iTunes 9: New Features & Thoughts

The latest version, iTunes 9, was announced at Apple’s September 2009 keynote “Rock and Roll”.

iTunes 9 can currently read, write and convert between MP3, AIFF, WAV, MPEG-4, AAC and Apple Lossless.

iTunes can also play any audio files that QuickTime can play (as well as some video formats), including Protected AAC files from the iTunes Store and Audible.com audio books.

iTunes 9 Thoughts

There is limited support for Vorbis and FLAC enclosed in an Ogg container (files using the Ogg container format are not naturally supported) or Speex codecs with the Xiph QuickTime Components. Because tag editing and album art is done within iTunes and not Quicktime, these features will not work with these QuickTime components.

iTunes currently will not play back HE-AAC/aacPlus audio streams correctly. HE-AAC/aacPlus format files will play back as 22 kHz AAC files (effectively having no high end over 11 kHz), and HE-AAC streaming audio (which a number of Internet radio stations use) will not play back at all.

The latest version of iTunes (Win/Mac) supports importing audio CDs with the default iTunes standard file format of AAC at 256 kbit/s, but users can choose from 16 kbit/s to 320 kbit/s constant bit rates (CBR) in either AAC or MP3.