How to put iTunes M4P music onto Windows Media Player?

The following tutorial will show you how to remove DRM from iTunes protected AAC (M4P) music and convert M4P to (DRM free) WMA/MP3 so as to put iTunes M4P music onto Windows Media Player for syncing to a lot more mobile players.

Why Put iTunes M4P music onto Windows Media Player?

When you purchase music from iTunes Store, you actually get DRM protected content (in protected AAC or M4P format), which you will not be able to play on MP3/MP4 players and other non-Apple mobile players. You cannot directly transfer the M4P files to Windows Media Player, either. In such case, the option is to burn those tracks to an audio CD and then rip them (with iTunes or Windows Media Player) once again to your computer hard drive wherein the DRM will be removed and you will get the tracks in (DRM free) MP3 or WMA format. After this you will be able to transfer them to Windows Media Player.

In case you have purchased a great amount of music from iTunes Store, you can go ahead and use TuneClone M4P to MP3 Converter which acts as a Virtual CD-ROM drive on your PC and lets you remove the DRM element without having to waste actual CD’s, with the music ID3 tags info well preserved.

Step by Step: Burn and Rip iTunes M4P Music for Windows Media Player?

1. Insert a CD-R or CD-RW disc into your CD-ROM drive.
2. Burn the iTunes M4P playlist to make an audio CD. You cannot select the “MP3 CD” option since it requires the DRM protected iTunes M4P files be converted to MP3 or WMA files for Windows Media Player.
3. After the audio CD is successfully burned, insert the disc into your CD-ROM drive again. Then you can use iTunes or Windows Media Player to import the music tracks on the burned disc as MP3 or WMA files.

Step by Step: Convert iTunes M4P Music for Windows Media Player with TuneClone

1. Create a new playlist in iTunes.

2. Add the M4P songs to the playlist.

3. Launch TuneClone M4P to MP3 Converter. Click the “Settings” tab. In the pop-up window, you can specify output folder, output file name format, output format (choose MP3 or WMA), etc for the output files. Note: You can check whether TuneClone virtual CD drive is successfully installed and where it is installed in the bottom left corner of the interface.

4. Switch to iTunes. In iTunes, click the “Burn Disc” button.

5. In the pop-up window of “Burn Settings”, select “TuneClon Virtual_CD-RW” from the “CD Burner” drop-down list, click the radio button next to “Audio CD” and tick “Include CD Text” option. Click “Burn” to start burning.

6. Upon the completion of burning the disc and encoding the music, you can open the TuneClone manager screen to show all the converted music files. To locate the output folder, simply click the “Folder” tab on the interface.

Source from http://www.tuneclone.com/how-to-put-itunes-m4p-to-windows-media-player.php
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iTunes Plus: Everything You Need to Know

By Nate Lanxon
Source from http://crave.cnet.co.uk/

Apple’s iTunes Store is almost completely DRM-free, and will be entirely DRM-free from spring. This means files downloaded from iTunes work on heaps of devices that aren’t from Apple. What better way to celebrate the final bullet to the living corpse of copy protection than by reading everything you need to know about iTunes Plus? There isn’t one. And anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, and not your friend.

Be warned: your account information is stored in every file
Although iTunes Plus files feature no copy protection, files downloaded still contain the email address you have registered with iTunes. So although files can physically be shared with, and played by, friends and family, any of your purchases that end up on file-sharing networks, for example, can be traced back to you.

If you’re interested in an easy way to check your own files, find an iTunes Plus file on your computer. Then choose to open it with a text editor (Windows Notepad works fine). It’ll take a while to open and will appear to be full of nonsense text, but if you choose the ‘Find’ option and type in the email address you have registered with the iTunes Store, you’ll find that your DRM-free music is not personal information-free.

iTunes Plus files aren’t MP3s
iTunes uses a format called AAC, which is a more modern alternative to MP3, with the file extension ‘.m4a’. Many players support this format, however, and you can create MP3 versions of the files within iTunes if you want to, so don’t worry — it’s like petrol versus diesel in the car world, except your player’s engine won’t break if you put the wrong format in.

Players that support iTunes Plus
Unlike the old downloads from iTunes, the new files are supported on a range of devices. Devices that support AAC include the Creative Zen and Zen X-Fi, the Sony A series, S series and E series, the Archos 605 WiFi and Archos 5 (with optional plug-in), the Sony PSP and PlayStation 3, the Nintendo Wii, Sony Ericsson’s Walkman phones and Nokia’s XpressMusic handsets, the Logitech Squeezebox systems and the Sonos streamers.

Upgrading your library to iTunes Plus
As all your previous iTunes downloads are now available in DRM-free format (or will be within the next few weeks), Apple lets you upgrade them — at a cost. It’ll cost you 20p per song, or 25 per cent of the cost of the album, which is usually £2 a pop.

CNET UK’s editor Jason Jenkins had a smashing moan about this the other day. But not just about the cost: Apple doesn’t let you choose which songs you upgrade — you either upgrade it all, or not at all.

If you do upgrade, however, your new DRM-free songs have twice the audio quality of the originals, and replace the originals within your library. Any playlists they appear in, or any ratings you’ve given them, remain unchanged. Whatever you think about the cost issue, you can’t argue with the simplicity.

The final word
Eighty per cent of music in the iTunes catalogue is DRM-free already, and you’ll probably find that very little of what you search for remains in the old DRMed format. At the time of writing, 90 out of the top 100 songs on iTunes are in iTunes Plus format.

You can tell which songs are in iTunes Plus by looking for a little plus symbol next to each song in search listings. Or look above the ‘Buy Album’ button at the top of an album’s page for the words ‘iTunes Plus’.

Convert Your iTunes Purchases to MP3s

By Rick Broida, PC World
Source from http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/01/07/convert-your-itunes-purchases-mp3s

As you’ve probably heard by now, Apple just announced plans to ditch DRM for good. That means all songs you purchase from iTunes will arrive on your PC without the usual copy-protection shackles.

However, this doesn’t give you carte blanche. Many music players and mobile phones will still not be able to play songs in the format Apple is using, because the company will continue to use its proprietary “AAC” files, rather than changing to the more universal MP3 format.

Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to convert iTunes Plus purchases (i.e. the DRM-free versions of songs) to the universally compatible MP3 format. Here’s how:

In iTunes, go to “Edit”, “Preferences”, “General”. Click the “Import Settings” button. Change the “Import Using” option to “MP3 Encoder”. In the “Setting” field, choose “Custom”, and then set “Stereo Bit Rate” to your desired setting (I recommend 256 kbps or 320 kbps). Click “OK” three times to exit the various windows.

Now you’re all set to convert any iTunes Plus download to the MP3 format. To do that, right-click the song and choose “Create MP3 Version”. Wait a minute or so and presto: iTunes plops an MP3 copy of the song into your library.

Note that you’ll have now both versions of the song in your library, so you’ll have to do a little housekeeping.

The bigger downside is that converting from AAC to MP3 necessarily involves some loss of audio fidelity. Not much, but if you’re a purist, you may want to skip iTunes altogether and buy MP3s outright from a store like AmazonMP3.

Note: If you want to upgrade your previously purchased tracks to DRM free, you need to pay 30 cents per song. And you can’t pick and choose which tracks to upgrade. Start by going to the iTunes Store home page, and clicking on “Upgrade My Library” under the “Quick Links” heading. Once there, you’ll see a list of all the songs and albums that are available for upgrading, with a price next to each. But the important number to look at is the price next to the buy button, since that’s how much it’ll cost to upgrade your library.

So, if you have a big collection of iTunes music tracks ready to upgraded to DRM free, you will have to pay not a small sum of money. And in order to listen to them with your MP3 player or mobile phone music player, you still need a further step – convert the AAC music to MP3 one by one. It is really a money-consuming and time-consuming process. My suggestion is that you follow this tutorial about how to convert iTunes M4P music to MP3 with the burn-and-rip method or using TuneClone Audio Converter.