help with Itunes/CD's

[brendan67]

hey

sorry if this has been asked and explained before but i'm new to
MP3 formatting etc.

here's the deal - i have a collection of my own personal shop bought cd's which i would like to condense into MP3 format for playing in my car stereo which is MP3 format. When you rip tracks from your cd into Itunes do they become MP3 format? If not, how do I convert them to a format that is smaller allowing me to have perhaps a few cd's with loads of tracks
condensed, and which i can keep in the car?

hope this makes sense any help would be much appreciated.

kind regards

[Chundles]

Hi there. Let's see if I can beat mad jew to the punch.

Firstly, you'll need to open iTunes. Follow the instructions that follow:

PC:
Go to Edit -> Preferences. From here go to "Advanced" the "Importing". Click on the "Import Using" drop down menu and select "mp3." From here you can either select "Setting" and chose one of the three listed options, (192 gives good sound, 128 gives a smaller file but slightly less quality - still good though, I'd recommend 128 for your car CD) OR, you can select "Custom" and fiddle around with the settings a bit more (eg. you can enable Variable Bit Rate to shrink the files a bit more).

Once you like the settings, click "OK," insert the CD, wait for it to populate the CD track data and then click the big "Import" button at the top right of the window.

Mac:
Same deal only you go to "Preferences" under the "iTunes" menu in the Menu Bar.

Caveat:
iTunes cannot burn what is known as CD-Text discs, many car players are able to read these CDs that display the track name on the player's display as they are played. You can burn an mp3 disc by dragging all your songs into a new playlist (the little + button in the bottom left will set you up a new playlist, from there you just select the songs or groups of songs and drag them onto that new playlist). Keep the size of the playlist to about 685MB. Go back to the Advanced Preferences only this time go to "Burning" and select "mp3 disc" under the "disc format" menu. Click OK, then when you are satisfied with the disc, insert a blank CD and click "Burn Disc" in the top right hand corner.

Et Voila.

[brendan67]

hey

i,ve already imported the cds and made playlists

if i use preferences etc will i still be able to convert them
or must i import them again?

thanks for the help

regards

[robbieduncan]

hey

i,ve already imported the cds and made playlists

if i use preferences etc will i still be able to convert them
or must i import them again?

thanks for the help

regards

If you have already imported them as AAC and you want MP3 you should re-import. There are utilites that will turn AAC into MP3 (not iTunes) but the sound quality will suffer.

[Chundles]

If you have already imported them as AAC and you want MP3 you should re-import. There are utilites that will turn AAC into MP3 (not iTunes) but the sound quality will suffer.

iTunes will turn all your AAC encoded tracks into mp3 - just set your importing preferences as per above and then select all your AAC tracks. Right-click on them and select "convert to mp3."

This compresses an already compressed file so sound quality does suffer. You're best off re-ripping your CD's to mp3.

[brendan67]

thank you everyone for your help with this, i'll try this out asap

kind regards