SoundJam MP

You want to have that navigation to go through the stuff that you want.

So there's a lot of pieces, even from the software perspective, that have advanced past where Apple started with buying SoundJam to now.

Yeah, exactly.

So where did the name iPod come from? A great debate.

When we last left you, the MP3 music format was sweeping the world with a few companies building hardware players.

Apple had bought SoundJam and begun the process of transforming it into iTunes.

The next step, though, was creating its own hardware MP3 player to sell alongside Macs and sync via iTunes.

That's the story of today, the building of what would be known as the iPod.

We had to work hard to catch up.

Which takes us to that moment in early 2000, where Apple placed a few phone calls to the authors of SoundJam and Audion, MP3 player software for the Mac, to talk about the future of their apps.

Okay, here's the situation Apple's in.

Steve Jobs wants something by the end of the year.

At this point, we're going to get to it.

There were some MP3 players out there, hardware, and they would sync with this.

In fact, that's the origin of SoundJam, which we'll get to in a little bit, was that.

So Apple's thinking of this as very much a digital hub aspect, not building their own piece of hardware.

Yep.

Meanwhile, two people with Apple ties, former Apple employee named Bill Kincaid and a former Apple intern actually named Jeff Robbin, started writing their own MP3 app called SoundJam.

Jeff Robbin had written an incredibly essential, actually incredibly important Mac utility called Conflict Catcher-

Okay

Whatever you say.

[laughs]

So summer of '99, two different Mac MP3 apps debut, Audion and SoundJam.

They're both much friendlier than Macamp, much better Mac apps.

Yeah, right.

It was like Sound Jam or something.

No, it was just iTunes.

It was before iTunes.

Oh, that's right.

Apple bought something.

I think it was called Sound Jam or something.

That's right.