About iTunes and iTunes Store
iTunes is an audio player for playing and organizing digital music files, and purchasing digital music files in the FairPlay digital rights management format. It supports playing various formats like M4P, MP3, AAC, M4B, M4A, AIFF, WAV etc. Now it's available for Mac OS X, Windows Vista and XP. And its version 8 released in September adds genius playlists feature, which automatically generate a playlist of 25, 50, 75 or 100 songs from user's library that are similar to the selected song.
The iTunes Store (as iTunes Music Store) is the component of iTunes through which users can purchase digital music files within iTunes. With music from all five major music companies and more than 600 independent labels, the iTunes Music Store catalog now offers more than 1,000,000 audio files. Features include a free download with no hidden charges for extra features, MP3 and pristine-quality AAC-encoding from audio CDs, smart playlists, more than 250 free Internet-radio stations, and the ability to burn custom playlists to CDs and MP3 CDs, to burn content to DVDs to back up an entire music collection, and to share music via Rendezvous over any network, cross-platform. The iTunes Store has already sold 5 billion songs, according to a report released in June, 2008. This amount keeps increasing, of course.
M4A and iTunes Store file formats
M4A
A kind of MPEG-4 container format, but only with audio; this is especially true of non-protected content.
M4P
MPEG-4 files with audio streams encrypted by FairPlay Digital Rights Management as sold through the iTunes Store.
M4B
Audiobook file based on the MPEG-4 container format; typically compressed with .AAC encoding; nearly identical to a .M4A file, but denoted as an audiobook and can be "bookmarked" by supporting audio players.
M4V
MPEG-4 video format that include copyright protection; includes music videos, TV episodes, and full-length movies.
TunePat iTunes Music Converter for Windows PC
