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 100+ CDs just sitting at home? Thus - iTunes. Apple released it in January 2001, months before the iPod, as a way to import and organize your CDs on your computer. When the iPod arrived that October, iTunes became the hub for managing and syncing it too.
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. And starting in 2003, you could buy songs directly from the iTunes Store and download them 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 for the iPod said it simply: 1,000 songs in your pocket.
So why does that matter to all this? Well, it's about how you fit 1,000 songs in your pocket. CDs hold uncompressed audio - think of it as the song exactly as it was mastered. But if you kept every song that way on your iPod, each one would take up a lot more space.
Audio File Formats
The original iPod supported three audio formats - MP3, AIFF, and WAV - with AAC added 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 in 1988, based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF), to store uncompressed audio. That's about 13 years before the iPod. It was used throughout the classic Mac OS and carried forward into Mac OS X. What matters is that, unlike MP3, the audio from the CD was copied 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. It's a favorite of audio engineers because it preserves audio quality in a way an MP3 or AAC file can't. 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. It was developed by Fraunhofer, Dolby, AT&T, Sony, and Nokia (among others) as the successor to MP3, and became part of the MPEG-4 standard. AAC is still everywhere today: Apple Music streams in AAC, YouTube uses it, and even Spotify - which built its service on Ogg Vorbis - uses AAC in some of its apps. It remains one of the most common lossy formats for listening to and streaming music.
How did this fundamentally change software?
1 - Normalizing MP3 and AAC. Apple turned audio quality into a storage trade-off the everyday listener could understand: drop the quality ever so slightly, and you can fit 1,000 songs in your pocket. That trade-off changed how music is played.
2 - DRM (Digital Rights Management). To get record labels on board with the iTunes Store, Apple wrapped purchased songs in its FairPlay DRM, which limited how many computers and devices a song could be copied to. That protection is what convinced labels to sell music digitally at all, and the same idea - licensed access instead of free copying - is what streaming services like Spotify are built on today.
3 - Sync software. If you remember the import steps from earlier, you'd also have to make sure your iTunes library and iPod stayed in sync. Every time you connected your iPod and pressed 'sync', iTunes copied your library over. 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.
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.