QuickTime is Apple’s standard format for handling video, sound, animation, and even 360-degree virtual reality (QTVR) scenes. Supported audio file formats include: AIFF, AU, WAV, DV, MPEG 1 layer 1 & 2, MP3, Sound Designer II, and MIDI. Apple’s media players, the QuickTime Player (free) and the QuickTime Player Pro (paid upgrade) are available for both Mac and Windows. Here at the studio, QuickTime Pro has been the player of habit for the iMac, but we recently discovered a peculiarity. QuickTime does not support tagged MP3 files, and refuses to play them. Tagged MP3s have additional information such as artist biography, credits, lyrics and album artwork. These ‘tagged’ files are supported by most players and can playback even if the player is incapable of displaying this information. All of the MP3 files available here at our Website were tagged, since when we encoded our files we thought these little ‘extras’ would be a nice bonus. Since then we've de-tagged all of our MP3's for universality, sorry. This is a surprising and limiting oversight. Several attempts were made to Apple regarding this issue but still no word on their part.

QuickTime Pro delivered a boomier, and punchier bottom end than the RealPlayer. In addition, it still lags behind being a complete MP3 music station for several reasons. There is no MP3 encoding ability built into the player and it lacks the playlist function. Regardless, we found QuickTime Pro to be one of the easiest and smoothest. It has a clean, easy to use interface and was, with MusicMatch, the best sounding player.