Apologies & Gifts

I currently have 1,271 emails in my inbox.  This is a problem.  Cranes have been hired.  Expect replies shortly.

So long as I'm apologizing, I wonder if anyone knows how to convert a song ripped in iTunes into an .mp3.  After I lost my hard copy of Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate—his best, by far—I downloaded it through iTunes ... which means I can't import it into my newly purchased generic .mp3 player.  Now, neither my original rips nor the iTunes files work, and damn it, if I can't listen to it, I'm living for nothing now, and am keeping, no kinds of records.

I also misconverted all my episodes of In Our Times, so if you have any about and some bandwidth to spare, I'd love to reconnect with my collection.  If I can't learn about epistolary novels most immediately, I'll ensconce myself in that cupboard until Mr. B. uses wiles to release me.

Gifts: Leonard Cohen, Master Song, So Long Marianne, Stranger Song.

Comments

[Floyd]

When you right click on a song in your library, is there a "Convert to MP3" option? I can't claim to have done it, but I've seen it there.

[Bob]

For converting files I usually use GoldWave. The trial version has full functionality, you're just limited by the number of commands per session.
It's been a while since I originally installed it too, but my imperfect memory suggest that you'll need one of their plug-ins to read a .m4a file.

[Gian dei Brughi]

If you use Mac OS X, go here:

http://sbooth.org/Max/

That program has the advantage of being freeware; no need to mess around with a trial version. In the likely event that you're a Windows/Linux user, that will not help you.

[Joseph Kugelmass]

Scott, have you tried burning to CD and then re-encoding as .mp3? Once you've burned an AAC file to CD (as a CD file), it's no longer DRM-protected.

[not veronica]

Audio Hijack is an application that lets you record the audio output of any other program (audio players, video players, internet browsers streaming audio ...). This may be an overly complicated solution to your problem, but it's such a great app I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[Minivet]

If you haven't upgraded to iTunes 7.1 or higher, you can use myfairtunes6, which is designed for this purpose. It requires you to play through the tunes all the way, and it can be a bit creaky, but it usually works.

[Luther Blissett]

To repeat what's already been said:

1. Under "Advanced" in iTunes, there's the option to "Convert selection to mp3"

-or-

2. You can burn the Cohen album onto a CD-R, then re-import it as an mp3. Just make sure your import settings are switched to mp3 rather than Lossless(Preferences-->Advanced-->Importing)

-or-

3. Or can record yourself in Garageband performing the entire Cohen album, then export the files to iTunes, and finally convert these to mp3s.

[Karl Steel]

After I lost my hard copy of Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate—his best, by far—I downloaded it through iTunes

Alternately, since you've already bought it, I don't see that there's anything unethical about getting another copy through, say, Soulseek.

[Rich Puchalsky]

As long as people are helping people with iTunes software in this thread, does anyone know of a (preferably free) player in OS X that will reliably play Ogg Vorbis files? The xiph Quicktime plug-in for iTunes and other players flatly does not work for me.

[Karl Steel]

Good lord, Rich, why not just switch to Ubuntu and be done with it?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Many thanks, all. I'm sure one of these will work. Also, Not Veronica helped with the In Our Times problem, as I can play them through Realplayer and record them to an .mp3. Today's looking like it's a good day. (More on that in a moment.)

[pseudonymous in nc]

Rich: VLC is your friend.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Thanks, pseud, I'll try it.

Karl, I'm not really sure why I don't switch to Ubuntu. I think that as an early adopter of Linux for servers, I associate it with system administration, which I want to shove out of my life as much as possible. Also, I assumed that OS X would have programs to interface with the Windows world more simply than Linux would. (This may well be false; OpenOffice on OS X, for instance, is quite creaky). Should I re-evaluate those things at this point?

[Karl Steel]

Should I re-evaluate those things at this point?

Can't tell you that. I'm not very knowledgeable about computers, but I am pretty much exclusively a Ubuntu user these days. That alone suggests that you might want to reconsider your antipathy to Linux. Interfacing with Windows? Not too hard. There's Samba for that, which I use for getting my computers to talk to each other and sometimes for transferring things between my wife's (windows) machines and mine. I tend to prefer Abiword to OpenOffice (which saves quite nicely in .doc format), and, when I absolutely need to use Windows, I use this. I don't know if it's easy to dual boot on a Mac, but if it is, why not give Ubuntu a try? Can't hurt you so long as, haha, you back up all your data first.

[Alex]

Don't do it SEK - none of it!!

All the suggestions here will actually reduce the quality of your already low quality iTunes media files, doing what is called a transcode, that is making an MP3 of an AAC file, a bit like back in the day when you made a tape of a tape and it lost quality, you are compressing an already compressed file. Since you legally have these files I will gladly zip you over a lovely clean LAME (best encoder around) -V 0 -vbr-new rip from my own collection - this is the best format for most listeners and is the same quality I believe Warp Records use.

[Kevin]

I second Alex's suggestion (and yes, it gets no better than LAME coupled with EAC). I also second Karl's and Pseudonymous in Nc's suggestions, but for different reasons.

I've known a handful of people that have dual booted Linux and OsX. Don't know if it's hard, but it's possible.

Hey Karl, have you tried VMWare Server? I have and I prefer Virtualbox myself, but a lot of people seem to prefer VMWare and I'm not sure why. My virtual Windows machine was slow as hell with identical settings as in VBox and it turned me off.

I'm now off to figure out if my site is broken or if I've been attacked. The heavy server load my host just informed me of has me worried, but it could just be a script gone awry.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Sadly, VLC doesn't work right with my Ogg files any more than anything else on my mac. I'd guess that it uses the same xiph plugin.

And, since iTunes-LAME failed to encode some tracks from a not-even-scratched CD, I also tried the nearest equivalent of EAC for the mac I could find, xACT -- whose clueless Linux-style interface also reminded me just why I'm still resisting it for my desktop. I mean, thanks people, I really want to devote hours to figuring out how to copy tracks off a CD.

I think that one of the main advantages of Windows is that when you waste time trying to fix something, you at least don't expect any better.

[Karl Steel]

Hey Karl, have you tried VMWare Server?

Have not. VBox works just fine for me, once I figured out what command to run to get it running again when the kernel updates. Since I upgraded to 2G of memory on my lappy, I give over 1G to my virtual machine when I'm running it, and, well, it's more than fast enough. But even with 1/4 that, it ran just fine on the 300M I gave it. It was just that I couldn't run firefox and amarok (my preferred music player) in the background at the same time.

Oh, c'mon Rich. Not every Linux interface is equally clunky. Try Ubuntu. It's free (everybody now: as in beer, as in speech) and it's easy, especially if you don't want to do anything particularly fancy.

Sorry for hijacking the thread into a Linux Rulz thread, but there you go.

And VLC works like a charm on everything I throw at it, at least on my machine.

[Scott Lemieux]

After I lost my hard copy of Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate—his best, by far

True! Fortunately, I was able to get a hard copy of the new reissue for 8 bucks...

[Brian]

I found MyFairTunes to be horribly clunky. I had much better luck with QTFairUse.