Have I Jumped The Gun?

[swayed]

Hi everyone , just wanted a little advise and input please. When Apple came out with itunes with aac support,I immediately reripped my cd collection (3000+ and growing) into 128aac and deleted all my old mp3's of my cd's(to save drive space and take advantage of better sounding files), and herein lies my dilemma, none of my pc friends can play aac(thats what they tell me.)(if i want to send them a song to listen to) and also in the car and home surround system mp3 is all that the players will do. What I was wondering is how do others handle this problem, do you keep 2 copies of a file (aac and mp3) or just convert an aac file to mp3 when you want to share it or have a copy in the car or play in a dvd player. Also do you think aac will always be a mac thing or will pc users eventually start using it to encode songs? What I was wondering was have I made an error in adopting aac so quickly or should i have stayed with mp3 for cross platform compatability and longevity, the last thing i want to do is re-rip everything but also kind of want to be prepared for the future and not have a bunch of music files that i may or may not be able to play(I keep all my music files on a separate firewire drive so i can go between pc and mac). My pc friends say this is like VHS vs Beta and that aac is the equal of Beta. Thanks in advance.
swayed

 

[iJon]

this is what i would do. just hold out a little longer. apple will have itunes 4 for windows out soon (before end of year) and then they will be able to play anything. as for car or home stereo, dont make them mp3's cds. convert them to the audio standard just like a regular cd.

iJon

 

[gello2424]

I could swear when i copied my collection of CD's into iTunes I made the the apple format which I didn't mean to do. I went in to the pref. menu and then clicked on importing then changed importing to mp3 format. After I was done with that I went to itunes and clicked all of my apple formated songs and I know there was a option to convert them!(I think it is as easy as right click or is in the menu) Check it out might be very helpful to you and I know that you can do it.

P.S. It is under the advanced tab select your files and click convert selection to mp3

 

[pyrotoaster]

AAC's nice, but it's yet to move to other platforms (*cough* Windows! *cough*). Obviously, iTunes for Windows will help bring an end to this problem.

I rip new CDs into AAC, but I'm not going to bother with re-ripping old ones. Then again, my music tastes differ quite a bit from those of my friends, so I don't have the file sharing issue that you do.