iTunes

I have iPod since it was first released. So I used iTune for a long time. I thought iTune is just music library for iPod but I realized that it is more than just livbrary after I took a tech. trend class. It has much more features than I thought.

iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.The latest version, iTunes 8, was announced at Apple's September 2008 keynote Let's Rock. The application is used 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 music, music videos, television shows, applications, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, feature length films and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and ringtones (available only in the USA). It is also used to download applications for the iPhone and iPod touch as long as they are running the 2.X firmware.
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-based operating systems through Wine, a Windows compatibility layer.
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 order to concentrate sales to Apple's device.
iTunes 8 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 Vorbis and FLAC enclosed in an Ogg container (files using the FLAC 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. 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), and 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 with the default iTunes standard file format of AAC at 128 kbit/s, but users can choose from 16 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s constant bit rates (CBR) in either AAC or MP3.
iTunes is an application that allows the user to manage audio and video on a personal computer. 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 playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record Compact Discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store, download free podcasts, 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 iPhone or iPod.
In the most recent version, iTunes 8.0, the preferences menu was given a complete makeover. The result added very few new options, but instead removed several options that may seem trivial to most users. 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 Music Store. Now these arrows are not removable, except through the direct editing of a preferences file.
Importing of audio CDs into MP3 can also be accomplished using variable bitrate (VBR). 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 may have performed better with a Constant bitrate (CBR).
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.