Tootfinder

The U.S. patent for mp3 audio was granted on November 26 in 1996. This piece is kinda weird about it in spots, but it gives a decent history about how it laid the foundations for peer-to-peer music sharing, etc.

The U.S. patent for MP3 audio was granted on this day in 1996 — laid the foundations for peer-to-peer music sharing, iTunes, and today's streaming services
The Fraunhofer Institut had been working on its lossy audio compression tech for phone line transmission since 1977.

I remember a time where you had to pick a competitor in an industry based on who you think will still be around in twelve months and who has a product that works on the devices that you own. (Example: Nook vs Kobo vs Kindle for ebooks or iTunes vs Amazon VOD vs Microsoft Movies and TV for streaming movies) I miss the days when it was still that simple.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115945071431971557
Also, yes you can connect to WiFi in Mac OS 9.2 with AirPort in a 27 year old iBook from 1999 and yes, iTunes can still query Gracenote for CD track titles.

Multiple Apple services, including Apple TV, the App Store, and iCloud have been experiencing outages since 6:48 PM ET, according to Apple's system status page (Juli Clover/MacRumors)
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/20/app-store-apple-tv-down/

App Store and Apple TV Experiencing Outage
Apple's App Store, iTunes Store, and Apple TV service are experiencing an outage at the current time, according to Apple's System Status...

Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting.
Looks like I wrote about it last year.
Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache. https://bsky.ap…

Boris (@bmann.ca)
Oh, today is my iTunes Match-iversary. I pay Apple ~$30CAD annually for them to store and sync my 30 year old digital music collection of like ... 100GB and counting. Looks like I wrote about it last year. Most of my music purchases are Bandcamp/indie these days and uploaded to my home Ampache.

Did you know that iTunes does CD Text?

I literally sometimes still RIP CDs with iTunes on Mac OS 9 on my iMac G4. Still works fine—yes, including getting titles from the Internet.
As easy as ever. 🤷

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115667646361265085
The other ongoing criticism is "well actually, iTunes was always bad".
No, it wasn't. When it was released it was _way_ better than any other jukebox sofware.
You could actually find stuff easily, manage playlists super quick. It ripped CDs, including getting track titles and managing files, with literally _no clicks required_.
Burning CDs took like two clicks.
While admittedly lock-in, it would sync your iPod with no clicks after dropping it in the iPod dock. And it was super fast. (Other manufacturers didn't have anything close to this convenient).
Other jukebox software didn't do any of this.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115664856327099469
The worst part is that on Windows you can still officially install iTunes
Apple’s Software works better on Windows

Grabbed my mom's mac and to this date Finder is still completely unusable to restore. Did they seriously ditch iTunes for this shit? It clearly knows an iPhone is connecting, but doesn't show the button to open the restore screen. Trillion dollar company.