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iTunes is a computer program made by Apple Computer intended to play, organize and buy music files (it is also a common name for iTunes Music Store). It is compatible with computers running Mac OS X, Windows 2000, or Windows XP operating systems. Earlier versions of iTunes also ran on Mac OS 9. The player has gained a reputation of ease of use and good organization, and has been positioned by Apple as the preferred music player for users using the iPod music player (succeeding Musicmatch Jukebox on Windows). It is freely downloadable from Apple's website and supplied with Mac OS X.
iTunes is largely based on SoundJam MP , a popular commercial MP3 application distributed by the Macintosh software company Casady & Greene. Apple purchased the rights to the SoundJam MP software, as it already employed the programmers who created the program. Although the first release of iTunes was very similar to SoundJam MP; it did however lack some features such as the ability to use interface skins and broadcast audio over the Internet - both of which are still lacking.
Users are able to organize their music into playlists, edit file information, record compact discs, copy files to a digital music player, purchase music on the InternetThis article is about the Internet the extensive, worldwide computer network available to the public. An internet is a more general term for a set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking''. WWW information network structu through its built-in music store, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music as well as encoding music into a number of different audio formats.
'Smart playlists' are playlists that are automatically updated (like a databaseA database is an information set with a regular structure. Any set of information may be called a database. Nevertheless, the term was invented to refer to computerised data, and is used almost exclusively in computing. Sometimes it is used to refer to no query) based on a customized list of selection criteria.
iTunes stores metadataMetadata is data about data. An example is a library catalog card, which contains data about the nature and location of a book: It is data about the data in the book referred to by the card. The content combined with its metadata is often called a content about the audio files in two files which are equal in content, though not in format. The first is a binary file called iTunes 4 Music Library that uses its own music library format, independent of the audio format's tag capabilities (for example the ID3This article is about the metadata format for MP3 files. For information about the machine learning algorithm which produces decision trees, see Inductive Dichotomiser 3 (ID3). ID3 is a tagging format for MP3s. It allows metadata such as the title, artist tag). The second file, called iTunes Music Library.xml, uses XMLXML eXtensible Markup Language is a W3C recommendation for creating special-purpose markup languages. It is a simplified subset of SGML, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured tex format, allowing developers to easily write applications that can access the information (e.g. Apple's own iMovieiMovie is an application, created by Apple Computer as part of their iLife suite of applications for the Macintosh, that allows users to edit their own home movies. iMovie 3 and later versions runs only in Mac OS X. Earlier versions of iMovie (2. 3) ran i or Freshly Squeezed Software's Rock Star [1]).