iTunes

iTunes is a digital media player application, introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001 at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The program is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod digital media players as well as the iPhone. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store via the internet to purchase and download digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films (available only in the USA and Canada), Movie Rentals and Ringtones.

iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X, Windows Vista, and Windows XP from Apple's website. It is also bundled with all Macs, and some HP and Dell computers. Older versions are available for Mac OS 9, OS X 10.0-10.2, and Windows 2000. Although Apple does not produce iTunes for other operating systems, it can be run on Linux through Wine.

iTunes users may choose to view their music and video libraries in one of three ways: as a list, as a list with accompanying album artwork, or as a side-scrolling catalog of album artwork, which bears the marketing name Cover Flow.

The standard list view displays library files with many optional detail fields, including name, artist, album, genre, user rating, play count, and so forth. Item backgrounds alternate between white and a light blue-gray for readability.

The list with accompanying album artwork is much the same, only the list is broken up by albums, with the artwork as a header to the list. Although this 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. Accordingly, as with Cover Flow view, the second view mode is most appropriate for users who sort their libraries by album.

iTunes 7 can currently read, write, and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC, 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 Ogg and FLAC enclosed in an Ogg container (FLAC files are not playable) 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. iTunes currently will not play back HE-AAC/aacPlus audio streams correctly. HE-AAC/aacPlus format files will play back as 22 kHz AAC files (effectively having no high end over 11 kHz). HE-AAC streaming audio (which a number of Internet Radio stations use) will not play back at all. The latest version of iTunes (Win/Mac) supports importing audio CDs, when referring to iTunes standard file format AAC, users can choose to import their CDs in either 128 kbit/s, which used to be the standard importing option or 256 kbit/s. Of course, the 256 kbit/s feature only applies to AAC format.