I would like to get a cheap (sub-$100), portable mp3 player/FM radio combo (I only use an FM walkman for a few hours in the AM, and listen to a tape–remember those?–only when reception bites). But I realized that not all of my music files may be mp3 files. What’s the deal with Apple iTunes and the AAC format? Can I convert these to mp3? Or can I just never listen to them on non-Apple systems?
You can convert (transcode) AAC files to MP3 but:
- It is kind of a pain
- You’ll lose some quality.
The basic procedure is to convert the tunes to CD (AIFF?) format.
You can do this with a CD-R or a CD image.
Then convert them to MP3
Brian
If you bought them from the itunes music store, you can’t convert them. When you rip files yourself, you can specify whether to rip to aac or mp3. Choose mp3 if you need to play them on an mp3 player. I know there is a way to convert mp3 to aac through iTunes, but I’m not sure if you can do the reverse.
Going by what I have just done, converting AAC files to mp3 should be easy enough (I am using iTunes on a Mac, and would assume that the windows version works the same, but don’t know for sure). In ‘preferences’, change your import format to mp3 (or whatever other format you want to use). Then, in your library, select the AAC files you want to change, and under the ‘advanced’ menu, select ‘covert selection to mp3’. Pretty simple. A month or so ago, I switched my whole library from mp3 to AAC, so I could fit even more songs on my iPod.
Note, I am under the impression this will not work with the Protected AAC format (which is what you get when you buy songs from the iTunes music store), and I have no idea about loading the songs onto a player other than the iPod.
Nope, these are all home-ripped (on Macs). Most with MusicMatch, recent ones with iTunes. I’ll have to check my preferences to see how the heck I told iTunes to treat them…