Three price points: 59p, 79p and 99p at 256kbps AAC DRM-free
Apple on Tuesday followed through on its promise to remove all digital rights management (DRM) from music sold on the iTunes Store. The company also unveiled tiered pricing for individual songs and albums.
Apart from a great game player, the PSP-3000 is also a very good entertainment device which can be used for playing music. Suppose you’ve purchased a lot of songs from iTunes Store and are trying to figure out how to transfer them to your PSP-3000. You copy and paste the songs to the PSP music folder, however, the PSP doesn’t recognize them as music at all. What’s wrong? This article comes to the rescue! It is composed of the following parts:
Part 1. How to put iTunes DRM music to PSP-3000
As we know, the majority of music from iTunes Store goes DRM free (iTunes Plus). However, as long as you are not a new iTunes user, you are likely to have in your iTunes Library some songs which are DRM protected. You have to pay 30 cents per songs in order to upgrade them to DRM free. It’s simple mathematics. For 500 songs to upgrade to DRM free, you need to pay USD150 = 500 X 0.3.
To save money, the easiest way is to burn the music to an “Audio CD” and then rip it back to Windows Media Player or a similar program as MP3 music.
Or you can turn to some software for help. I always use TuneClone M4P Converter to help me convert iTunes music to MP3, ready to transfer to my new PSP-3000. The steps are quite simple:
1. Download and install TuneClone M4P Converter.
2. In TuneClone, click the “Settings” button and choose “MP3″ as the output format.
3. In iTunes, create a new playlist and add to it the iTunes music you are going to put onto your PSP.
4. Click “Burn Disc” button. In the pop-up dialog of “Burn Settings”, select TuneClone virtual CD drive as the “CD Burner”, choose “Audio CD” from the “Disc Format” checkboxes and tick “Include CD Text” option (to preserve music metadata).
5. Start burning.
Part 2. How to put iTunes DRM free (iTunes Plus) music to PSP-3000
To put iTunes Plus music to your PSP-3000, launch your iTunes and then:
1. Click on “Edit -> Preferences…”. From the “General” tab click on “Import Settings…” button.
2. Change the “Import Using” drop down box to “MP3 Encoder”.
3. From the “Settings” drop down box select “Custom…” and choose a “Stereo Bit Rate” of “256Kbps”.
4. Click “OK”, “OK” and “OK”.
5. Now find a file that you want to convert, right-click on it and select “Create MP3 Version” and an MP3 copy will be created.
Note: If you want to skip the trouble of converting AAC music to MP3 one by one, you can still use TuneClone M4P Converter to help you transfer the iTunes Plus music to your PSP-3000. If you have both iTunes DRM music and iTunes Plus music in your Library, it is recommended that you get TuneClone to batch convert the music for your PSP.
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’.
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.
