Stupendous Man

Join Date 12/2002

An iTunes/iPod question. . .

Could I have made a mistake???

Hello all! I'm in a bit of a quandary here and hoping that you can provide a bit of advice. I've used iTunes to download 80 or so tracks into mp3 format and not AAC, in the hope that I would be able to play my music with one of the SanDisc, Creative, or iRiver players. However, when I tried to play the "mp3" files in Winamp I had to download an m4p plugin. Will I have the same kind of problem when I purchase an mp3 player, or am I forced to use the iPod shuffle? Anyway, basically I want to know if anyone has been able to play tracks downloaded via iTunes on a non-apple player and how it worked out.

thanks for your help, advice, suggestions!

Donnie

ipod

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You can burn the tracks (as audio cd's) and then rip them as MP3's--that'll work with any mp3 player. Otherwise, you are pretty much stuck with Apple products. The services that use WMA formats work on a wider range of devices.

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Yeah, I'm just beginning to find this out. I read somewhere that the audio quality deteriorates when you use that method. Is that true? Thanks for the help j dott.

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PurrBall

Join Date 02/2003

+23

the m4a files that iTunes imports from CDs work on my iPod.

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You are 100% correct on that Meowy, m4a and m4p are Apple or iTunes file types, but they work only on iPods. The thing is that I would prefer to purchase an mp3 player without having to pay Apple's price. $249 for a 4GB iPod Mini, when Creative has a 20GB player for the same price? I don't need to have the latest, greatest player. I went with iTunes because I like the ease with which I can purchase music, the price, and the playlists (which I am now willing to give up).

Anyway, does anybody else find it annoying that Apple is forcing you to buy their stuff (the iPod), when Microsoft has licensed the encoding(?) to other companies which creates competition and thus lower prices for everyone? $300-600 for a good sized iPod? Not this boy.

Guess I'll just have to burn my music and then rip it to mp3. Time consuming, wasteful in CD-R's, but I'll be able to use an iRiver player. Gotta make a sacrifice sometime, right?

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Look at it this way: Burning a cd is protecting all the $$ you're spending on songs. If your hdd crashed and you lost all your files, you'd be upset right? This is the 'backup'

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paxx

Join Date 03/2001

Okay, sorry to sound obvious here, but why don't you just convert the m4a files to mp3 with iTunes? In you iTunes libray, right click on the m4a song and select "Convert to MP3" from the dropdown menu...

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www.allofmp3.com

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PurrBall

Join Date 02/2003

+23

Good point paxx.

werewolf said to burn to cd. Then all of the files will be converted into a standard cda format.

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Hello! I've been unable to get online for a few days, so I'm just reading the newest responses. So here goes.

Look at it this way: Burning a CD is protecting all the $$ you're spending on songs. If your hdd crashed and you lost all your files, you'd be upset right? This is the 'backup'

I agree, but would prefer to save several mp3 files as opposed to only 10-12 wav files.

Okay, sorry to sound obvious here, but why don't you just convert the m4a files to mp3 with iTunes? In you iTunes library, right click on the m4a song and select "Convert to MP3" from the dropdown menu...

In this case stating the obvious is o.k., because it wasn't obvious to me.

I tried that and got a dialog stating that protected files could not be converted to other formats. I believe that the m4p files that iTunes saves your music downloads as are protected. Thus no conversion by iTunes.

I don't have a burner (I'm planning to get one) so I can't try the Burn & Rip method yet.
On a side note, this whole situation makes sense if it's Apple's way of selling more iPods. They are probably getting VERY little, if anything on the sell of individual tracks or even whole albums, but the whole 'protected' format thing will force the less knowledgeable consumer to buy the iPod thereby making Apple's pockets nice and fat.

However, I think they might have made more money by licensing out the AAC encoding format to the various mp3 manufacturers. While those who want to pay the big $$$ can still go out and by iPods to their hearts content. Just my 2¢.

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Burn the tracks to cd. These days you can find cds on sale and it comes out to like a quarter per cd or something crazy like that. As was stated above (and in iTunes) these songs are your purchases, do not rely soley on media for backup. Put them on a cd. Then you can rip them to whatever you like. I have not noticed any degradation in quality at all (but I'm not a pro).

Apple uses that format because they believe it's a smaller footprint with greater sound quality. Their device, their opinion, their right.

I have an ipod and jukebox. I purchase from iTunes, burn to cd, rip to mp3 and put on both devices. It's <$1.00 which puts my album purchase price at around $10-$10.50 and takes about 30 minutes to download, burn, rip and copy.

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kona0197

Join Date 02/2003

+86

CD-R's are very cheap. I can get 100 at Fry's Electronics for 9 bucks.

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you can buy mp3 players that work with AAC files. but i'm gonna sitk with my iPod mini

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Hey, check it out. I found this program called JHymn which converts m4p's to wavs and then from wavs to mp3's. Go ahead and give it a try here --> Link
if you're interested. I know it works with iTunes 4.8 but I don't know if it'll work with ver. 4.9 yet. Hope you like it.

I agree burning is a good way to backup and protect your music, especially when you've spent maybe a few hundred bucks on iTunes downloads. And I have heard of people who have 5000, 10000, or more tracks in their library. While not all of that is gonna be iTunes downloads, it still can represent a significant investment for the number of tracks that were purchased.
I just need to get around to buying a burner.

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I want an IPod mini so bad I can taste it. I've even set up a cart at the apple store which has mine already to go, customized engraving and everything.

rool:

The thing is, I have no idea why. I've got a 1g Sandisk which works really well and uses 1 AA battery. I can listen to music for 2 weeks before I need to recharge the battery.

But that Ipod....mmmmmm. Sleek, stylish, so yummy looking, 1000 songs, calendar, phone lists, etc. It's $200. Which isn't a reaaaalllyyy a lot. But I don't need it.

I want it. I want it bad.

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Everyone I know who has an iPod or Mini (about 15 people) has had some major problems with it at one point or another (from headphone jacks breaking to, to random "outages" where it stops working or syncing for a week and then is fine, to complete device death after a month or two of ownership). On top of that, you have to have iTunes, you have to have songs in those limited formats, and you get crap like this.

I got an iRiver 20gig jukebox last winter for about 300 bucks and I've been very happy with it. It's a USB mass storage device, so I just plug in the USB cable and can copy songs right onto the thing, drag and drop. I can also copy other files for easy storage, backup, or transfer between computers.

It plays MP3s, WMAs, and OGGs right out of the box and may support more now, I haven't checked for firmware upgrades in a while. It also has a full color screen, can display images or .txt files if you put them in the right folders, both the txt files and song titles support Asian characters (good if you study Japanese like me, and listen to lots of J-pop and anime music), do (very good) voice recording (I've recorded a lecture from far, far back and it sounded great... though of course I was too lazy to listen to the whole thing ever again), has an FM tuner, can be charged via USB if you misplace your power cable...

It's just plain stellar. I used to have an iRiver 256 meg flash mp3 player that was also great (had the fm tuner and voice recording too), that's why I went with them for this thing. They are hand down my favorite portable music device company.

Here's a link, though I have the 320 not the 340 (20 gig vs. 40 gig), I find it sad that they are now concentrating on 2-10 gig jukeboxes with oversimplified controls and limited features (H10 series), when they had a product this good. Probably couldn't compete with the simplicity and "sexiness" of iPods.

Link

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I have been talking to some ipod owners myself and have gotten the same responses about problems. Too bad. I don't have the $200 anyway, so I'm not at risk

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I've done a lot more investigation...All the articles about sound problems due to a bad connector design on Apples part are from last year, as are most of the articles about losing connectivity and having to reset/restore the ipod. Are there any problems being 'widely reported' with the current version of the ipod mini? and how do you know which version/generation you are buying?

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I agree with you Lord Shitzu, without ever having heard the sound quality on any iRiver player, I am convinced that is the brand I wanna get. I was interested in 3 brands, iRiver, SanDisc, and Creative MuVo. I got on Google and just did a little comparison shopping for prices, features, usability, etc., and between that and the reviews for the various players iRiver came out head and shoulders above the rest. One of the features that seems to be really cool is the fact that the iRiver flash players have a battery life of about 40 hours! Have you found that to be true? I'd like to get your impressions as an iRiver user if I could. Thanks for the help all!

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