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, 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 2.0 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.

History

The software that was the basis for iTunes was developed by Jeff Robbin and Bill Kincaid as a media player called SoundJam MP, and released by Casady & Greene in 1999. It was purchased by Apple in 2000, given a new user interface and the ability to burn CDs, had its recording feature and skin support removed, and released as iTunes in January 2001. Originally a Mac OS 9-only application, Mac OS X support was added with the release of version 2 nine months later, and Mac OS 9 support was dropped with the release of version 3. In October 2003, with the release of iTunes 4.1, Apple added support for Microsoft's Windows 2000 and Windows XP. iTunes 7.1, introduced in March 2007 added support for Windows Vista, and 7.4 marked the end of Windows 2000 support. iTunes lacked support for 64-bit versions of Windows until the 7.6 update on January 16, 2008. iTunes currently fully works and is supported under any 64-bit version of Windows Vista (although the iTunes executable is still 32-bit), but not the 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Windows Server 2003; though not supported by Apple a workaround has been discovered for both operating systems.