iTunes

iTunes is a media player for organizing and playing music and movies, developed by Apple and distributed for free on macOS and Windows platforms.

iTunes provides access to the iTunes Store, allowing users to buy music, movies, iOS apps and books. One of the interesting features of the player is the Genius function, analyzing the user's library and offering songs and movies in the iTunes Store, based on preferences.

All the mobile applications (free and paid) are placed in the iTunes Store for future downloading, evaluating and commenting by the users. Based on the user’s downloading quantities and the feedback, the score of the application is calculated, where 5 stars is the top rate.

iTunes can be synchronized with the iCloud, allowing you to save music, books and applications in it.

iTunes is compatible with all existing iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV models. The player can be used for streaming media (including HDTV format) and creating a home collection, including both audio and video files, and photos.

Functions

• Navigation in the multimedia library,  search lettering, data presentation in a list of songs or albums, grids, Cover Flow.
• Organization of multimedia library, creation of playlists, smart playlists, folders.
• Genius - an iTunes Store service that creates playlists and mixes from matching songs and gives recommendations based on songs in the iTunes library.
• Editing of songs metadata, such as "author", "composer", "cover", etc.
• Recording and importing tracks from CDs.
• Playing music, movies, podcasts, multi-band equalizer, visualizer, mini-player mode.
• Internet radio.
• Buying tracks in a branded online store.
• Sync with iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.
• Sharing - allows users to open access to the library and listen to music from other libraries on the local network using the DAAP protocol.

Music

By default, iTunes uses AAC music, 256 kbps. It is in this format that all the songs purchased through the iTunes Store go. However, the built-in encoder can also be set to MP3. In this case, for example, songs from CDs can be saved in the MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV formats. The Ogg Vorbis file format is optionally supported, the XiphQT codec can be installed by downloading it from the Xiph.Org website.

Until December 2008, music purchased in the iTunes Store had a built-in security mechanism and could not be recoded into other formats by regular means. But in December 2009, Apple announced the standard iTunes Plus, which removed the copy protection and increased the quality of songs. At the moment, all 6 million tracks in the iTunes Store are converted to iTunes Plus format. Users who previously purchased songs with protection can transfer them to the iTunes Plus format for free.

In 2014, Apple launched a new feature in iTunes AppleMusic. The first three months of subscription are free.