Wednesday of this week was Apple’s iTunes Music Store’s (iTMS) First Birthday. To coin a phrase, “it’s not getting older – it’s getting better”. Before I cover the new features, let’s genuflect on the highlights of Year One. Oh, and if you’re a Windoze user, don’t turn the page just yet. The iTMS, the iTunes application, and the iPod, all work great on Windoze.

In the first year, over 70 million songs were purchased through the iTMS. That’s a 70 percent market share of all legally downloaded music. Today, people are buying music at a pace that will yield around 140 million songs in Year Two. Over 700,000 songs are available, with one million projected by year’s end. The catalog includes offerings from the Big Five record companies, as well as 450 independent labels. HP expects to ship over 8 million PCs with iTunes for Windows installed on their desktops this year. The iPod juggernaut continues, with 810,000 units sold this last quarter. Demand for the iPod Mini is so great that even the Apple Retail Stores can’t keep them in stock.

So, how do you follow that act? You release iTunes 4.5, and rev up iTunes and the iTMS with a ton of new features. Here are but a few highlights.

iTMS will offer a free download from a popular artist on Tuesday of every week. You can now have music on up to five authorized computers, up from the previous three. You can put your music on unlimited iPods, but the number of CDs you can burn from a given playlist drops to seven from ten (not a big deal unless you are trying to illegally sell CDs).

In the Windows version only, you can now easily convert “unprotected” Windows Media Audio files into AAC files that will play on your iPod. Plus, Apple is offering a new codec called “Apple Lossless”, which gives you music files with the full quality of uncompressed CD audio using about half the storage space.

Some CDs contain songs that blend into each other, and importing them into iTunes sometimes created a small gap between the songs. iTunes now has a Join Tracks feature that melds two or more songs into one continuous, gap-free track. Perfect for those concept rock albums and extended dance mixes.

Wow! Out of space and we haven’t got started yet! More next week!

© 2004 Peter F. Zimowski