The History of iTunes
Everyone knows about the iPod. The piece of hardware that promised 1000 songs in your pocket. At the time, nothing on the market quite appealed like the iPod. Releasing in 2001, the iPod created a class of customers who truly believed they were part of a revolution in technology. Gone were the days of CD players and cassettes in every car - we were entering the world of adapters and cables.
But then begged the greatest question - why would anyone want to go digital, when they have a 100+ CDs just sitting at home? Thus - the creation of iTunes. When it was released in 2001 alongside the iPod, the idea was that it would be a way to store and maintain imported CDs into your computer and as an MDM (mobile device manager).
How do you import CDs and send them to your iPod?
Get your CD -> Put it in the CD Bay of your iMac -> Open iTunes -> Import the CD -> Select your audio format -> Confirm.
It may seem basic today, but in that period of time this is what felt revolutionary about Apple's software. Oh and add on top of that you can buy directly in the iTunes Store and download it over the internet! (To us, that seems like a basic feature, but in that era, it was a luxury practically unheard of).
What's the end state? Unlimited portability - gone are the days of limited discs to bring with you when you go in your car - gone are the days of having to listen to the few albums you can carry with you in a trip, or to work. The first ads that rolled out for the iPod were simply. 1000 songs. In your pocket.
So why does that matter to all this? Well it's about how you achieve 1000 songs in your pocket. Now, CDs are high resolution music - think of this as exactly how the artist meant for the song to be played, uncompressed directly from the studio.. but if you were to do that, and keep it on your iPod you'd need to use a file format that would be a lot more space.
Audio File Formats
So, Apple allowed four unique audio files: MP3, AIFF, WAV, and AAC (later).
MP3
MP3 was a huge leap in terms of audio files when it first came out in the early 90s. The way MP3 audio works is that it takes the most critical parts of an audio file - essentially only what a human can hear, and keeps that. It removes everything else, saving a lot of space in terms of size - and it is known as a lossy audio system.
(read more about lossy versus lossless audio in the next post here: Lossless Versus Lossy)
AIFF
AIFF, or Audio Interchange File Format, was another file that was readable by the OS on the original iPod. AIFF was built by Apple, originally designed off of Electronic Arts' (or EA) for an audio file that was uncompressed (lossless). The file type was originally created about 13 years prior to the iPod, and used by Apple's Macintosh OS and later redesigned the architecture for Mac OS X (read more here: ). The importance of is that unlike MP3, the audio quality from the CD was a 1 to 1. there was no loss of data between the two, (hence the term lossless).
WAV
WAV, or Waveform Audio Format is a file format developed by IBM and Microsoft. This was also used to store uncompressed (lossless) audio. The file type is the most popular for audio engineers and travels information in a method that preserves audio quality unlike an MP3 or an AAC file. Similar to AIFF, this audio file is much larger than its counterparts - where 1 minute of audio takes up about 10 MB.
AAC
When the iPod first released, it only supported MP3, AIFF and WAV. However, later on they changed the firmware on the iPod to also support the audio file format AAC, also known as Advanced Audio Coding. This was specifically developed by Dolby, AT&T, and Sony (among others) to succeed the MP3 file format. While it is important to mention that it's first original use case was simply to just outperform the MP3 by going to an 'MP4' format, the technology behind this has been proposed to be utilized since 1972. In fact, both Spotify and Apple Music still currently use AAC to store all their music, and this lossy audio format is what is most popularly used in modern day technology to listen to and stream music.
How did this fundamentally change software?
1 - Normalizing the standard use of MP3 and AAC. Bringing the idea of storage to audio quality, and creating an essential trade off for the normal user, and advertising that if you drop the quality of audio ever so slightly you could fit a 1000 songs in your pocket, there would be a great and vast shift in how music is played.
2 - DRM (Digital Rights Management) So - How do you claim that a song truly belongs to you, as an artist? How does that happen? Well, Apple used iTunes to also help create a records management tool that tracks the ownership of a song to the original artist or record label. That software is what is key to ownership, and later on streaming based ownership for audio. This is similar to how Spotify currently operates with a records management system to ensure proper ownership.
3 - Sync software. If you remember the amazing diagram of how the CD software works (see ## How do you import CDs and send them to your iPod? ), you realize that you'd have to make sure your iTunes library and iPod were in sync. Similar to how cloud storage works, you essentially call the songs on your library into your iPod and go everytime you press the 'sync' button on the iTunes library when the iPod is connected. This software principle is what cloud essentially uses - essentially if your computer is connected to the cloud (Google Photos, or iCloud Drive), it uses a similar sync feature to keep your files, music, and everything else in two places at once.
Thank you for reading this. The reason I wrote this article is because I have been working on building and repairing iPods in the past year, and the idea of how audio ownership existed before the era of Spotify and streaming fascinated me. I hope that you were able to learn something about this topic, and if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out!
- Keshav