How does iTunes work?

by Lucas_ on April 4th, 2005

iTunes from Apple is a music management software that lets you manage, play, transfer and stream the music you own, and also lets you acquire new music. You buy either single songs for 99 cents each or whole albums. Each song has the same price and comes with the same basic digital rights restrictions. The restrictions iTunes imposes upon its users are comparatively generous. You are even allowed to burn all your songs to CDs as many times as you want to and then rip them back into iTunes, thereby stripping them of any restrictions.

If you buy a song and leave it in its restricted state, you can listen to it on up to five different computers at the same time. You can copy them on your iPod and leave them there without restriction.

iTunes has a neat feature called "music sharing". Music sharing allows you to share your music on your local network. After you've shared your music or some of your playlists, other people who have "Look for shared music" (which is based on Bonjour) activated will see this music and be able to play it. You need to turn on both sharing and looking for shares if you want to use music sharing. Go to Preferences -> Sharing to do this.

Gah, don't rate me down for not describing every single feature of this application! It has literally hundreds of them.