What is iTunes?

iTunes is a proprietary digital media player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and video files. The application is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod and other digital media players such as the iPhone and iPad. Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store via the Internet to purchase and download music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, podcasts, feature length films and movie rentals (not available in all countries), and ringtones (only used for iPhone). It is also used to download applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad running iOS 6 or later.

iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. At Apple's September 2009 "Rock and Roll" keynote, iTunes 9 was announced. iTunes's latest version is 12.8.

iTunes is available as a free download for Mac OS X v10.8.5 or later and Windows 7 or later from Apple's website.

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iTunes Features

iTunes includes visualizers. Shown here is a visualizer first delivered with iTunes 8, including black orbs and moving specks of light. iTunes is an application that allows the user to 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 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.

iTunes Store

Mac OS X icon for a restricted AAC file from the iTunes StoreVersion 4 of iTunes introduced the iTunes Music Store from which iTunes users can buy and download songs for use on a limited number of computers. 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, Apple TV, etc). DRM protected songs can not 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.

iTunes - iTunes is a media player, media library, online radio broadcaster, and mobile device management application developed by Apple Inc...