iTunes Conversion M4A to MP3

AppleSeeds2009 said:

I have a Macbook and a library mostly in M4A format. I have a 8GB mircoSD card for my Virgin Mobile LG Rumor Touch. iTunes 9.0.3.

I am trying to convert M4A to MP3 so it will work properly on my phone. When I convert from M4A to MP3 using iTunes, the music losses the artist & album info so it appears with only the track name on my phone. MP3s that have never been converted from M4A (from Amazon for example) play and appear with all info on my phone. How is iTunes stripping info during the conversion? I only have 1 or 2 songs bought from iTunes store, so they are not protected.

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Not sure the answer to your actual question. But I would encourage you to NOT do what you're doing. At least if you value quality at all. Transcoding will result in inferior sounding music.

Think of it this way. Each song uncompressed has all the data and sounds "perfect" (not really but whatever)... if you compress the music using one compression format such as AAC (M4A files) then that format inherently gets rid of certain bits in the original file to make it smaller in size. If you then take that same file that is now an AAC file and encode it to MP3 then MP3 will remove certain bits of the song that are likely different entirely to what AAC removed. So now you've effectively lost lots of information.

Just a warning.

I want to convert M4A to MP3 so I can play on my mp3 player

i have this very small portable mp3 player that I use for running and I want to play my M4a songs, but the player only accepts mp3 format. What is the best way to convert some of the songs over to mp3 into a different ITune library folder so I don't ruin the original M4a format? I have ITunes 9.2.1 and there is no option for converting to MP3 on the advanced tab. Any hints are very much appreciated.

snowpak2001 said:

i have this very small portable mp3 player that I use for running and I want to play my M4a songs, but the player only accepts mp3 format. What is the best way to convert some of the songs over to mp3 into a different ITune library folder so I don't ruin the original M4a format? I have ITunes 9.2.1 and there is no option for converting to MP3 on the advanced tab. Any hints are very much appreciated.

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You really should have created a new topic considering this thread hasn't been updated in 3/4 of a year and since you have a different issue.

Anyway to answer your question, Go into the Preferences, Click Import Settings on the General Tab and make sure MP3 is selected. Click on the song(s) you wish to convert, click Advanced and then and click "Convert to MP3". It'll convert it to MP3 but it'll remain in the same folder because it has the same album name and artist name. There is no way to change this.

You'll just have to go through the folder and take out the MP3s.