ITunes has come a long way since 2001.
Version 1 was supplied, appropriately enough at the time, on a CD - but what
Apple always intended it to represent was the end of buying physical media.
Today, the iTunes Store is your default
shop front for music, movies and TV shows, and the iTunes app in OS X is where
Apple expects you to manage all your media, including content imported from CD
and other sources, and sync selected items to your iOS devices. Now, with the
arrival of iCIoud, there are more and more ways to move media between your
devices - and to bypass the iTunes app altogether, if you prefer. But to make
sure you can access everything everywhere you want it, you’ll need some key
knowledge about the way content is sold and stored.
iTunes store
Music purchases
There are two basic categories of media
that concern us here: music and videos. Music was available from the start on
what was then the iTunes Music Store. To get the music industry signed up,
digital rights management (DRM), also known as copy protection, was embedded in
every file, so the tracks you bought were locked to iTunes and your iPod, and
couldn’t be played on other kit.
iTunes download past purchases
Eventually Apple convinced the record
labels to agree to drop DRM, same time it increased the quality of standard
downloads to 256Kbit/sec AAC (advanced audio coding). This was introduced as
‘iTunes Plus’, and is now the norm for all iTunes music. If you still have
older tracks in protected format, you can ‘upgrade’ them to the DRM-free and
higher-quality files, but - illogically - you have to pay extra. To see which
of your tracks can be upgraded, go to bit.ly/itplus in Safari on your Mac
(window opens in iTunes). However, if you subscribe to iTunes Match you can
re-download any previous purchases in the new format anyway, so that’s likely
to be more cost-effective.
All purchased music comes in AAC format.
Older, protected tracks have the extension .m4p; newer, unprotected files are
.m4a. Album artwork and metadata about the recording, including artist and
copyright information, are stored within each AAC track file, as you can see if
you right-click one in the Finder and select Get Info. To see where any iTunes
item (whether music or video) is stored on your Mac, right-click it in iTunes
and choose Show in Finder.
You
can choose which version of videos to download when both 720p and 1080p are
available
To play users’ own music files, the iTunes
app also supports MP3, along with uncompressed WAV and AIFF files. You can
also create files in Apple Lossless format, which preserves maximum quality at
around half the size of uncompressed files. This is a different format from
AAC, but files have the same extension, .m4a.
iTunes now supports both SD and HD
(standard or high definition) video. ‘HD’ means 720p unless identified as
1080p. Users outside the US still have a more limited choice of content and
can’t re-download purchased videos direct to other devices; support for this is
being negotiated with copyright owners. So if you buy a movie on your iPad, and
then want to watch it on your iPhone, for example, you’ll need to connect the
iPad to your Mac, transfer the purchased video, then connect the iPhone and
sync it. This seems clunky, but it’s also clever, in that it doesn’t just copy
the file but creates a version appropriate to your target device, so it’s
guaranteed to play properly and won’t take up more space than needed.
TV Shows in iTune
You can also make iTunes create versions of
music and video files for other Apple devices without syncing. Select an item,
then go to Advanced > Create and choose a target device.
Downloaded videos come in the .m4v format,
and iTunes also supports .mp4 and .mov video files of your own. Each of these
‘container’ formats supports various codecs the compression/decompression
systems that store video in manageable file sizes - so quality (and
compatibility) can vary.
Unlike music, videos bought from iTunes
still have DRM to prevent copying or unauthorized sharing. But you can play any
iTunes purchase on any device where you’re logged into your iTunes account.
