CASESTUDY 13. AUDIENCE ACTIVITY - DIGITAL MEDIA PLAYERS

DIGITAL MEDIA PLAYERS – ITUNES


WHAT IS ITUNES?
iTunes is a digital media player application for playing, purchasing and organizing digital music and video files.

It is also an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod

Additionally, iTunes can connect to the iTunes Store in order to download purchased digital music, music videos, television shows, iPod games, audiobooks, various podcasts, and feature length films.

iTunes is available as a free download for certain computers from Apple's website.


FEATURES

Users are able to organize their music into playlists within one or more libraries, edit file information, record compact discs, copy files to a digital audio player, purchase music and videos through its built-in music store, download podcasts, back up songs onto a CD or DVD, run a visualizer to display graphical effects in time to the music, and encode music into a number of different audio formats.


Playlists
Playlists are created by the user of iTunes with his or her own preferences.


Music library
iTunes keeps track of songs by creating a virtual library, allowing users to access and edit a song's attributes.


iMix
- An iMix is a user-created playlist published in the iTunes Store.
- Anyone can create an iMix free of charge.

- iMixes are limited to 100 songs and support both music downloaded from the music store as well as music that has been imported from CDs
- iMixes are public and searchable by any iTunes user. Users may also rate any iMix using a five-star system.
- Users can publish their iTunes iMix to their blog, profile page or website.

Internet radio
- features around 300-400 distinct "radio stations" mostly in MP3 streaming format.
- Programming covers many genres of music and talk

Sound processing
- "sound enhancement" and crossfade
- "Sound Check" which automatically adjusts the playback volume of all songs to the same level.


Music sharing

Video
- Users can drag and drop movie clips from the computer into the iTunes Library for cataloging and organization.
- They can be viewed in a small frame in the main iTunes display, in a separate window, or fullscreen.
- purchasing and viewing of video content from the iTunes Music Store.
- The iTunes Music Store also gives the ability to view Apple's large collection of movie trailers.
- iTunes Store offers over 200 television shows for download

Podcasting
- Users can choose to update podcasts weekly, daily, hourly, or manually.
- Users can select podcasts to listen to from the Podcast Directory, to which anyone can submit their podcast for placement.
- The front page of the directory displays high-profile podcasts from commercial broadcasters and independent podcasters.
- It also allows users to browse the podcasts by category or popularity.
- The addition of podcasting functionality to a mainstream audio application like iTunes greatly helped bring podcasting to a much wider audience -podcasters were reporting that the number of downloads of their audio files had tripled, sometimes even quadrupled.

iTunes Store
- users can buy and download songs for use on a limited number of computers and an nlimited number of iPods.
- Songs purchased from the iTunes Store are copy protected
- offer movie and game downloads -more than just an online music store



Integration with other applications
These applications can access the iTunes Library directly, allowing access to the playlists and songs stored within