Apple Announces iTunes 3

MACWORLD EXPO, NEW YORK—July 17, 2002—Apple® today announced iTunes™ 3, a major upgrade to its award-winning digital music software for the Mac® featuring Smart Playlists, a revolutionary new way to listen to your music. iTunes 3 adds dozens of new features, including Sound Check for consistent volume playback and support for audio programming from Audible.com. iTunes, with more than 14 million copies distributed since its introduction, is available as a free download to all Mac® OS X customers and will be included with Apple’s ground-breaking iPod™ digital music player.

Smart Playlists are playlists that automatically and dynamically update their songs based on simple rules set by the user. For example, a user can specify that a Smart Playlist contain every song by a given artist, and when new songs by that artist are added to iTunes’ music library, they will automatically appear in this playlist. Or, a user can specify that a Smart Playlist contain their 25 most-listened-to songs, which will be dynamically selected based on the up-to-the-minute play counts for all the songs in their iTunes library.

“iTunes 3 with Smart Playlists is a major leap forward in the digital music revolution,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iTunes 3 and iPod provide the easiest to use and most advanced digital music experience available, and are setting the pace for the industry.”

With its elegant user interface, iTunes was the first “digital jukebox” application to take the complexity out of managing digital music, making it fast and easy to encode MP3s, create playlists, burn custom CDs and store an entire digital music collection on a Mac. iTunes seamlessly integrates with iPod, allowing Mac users to easily transfer their entire digital music collection onto their iPod in less than 10 seconds per CD.

In iTunes 3, Smart Playlists make it easy for customers to automatically create mixes of their favorite songs from their music library based on any criteria they choose—artist, genre, play count, release date and more. These mixes can dynamically change and grow as the user’s music library grows. Smart Playlists work with iTunes’ new song rating feature so that users can identify their favorite music and have it automatically added to a Smart Playlist for playback on their Mac or their iPod.

With support for Audible content, iTunes 3 allows Mac users to access a broad range of audio programming over the Internet. Through Audible.com, customers can choose from over 4,500 audiobooks and 14,000 other audio programs, including national best sellers, classics and daily highlights from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. With iTunes 3 and iPod, Mac users have the flexibility to listen to Audible content whenever and wherever they want. Both iTunes 3 and iPod also support Sound Check, which automatically adjusts the volume of songs for a more consistent listening experience.

Pricing & Availability
iTunes 3 requires Mac OS X version 10.1.4 or later and is available immediately as a free download at www.apple.com/itunes.

Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, iPod and iTunes are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.