ITunes Music Store

The iTunes Music Store (iTMS) is an online music service run by Apple Computer with its iTunes application. Introduced on April 28, 2003, the store, which uses DRM restrictions, has since been a dominant online music service and has proven the viability of online music sales.

File format

Songs are encoded using FairPlay-encrypted 128 kbit/s AAC streams in a mp4 wrapper, using the .m4p extension. In practice, the sound quality is comparable to songs encoded at 160 kbit/s using MP3 or 128 kbit/s using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio WMA format.

Related Topics:
FairPlay - AAC - Mp4 - WMA

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While licenses to the AAC compression and the mp4 file format are readily available, Apple has yet to allow their proprietary FairPlay encryption scheme to be licensed to other hardware manufacturers, so only Apple's QuickTime and iPod can play AAC files encrypted with Apple's FairPlay technology.

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