Apple Computer’s iTunes: The Online Music Store and Management

More and more music consumers are choosing to download music online instead of purchasing CDs. With the advent of high speed, broadband Internet connections and excellent audio file compression software, it has become possible in recent years for people to easily and conveniently share high-quality audio files over the Internet. This has spawned commercial web sites and products designed to distribute professional, commercial recordings directly to consumers’ computers and portable digital audio players.

Although not the only player in this game, Apple Computers is the industry leader in this phenomenon. The Apple iPod (http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipod.html) is the most popular portable digital audio player and Apple “blazed the trail” with its iTunes Music Store (http://www.apple.com/itunes). Consumers can download to their computers high-quality digital music files for 99 cents a track, which has revolutionized the consumer music industry. The iTunes Music Store has over two million songs available in dozens of styles and it continues to grow. It’s easy to browse, search, and purchase music from the comfort of your home or office. I find myself using the iTunes Music Store as an information database much like I will use Amazon to do research on what books and information might be available on a certain subject. You can browse sample pages of many books on Amazon and, likewise, you can listen to 30 seconds of any track on the iTunes Music Store. I like having the ability to only purchase selected tracks on a given CD rather than buying the entire CD. I sometimes do miss having all the printed material that comes with a commercial CD, but you can download graphics and liner notes with your purchases on iTunes.

Once you download music to your Mac or PC, you own it and can transfer it to up to three other computers or digital audio devices. You do not have to be online to listen to the music. It can go anywhere with you on an iPod or any mp3 player and you can burn it to a CD with your computer.

Apple’s iTunes (http://www.apple.com/itunes/overview) is a free computer application available for both Macintosh and Windows computers. It doesn’t work through your browser like some of the other online music stores. There are many advantages to setting up your computer with iTunes above and beyond giving yourself the ability to download music from the iTunes Music Store. You can import your CD collection to iTunes, which will digitize the music to a format you can use on your computer or portable digital music player. It took some time, but I have about 2,000 CDs (20,000 tracks) in my iTunes database library. I can easily browse and search this library, which gives me great power over my collection. I can search by composer name, performer name, tune name, style, date, and on and on. For example, with a few keystrokes I can find and list every recording of the Haydn trumpet concerto I have. As I’m working on a solo or orchestral excerpt with a student, I can quickly find out if I have it in my collection and play it for them if I do. I find this extremely valuable on a daily basis.

iTunes also works as a “jukebox” in that you can set up “playlists” of songs organized by artist or style or any number of criteria, or you can just set it to randomly pick tracks from your entire library of music. You can share your library with up to 5 simultaneous users on your local network. So, if your family is like mine, with 4 – 5 computers in the house on the same network, you can set it up play any iTunes track from one computer to another. They even have a device that allows you to “beam” your iTunes from your computer to your stereo for playback.

If you are an avid music consumer and use your computer regularly, I can’t think of any piece of software that would be more useful to you than iTunes. It’s a phenomenal organizational tool for managing your music collection and can change the way you shop for music.