Media player software for the Mac and Windows from Apple. Designed to transfer music to the iPod and iPhone and administer the copy protection on purchased music titles, iTunes is extremely popular because of its ease of use. iTunes is also used by many people to play their music collections on the computer, but who do not use a handheld player.

Introduced in 2001 for the Mac, a Windows version was added in 2003. Like other software media players, iTunes integrates Apple's music store to make it easy to purchase and download a song. In late 2005, video was added to iTunes 6 to support the new video-enabled iPods.

Designed for Sharing
A unique feature of iTunes is that users can open their playlists to any other iTunes user on the network, and titles can be streamed from one user's computer to another for playing. However, because of copyrights, the songs are played on, but not saved on the remote computer. For example, on a college campus, every iTunes user logged onto the network could share music with every other.

Gotta Love That Innovative Spirit
As would be expected, hackers have found ways to circumvent the iTunes "share-but-not-save" feature. Utilities such as myTunes and ourTunes were developed to make copies of someone else's music collection. Although new versions of iTunes void such usage, newer versions of the copy programs seem inevitable. See iPod, FairPlay, media player and playlist.