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well you can surely try..

itunes prefs>advanced>importing>set the decoder to mp3.

drag file into itunes or right click than convert.
 
I assuming you are talking about converting MPEG4 audio layer files to mp3, so a *.m4a to *.mp3 conversion, not extracting the audio layer of an MPEG4. For those wanting to, quicktime pro should allow you to save the audio layer as an aac file, (so m4a), then if you really need to downgrade the quality to mp3, continue as described above.

Any files you ctrl-click or right click, you can convert to the same as your default by selecting the convert option. Say you have a 320kbps mp3 track you want to convert to 128kbps aac, set your importing to 128 aac under preferences and then when you go to select convert, it converts to what you have set under preferences' importing panel.
 
Do note though, that since .m4a and .mp3 are both lossy formats, you'll lose sound quality by converting from one to the other (more than you would by simply encoding in the mp3 to begin with).
 
Do note though, that since .m4a and .mp3 are both lossy formats, you'll lose sound quality by converting from one to the other (more than you would by simply encoding in the mp3 to begin with).

+1

This is not a very good idea if you care AT ALL about your audio quality. Re-rip from the CD if possible. I just cringe when I hear about people re-encoding a lossy format to another lossy format.
 
Conversion

I just ripped a video from youtube extracted flv to mpeg4 with iExtractMP3. Then i loaded the file into itunes switched the import properties to MP3. Then i right clicked on the song converted it to MP3 and it sounds great i picked high quality in the settings so for my mp3 or small background music on a presentation it works great.
 
I suspect the easiest would be QuickTime Pro with MPEG Components,
Unfortunately it'll run you $30, and the free Perian QT component.

Read the MPEG4 into QuickTime, and export/sound/to AIFF and use
a converter (iTunes'll do it) to convert the AIFF to MP3.
 
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