What is itunes

They can do the same to you. You choose an arbitrary number of songs to go in an arbitrary order, then you can choose to play these songs in the order you chose or you can choose to play them randomly. You can choose to play these songs in the order iTunes organized them or you can choose to play them randomly.

Genius mixes are sets of music files, stored on your computer, which an iTunes algorithm has determined are related.

Often, iTunes names them and organizes them after genre or artist names. One of these which mimics the appearance of a CD jewel box. You cannot edit it or download it permanently using iTunes.

For a fee, you can download a video file to your computer and watch it whenever you like. Some of the advertisements are for films which have already been released.

You can even pick up where you left off on any screen, across all your devices. And for the first time, 4K 2 and Dolby Atmos 3 -supported movies are available on Mac. More than , of the best entertainment, comedy, news, and sports shows are now available on your Mac with Apple Podcasts.

Search for podcasts by title, topic, guest, host, content, and more. Subscribe and be notified as soon as new episodes become available. And in the Listen Now tab, you can easily pick up where you left off across all your devices.

Get help with syncing, updating to a more recent version of iTunes, or with an iTunes Store purchase — and much more. Download earlier versions of iTunes to work with compatible operating systems and hardware.

Songs from the Apple Music catalog cannot be burned to a CD. Apple first began collecting this kind of information -- which the company claims is anonymous and isn't recorded -- when it introduced the MiniStore. The Genius feature is opt-in. You don't have to turn it on if you don't want to. At the iTunes Store, you can find millions of songs, thousands of audiobooks, thousands of music videos, tens of thousands of podcasts, feature films, TV shows, iPad, iPod and iPhone applications, and CD album art.

All you do to get to the store is click a button in the main iTunes screen. You're not going through a Web browser -- the jukebox software is the user interface for the store. Apple has deals with record labels for iTunes-exclusive music tracks from select artists.

In addition to pure content, there are community-type functions like user-published reviews, ratings and playlists, and then there is the pop-culture headshaker that is the "celebrity playlist. She also included three of her own tunes on her list. There's also a podcast dedicated to celebrity playlists if you want to keep up with what the rich and famous listen to.

There's a search box on the main store page where you just enter a keyword, and iTunes returns matching results from all areas of the store. You can also perform a "power search" by song, artist, album, genre or composer. If you enter "Adam Sandler" in the "artist" field and choose "comedy" as the genre, you'll get a list of all of Adam Sandler's songs and albums available on iTunes. If your mother has set up parental controls to limit your access to explicit content, you'll see a lot fewer results than we did.

Apple also includes a link to free content available for iTunes. This can include samples from all the categories we've listed. Sometimes the free content is available for only a limited time so it's a good idea to check this section regularly if you're interested. To set up an iTunes account, you provide a credit card number or PayPal account that you'll use for all of your purchases.

You can also pay using an iTunes Allowance sort of like a debit account, typically set up by parents for their kids or by Music Card or gift certificate. To make a purchase in the iTunes store, all you have to do is click the "Buy" button next to the song, video or app.

Apple will charge your account and the download will begin. If you have to shut down your computer in the middle of your download, the process will continue once you reboot your computer and log into iTunes. It's important to create a backup of your iTunes library. Songs, videos and iPod games not apps can only be downloaded once per purchase. Apps are different -- once you purchase an app, you can download it again for free. You just have to use the same iTunes account as the one used to purchase the app the first time.

Submitting your music to iTunes is not a simple task. You don't just click a button like you do with a podcast. You need to be a company, first of all; you need a UPC code for your album and an ISRC code for each track on it; and you need to be passably good -- Apple reviews the submissions and chucks the bad stuff. Exchanges related to browsing content and sampling songs happens in simple HTTP hypertext transfer protocol through a proxy server, which is a lower level server that sits between your computer and the main iTunes Web servers.

This cuts down on requests sent to the main system architecture. Here's what else we know about the store's technology infrastructure:. AES for advanced encryption standard basically takes a bit block of code and reorganizes it into a bit block of ciphertext using a particular key an encryption algorithm. CBC cipher block chaining mode is a method of disguising any encryption patterns that might reveal the key. In CBC, what happens is sort of like a double-layer encryption scheme.

During the encryption process, each consecutive, bit block of unencrypted text we'll call this the "original block" is XORed with the previous, already encrypted block of ciphertext to generate a bit block of text that represents the original block. The "XOR" operation is a piece of computer code that returns values based on an "exclusive OR" formula -- for example, an XOR operation might state that if the first bit in the original block OR the first bit in the ciphertext block is "1" but only one or the other , then the resulting value is "1.

In this way, if you were encrypting a page that had two consecutive, identical bit blocks of code, they would end up as completely different blocks of ciphertext. The same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the ciphertext -- that's the "symmetric" part of the process.

Once each block is decrypted using the key, the XOR operation is reversed to generate the original block of text. As we already mentioned, the iTunes Store once used a proprietary encryption method called FairPlay for its digital rights management scheme. When you purchased a song, the file was encrypted as part of the download process.

Next, we'll take a closer look at FairPlay and the controversy that surrounded it. You can buy someone an iTunes Music Card purchased at a retail store or iTunes gift certificate purchased through iTunes for a certain dollar amount, or you can actually buy someone a specific piece of content.

Your giftee will receive e-mail notification of the gift and instructions on how to "pick up" the file at the iTunes Store. FairPlay was an Apple-proprietary encryption scheme that determined what users could do with a file once they downloaded it. FairPlay let you:. When you did, the computer generated a unique ID and sent it to the iTunes server, requesting authorization.

If there were fewer than five authorizations on your account, the server added this unique ID to your account and sent back a decryption key to store on the computer. The key itself was encrypted so you couldn't just send it to someone else to use. This computer was then authorized to play FairPlay-protected songs registered to that account.

The next time you clicked on a protected song, the iTunes software used the computer's authorized ID to decrypt the key and then used the key to decrypt the song. Newer tracks on the iTunes Store are free of FairPlay encryption, but the technology still works if you attempt to play an older encrypted track.

Most of the controversy surrounding FairPlay was about Apple's refusal to license it, not about the limitations it imposed -- as far as DRM schemes go, FairPlay wasn't overly restrictive. But since Apple didn't license FairPlay to anyone, you could only play a protected file using iTunes software, and you could only take it with you on an iPod, iPhone or an iTunes phone.

The definition of iTunes on this page is an original TechTerms. If you would like to reference this page or cite this definition, you can use the green citation links above. The goal of TechTerms. We strive for simplicity and accuracy with every definition we publish. If you have feedback about the iTunes definition or would like to suggest a new technical term, please contact us.

Want to learn more tech terms?