a streaming provider.The term "presented" is used in this article in a general sense that includes audio or video playback. The name refers to the delivery method of the medium rather...
available. When Kerbango went out of business in 2001, Apple created its own Internet radio service for use with iTunes 2.0 and later. As of February 2008, the iTunes radio service features 1795 "radio stations", mostly in MP3 streaming format. Programming covers many genres of music and talk, including streams from both internet-only sources and traditional radio stations. iTunes also supports the .pls and .m3u stream file formats used by Winamp
Winamp
Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs and Android devices, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features.Winamp...
and other media players.
Since the release of iTunes 7, Apple no longer promotes the Internet radio feature, though it remains in the application. Some third-parties offer iTunes plugins that add additional radio stations.
In addition, users are able to enter additional stream feeds to listen to in their own music libraries. This is done by selecting the menu item "Advanced" > "Open Audio Stream..." or by the hotkey Ctrl-U (PC) or Command-U (Mac).
Ping
Apple revealed a new feature within iTunes 10 on September 1, 2010 called 'Ping', which is intended to bring a social music networking component to users of iTunes. It is not available in all countries yet. Ping can be connected to user's Twitter accounts. Ping connects user accounts of iTunes, allowing iTunes users to share and recommend music to one another.Ping lets users follow artists to see the photos and videos they have posted, their tour dates, playlists they have created, and their comments on other artists’ albums. Users can create a profile so their friends can see who they are following, what they’re listening to and what concerts they are going to. Ping also shows users top 10 lists of songs and albums among the people they follow. It also gives you artist recommendations to follow based on their library and preference options.
Apple's privacy policy controversy
In June 2010, Apple updated its general privacy policy for the iTunes Store and iOS 4 supported devices, revealing that it could and would collect real-time location-based information on users aged 13 and over.The revised policy states that Apple has the right to share this information with 3rd parties who provide services to the customer, including advertising and promotion services. Apple also states that "it may be necessary" to provide this [real-time] information in response to "requests from public and governmental authorities within or outside your country of residence or if [Apple] determines that for purposes of national security, law enforcement, or other issues of public importance, disclosure is necessary or appropriate.... Additionally, in the event of a reorganization, merger, or sale we may transfer any and all personal information we collect to the relevant third party."
The revised policy does not make any distinction between warrant-based and warrantless searches, nor provide what criteria would trigger the sharing of personal real-time information with government entities, nor allow an opt-out for the location-based information.
The revised policy prompted the co-chairs of the Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus of the United States House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
to request that Apple respond to nine basic privacy questions out of concern of possible violation of that country's Federal Communications Act. The Caucus stated it was pleased with Apple's prompt written explanations, and stated they would continue to monitor the issue.
The FinFisher exploit
The TelegraphThe Telegraph
The Telegraph is an Indian daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Kolkata since 1982. It is published by the ABP Group and the newspaper vies with the Times of India for the position of having the widest widest circulation of any newspaper in Eastern India.According to the Audit...
reported in November 2011 that Apple had been aware of a security flaw since 2008, that would let unauthorized third parties to install "updates" to end-user's itunes' software.
They reported that a security writer named Brian Krebs
Brian Krebs
Brian Krebs is an American journalist specializing in cybercrime and computer security. His father worked in the intelligence industry and his mother was a homemaker...
had informed Apple of the vulnerability in 2008.
They reported that the flaw was only closed in November 2011.
They reported that United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
security software firm Gamma International developed a program named FinFisher
FinFisher
FinFisher is security software that has stirred controversy because Gamma International marketed it to government security officials who were told it could be covertly installed on suspects' computers through exploiting security lapses in the update procedures of non-suspect software.Egyptian...
, intended to covertly spy on computer uses, which can be clandestinely installed via bogus updates to itunes' software.
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...
reported Gamma International had advertized the capability to clandestinely install FinFisher by exploiting this itunes' vulnerability.
System requirements
Macintosh hardware- Mac computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 processor
- Intel, PowerPC G5 or 1.0 GHz PowerPC G4 or faster processor is required to play Standard Definition video from the iTunes Store
- 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor is required to play HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras from the iTunes Store
- 512 MB of RAM; 1 GB is required to play HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras
- Screen resolution of 1024×768 or greater; 1280×800 or greater is required to play an iTunes LP or iTunes Extras
- Playing videos also requires at least 16 MB of video RAM
- Broadband Internet connection to use the iTunes Store
- Apple combo drive or SuperDrive to create audio, MP3, or back-up CDs; some non-Apple CD-RW recorders may also work.
- Apple SuperDrive to back up your library to DVDs; some non-Apple DVD-RW drives may also work.
Macintosh software
- Mac OS X version 10.5 or later
- QuickTime 7.6 or later
- Support for HE-AAC requires QuickTime 7.6.4 and Mac OS X version 10.5 or later
- Safari 4.0.3 or later
- 200 MB of available disk space
Windows hardware
- A PC with a 1 GHz Intel or AMD processor
- Intel Pentium D or faster processor is required to play Standard Definition video from the iTunes Store
- 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo or faster processor is required to play HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras from the iTunes Store
- 512 MB of RAM; 1 GB is required to play HD video, an iTunes LP, or iTunes Extras
- Screen resolution of 1024×768 or greater; 1280×800 or greater is required to play an iTunes LP or iTunes Extras
- DirectXDirectXMicrosoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...
9.0-compatible video card with 32 MB of video RAM; 64 MB recommended - QuickTimeQuickTimeQuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
-compatible audio card - Broadband Internet connection to use the iTunes Store
- iTunes-compatible CD or DVD recorder to create audio CDs, MP3 CDs, or back-up CDs or DVDs
Windows software
- 32-bit editions of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (or later), Windows Vista, or Windows 7
- 64-bit editions of Windows Vista or Windows 7 require the iTunes 64-bit installer
- QuickTime 7.6.6 or later is required (included)
- 200 MB of available disk space
- Screen reader support requires Window-EyesWindow-eyesWindow-Eyes is a screen reader for Microsoft Windows, developed by GW Micro. The first version was released in 1995. The latest version of Window-Eyes is 7.2, released in 2010. and version 7.5.1 was realsed on march 14 2011-Features:...
7.1.1 or later.
See also
- AirPlayAirPlayAirPlay is a proprietary protocol stack/suite developed by Apple Inc. that allows wireless streaming of audio, video, and photos, together with related metadata between devices...
- Audio conversion software, List
- Comparison of iPod managersComparison of iPod ManagersThis article is about alternative software applications to manage iPod contents. This includes the transferring of music, photos, and videos between an iPod and a computer....
- Feed aggregators:
- Feed aggregators, comparisonComparison of feed aggregatorsThe following is a comparison of notable RSS feed aggregators. Often e-mail programs and web browsers have the ability to display RSS feeds. They are listed here, too.Many BitTorrent clients support RSS feeds for broadcatching ....
- Feed aggregators, List
- Feed aggregators, comparison
- Distribution Into iTunesDigital distributionOnline distribution, digital distribution, or electronic software distribution is the practice of delivering content without the use of physical media, typically by downloading via the internet directly to a consumer's device. Online distribution bypasses conventional physical distribution media,...
- FairPlayFairPlayFairPlay is a digital rights management technology created by Apple Inc., based on technology created by the company Veridisc. FairPlay is built into the QuickTime multimedia software and used by the iPhone, iPod, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes, and iTunes Store and the App Store. Formerly, all songs in...
- iTunes version historyITunes version historyThe version history of iTunes spans from 2001 to the present and covers the application's evolution and refinement from a simple music player to a control center for many types of media. Support for the iPod and iTunes Store were added in the subsequent versions...
- Media players, comparisonComparison of audio player softwareThe 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...
- Music visualizationMusic visualizationMusic visualization, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music...