iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc. on January 9, 2001, on the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. At Apple's September 2009 "Rock and Roll" keynote, iTunes 9 was announced. iTunes's latest version is 9.2, which adds support with the iphone and the new ios 4.0.

iTunes can be a proprietary digital media player application, used for playing and organizing digital music and videos. The application form can be an interface to manage the contents on Apple's popular iPod along with other digital media players like the iPhone and iPad. Additionally, iTunes can hook up to the iTunes Store via the Internet to purchase and download music, shows,music videos, iPod games, podcasts,audiobooks, feature length films and movie rentals (not available in all of the countries), and ringtones (only employed for iPhone). It is additionally employed to download applications for that iPhone, ipod itouch and iPad running iOS 2.0 or higher.

iTunes is available as being a download free for Mac OS X v10.4 or later and Windows XP or later from Apple's website. Older versions are for sale to Mac OS 9, Mac OS X v10.0-10.3, and Windows 2000. iTunes 11 can currently read, write and convert between MP3, WAV,AIFF, AAC ,MPEG-4 and Apple Lossless.

The Windows version of iTunes can automatically transcode DRM-free WMA (including version 9) files with other audio formats, but does not support playback of WMA files and won't transcode DRM protected WMA files. Telestream, Inc. provides free codecs for Mac users of QuickTime permit playback of unprotected Windows Media files. These codecs are recommended by Microsoft.

Together with importing CDs in to the iTunes library, users may import digital audio tracks from other sources, an any format that iTunes supports. You can accomplish this by either right exploring the file, selecting open with, after which selecting iTunes or dragging the file into your open iTunes window. Alternatively, for Amazon.com mp3s, the Amazon MP3 Downloader application will automatically import the mp3 files into the iTunes library.