There are millions of people who’d love to listen to MP3 music, but who’ve been put off by the complex aspects of the technology. Fortunately, digital music is becoming a lot friendlier, starting now.

Digital Music For Your Mac.
Introducing iTunes. It’s MP3 done the Macintosh way. iTunes lets you do the things your geekier friends are talking about — like converting music CDs to MP3 files (a.k.a. “ripping”), creating personal playlists, burning your own music CDs and listening to hundreds of radio stations on the Internet. iTunes lets you do all that and more.

With the friendly, intuitive interface you’ve come to expect from Apple, iTunes software makes MP3 music a truly Mac-like experience. iTunes turns your Mac into a nifty digital jukebox — one that can hold your digital music library, and that lets you play your favorite titles from your music CDs (incidentally, “favorite” is the operative word here, but we’ll return to that later). You can also download music to your portable MP3 player and — thanks to the CD-RW drive that ships with the new Power Mac G4 — even burn your own music CDs with the click of a button. Think of it as MP3 music for the rest of us.

So where do you get the songs for your digital music library? You probably own stacks of music CDs. And you’ve probably noticed that a lot of these CDs feature — at best — only one or two songs you really like. Fact is, if you wanted to take your 100 favorite songs with you on your next vacation, you’d have to pack almost that many CDs.

Shrink to fit
How’s that possible, you might ask. In a word, MP3: A powerful industry-standard compression technology that dramatically reduces the size of audio files — without a noticeable difference in sound quality.

Now that you’ve learned about the things you get with iTunes, it’s time you hear about what you won’t — namely the limits that are all too common in the MP3 arena.

With iTunes, there are no annoying nag screens that pop up and urge you to upgrade to a paid version. iTunes is a rich, robust, full-featured software program — and it’s free. Another refreshing change: iTunes does not impose limits on the number of songs you can convert to MP3 format (and it encodes songs at bit rates of up to 320Kbps). You can burn as many CDs as you like, at the fastest speed supported by your Apple CD drive, CD-RW drive or DVD-R/CD-RW SuperDrive.

iTunes Fact Sheet

iTunes FAQ

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