Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Qythyx]

I'm considering moving towards purchasing some of my music as downloads. Since my collection is entirely CD-originated lossless WMAs so far, I'd like to keep the quality high and purchase lossless going forward as well. I know there are a few options available, one of which is iTunes' AAC lossless format.

My question is this: is it possible to convert a protected AAC lossless file to another format (WMA in my case)? If this isn't possible directly, does iTunes support burning to CD? If so, does anyone have any experience burning to a virtual CD drive and then ripping back off of that?


Finally, does anyone know of any other services where I can purchase music is a convertible/non-protected format?

[Galley]

Yes, you can burn purchased tracks to a CD, but the iTunes music store only sells 128Kbps files.

eMusic.com sells only non-protected MP3 files, but I don't know what their quality is.

[Qythyx]

Oops, I misread the stupid description. It said that iTunes supports lossless and I assumed they meant the store, where they really meant the media manager software. Blah!

[Health Nut]

I use lossless and iTunes sucks...  Shame that we can't get Apple's Losses integrated here officially and working well.  I want to transfer easily from APE to Apple's Lossless for iPOD reasons...  unfortunately I still have to use the crappy iTUnes and two other steps in between... convert from APE to WMA lossless, and then from WMA to apple's Losslessss... how stupid, but I need apples lossless on my 60 GB iPOD...

[Galley]

FWIW, Apple is requiring all publishers to upload files to the music store as lossless files.  This leads me to believe that Apple with either offer lossless downloads in the future, or you may have an option of bitrates, and they would be transcoded "on the fly" before they are downloaded.

[BartMan01]

I use lossless and iTunes sucks...  Shame that we can't get Apple's Losses integrated here officially and working well.  I want to transfer easily from APE to Apple's Lossless for iPOD reasons...  unfortunately I still have to use the crappy iTUnes and two other steps in between... convert from APE to WMA lossless, and then from WMA to apple's Losslessss... how stupid, but I need apples lossless on my 60 GB iPOD...

Have you tried to use iTunesEncode?  It is a command line utility that encodes files to AAC using the iTunes API.  You may notice that there is no option for quality because you set the encoding options in iTunes itself. 

Haven't tried it in a while, but you should be able to set it up in MC as an external encoder and go straight from APE to AAC as you transfer songs to the iPod.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35242