Photos: High notes from Apple's music event

At its music-oriented press conference Wednesday morning in San Francisco, Apple played up iTunes 9, iPod price cuts, games for the Touch, a video camera for the Nano, and much more.

But nothing excited the crowd like the return to the stage of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, making his first public appearance since coming back from medical leave after receiving a liver transplant earlier this year. (Here's a video of his standing ovation and opening speech.)

Click on for photos from the event or here for the live blog, which gave minute-by-minute updates of the event.

Apple announced the release Wednesday of OS 3.1, which will be a free update to both iPhone and iPod Touch owners. With 3.1, users on both platforms can now get Genius recommendations for applications they've purchased. These show up in the App Store app, as well as in iTunes, and function in a similar fashion to Genius for music. It takes your purchase information and sends it to Apple, which will analyze it for similar purchases, and offer up recommendations. This may end up being a more precise system since there are fewer apps than music tracks.

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, shows new prices and memory configurations for the iPod Touch.

Electronic Arts' Travis Boatman shows the new interface to control the company's forthcoming Madden football game. This interface lets the player select a football play in advance.

Ben Mattes of Ubisoft shows an upcoming version of Assassin's Creed.

Bart Decrem from Tapulous shows the new musical Riddim Ribbon game in which players have to steer a rolling ball down various tracks.

Mark Hickey of Gameloft shows off this first-person shooter, called Nova. The plot: defend humanity against aliens.

Schiller brags about the iPhone as a gaming platform compared to the Sony PSP and the Nindendo DS.

Schiller touts the iPod Touch as a gaming platform--and says games on competitors' platforms are more expensive.

Schiller notes that the iPod Touch uses OpenGL ES for graphics acceleration.

Schiller shows a slide mocking Dell's non-pocketable Inspiron Mini PC.

iTunes 9 comes with an album view to see not just the cover of an album, but also associated lyrics, photos, and videos.

Jobs shows new video-enabled iPod Nano models.

Schiller shows off the new iPod Nano colors.

Schiller boasts that nobody's even close to the iPod for music player market share. He takes pains to mention Microsoft's 1 percent share.

Jobs touts brilliant new iPod colors, saying a new process permits the choices.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can now rearrange apps on their home screen right in iTunes, instead of just on the device itself. It's also possible to search for new applications and download them.

iTunes 9 lets people see lyrics to songs, in this case one from the Dave Matthews Band.

The 160GB iPod classic costs $249, Schiller says.

Schiller shows how third-party headset makers now can supply products that that can be used to control the iPod Shuffle.

The new iPod Nano has a handful of new features, including a video camera, FM radio tuner, and pedometer.

Jobs announces iPhone OS 3.1.

Cisco's Flip video cameras are thicker than the iPod Nano. It's not yet clear how the image quality compares.

Jobs says the iPhone is popular internationally.

Norah Jones closes the event by performing two songs. There seems to be some disappointment from those in the audience expecting a Beatle, or Coldplay, which were some of the rumors.

Jobs applauds Jones' performance.