A walk through iTunes history

Running 10.5.8 here on a dual processor G5.

The Mac sitting next to it, my photoshop/graphics workstation, a Beige "Desktop" with a 500Mhz G4 upgrade, has the last version of SoundJam installed on it. I use it daily for streaming "Old Time Radio" audio, either from the Antioch Broadcasting Network or Internet Archive.

I still have the very first CD I burned of a playlist via SoundJam. And this is back when CD burners were very expensive, AND slow! The CD still plays, by the way.

This is the answer:

in 10 years from now iTunes will take over operating systems and replace them completely. Letting you buy every single command you issue :)

And here is the slogan for iTunes 20.0:

"iTunes will let you buy anything that 10 years ago was free."

:D

I forget if it was bill or jeff that approached me while I was working at adaptec managing toast 4.0. He was shopping around SoundJam and was wondering if Adaptec was interested. To this day I am thankful that I didn't pursue the relationship. Adaptec was a terrible place for anything Mac, specially software. We were the red headed step child of that pc hardware company.

Anyway it went to a good home (I hope apple is a good home, hard to know from the outside).

As a side note after Toast 4.0 (and my burn out) adaptec had the good sense of arranging for Toast to go back to the capable hands of Markus Fest and his merrymen at El Gato.

All wells that ends well?

v.

The top display of iTunes still mimics the look of a grayscale LCD. Do you suppose Apple has kept it this way as an homage to the original iPod?

HA! This has turned into a pretty awesome trip down memory lane. I remember Winamp and "whipping the llama's ass". My first MP3 player was an RCA Lyra that had a CF slot. It was horrible! Then I got my hands on a creative CD player that read MP3 and thought that was just about the best thing ever! But then there was iPod. Mac only, seemed very cool, but was so expensive! I finally jumped in with a 20gb 4th gen iPod and haven't looked back. It's so funny when I see people rail against iTunes, but I remember the clunky software for that Lyra and I compare that to the iTunes of today and my head spins.

oh my god... I remember using that on my performa 6400. I could barely chat on aim and listen to music at the same time.... oh the good ol days of 1998.

Here's a more in-depth history:

http://www.evansharp.com/2009/01/document-metadata-and-the-finder-part-i/

I worked for Casady & Greene, the original developer, when SoundJam was still in beta and then for a couple years after its release. It was astonishing to see the rapid rise in avid users of the software, especially since PMPs were barely a novelty at the time. More significantly though, after OS X came out, SoundJam became C&G's most successful piece of software, not to mention the only piece that truly survived the transition into a Cocoa world. After Apple purchased SoundJam, the company, which had been one of the most successful small-scale developers for the Mac for close to 20 years, had very few successful titles left in their catalog and was forced to shut down less than a year or two after the sale. As successful as iTunes has become, the way it came about can also serve as a potent warning to software developers making killer apps: if Apple asks to buy, make sure you aren't putting yourself out of business by signing away your app.

Soundjam was awesome.

I was all bummed out when Apple turned it into iTunes, as they dropped a few of the features i used all the time... but it's turned out well. :)

I miss SoundJam. Simpler times.