[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Convert Your iTunes Purchases to MP3s here

[tenney67]

This is exactly why I refuse to buy a IPod. If Apple were to make a IPod that plays MP3's directly I would buy one, but I refuse to be a slave to ITunes.

[ARock84]

I guess you don't know what you are talking about do you>? An IPOD does play mp3's but when you down load music from apple its not going to be an MP3 its going to be an ACC file. If windows sold music Im sure it would be an WMA and notr an MP3. Thats just their file extension that they use.! ! !

[macron1]

AAC is not proprietary, and several other devices (e.g. PSP, Sony Walkman Digital Audio Players, Walkman Phones, N-series Phones from Nokia...) can play it

[mgodjames]

Hi there,
Please be accurate. You can play MP3s anytime on iTunes, rip your own CDs. That's not been the issue. You could always convert whatever you bought from iTunes to mp3 and play it anywhere, but it was somewhat cumbersome. This new change just makes it easier.
There are plenty of aggravations out there - with PCs as well as macs (see Vista, etc.). Let's not add fake issues.

[owlmonkey]

AAC is not proprietary, it's the mp4 format. Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvancedAudioCoding
According to wikipedia, the AAC format is also supported by Creative Zen, Microsoft Zune, SanDisk Sansa, Sony Walkman and PSP, and others. I think this article needs some serious reconsideration.

[reybeast]

I guess you cant read either. He never said an ipod would not play mp3 files.

[mattflaschen]

MP3 and AAC both require proprietary patent licenses. Apple (and Amazon) should support a truly open format like Ogg Vorbis (which is incidentally far better technically than MP3).

[ff11]

Why on earth would you convert your music to MP3 music by default and lose quality before you need to?

This is nothing but a drawback if your music player can already play AAC files.

[tfvdw2at]

I will try to be a little bit more polite than ARock84. In your article you say, "Because Apple still encodes songs using the proprietary AAC format...". AAC is not an Apple proprietary (or for that matter any company's proprietary) file format. Wikipedia has the following about AAC:
"Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at many bit rates.
AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 & MPEG-4 specifications. The MPEG-2 standard contains several audio coding methods, including the MP3 coding scheme. AAC is able to include 48 full-bandwidth (up to 96 kHz) audio channels in one stream plus 15 low frequency enhancement (LFE, limited to 120 Hz) channels and up to 15 data streams. AAC is able to achieve good audio quality at data rates of 320 kbit/s for five channels. The quality for stereo is satisfactory to modest requirements at 96 kbit/s in joint stereo mode, however hi-fi transparency demands data rates of at least 192 kbit/s (VBR), as with MP3.
AAC's best known use is as the default audio format of Apple's iPhone, iPod, iTunes, and the format used for all iTunes Store audio.
AAC is also the standard audio format for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and is supported by Sony's Playstation Portable, latest generation of Sony Walkman, Walkman Phones from Sony Ericsson, Nseries Phones from Nokia, Nintendo's Wii (with the Photo Channel 1.1 update installed for Wii consoles purchased before late 2007), the Nintendo DSi, and the MPEG-4 video standard."
Also to address tenney67, iPods play MP3's natively along with the following file formats:
MP3 VBR, AIFF, WAV, M4A AAC, M4P AAC, M4B AAC, Apple Lossless, AA (Audible Spoken Word file format)

[mattflaschen]

" You could always convert whatever you bought from iTunes to mp3 and play it anywhere, but it was somewhat cumbersome."

Not legally you couldn't. The old fanboy-recommended method, "Oh, it's so simple. Just export all of your music onto CDs, then reimport them as MP3s" is a violation of the DMCA. Why bother with DRM in the first place?

[mattflaschen]

"I will try to be a little bit more polite than ARock84. In your article
you say, "Because Apple still encodes songs using the proprietary AAC
format...". AAC is not an Apple proprietary (or for that matter any
company's proprietary) file format."

You're missing the point. Yes, as Wikipedia says it was standardized. But legally implementing the standard requires the use of several proprietary patents. See http://mp3licensing.com/

[jtgroth]

I wouldn't recommend converting AAC to MP3. MP3 and AAC are both lossy formats, but the compression algorithms differ. If you take a WAV or AIFF file (CD quality) and compress to AAC or MP3 then convert that back to the original format you can see how each compression deals with loss. My experiments show that AAC has loss over a wider spectrum but less loss, where MP3 is more loss over a narrower spectrum (at the low and high end for both). Converting from AAC to MP3 (or vice versa) will essentially give you the worst of both worlds.
AAC is not a reason to not buy an iPod (because the device will play MP3, AAC, ALAC, WAV/AIFF), but it is a reason to not purchase music from iTunes. I refuse to by any music from iTunes, Amazon or any other source if it's not full quality. I do use AAC for my iPhone so I can fit more songs on it, but I start from CD quality only. That way I can decide how much loss, if any, is acceptable.
If you're okay with purchasing a lossy format, then keep it in the format you buy so as not to compound the problem.

[JaywalkerExtraordinaire]

{quote} Because Apple still encodes songs using the proprietary AAC format ?{quote}

Apparently Mr. Broida failed to do any research for his blog post. AAC, Advanced Audio Coding, is a standardized, a proprietary format.

{quote:title=From Wikipedia:}AAC was developed with the cooperation and contributions of companies including Fraunhofer IIS, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dolby, Sony Corporation and Nokia, and was officially declared an international standard by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in April 1997. ?

It is specified both as Part 7 of the MPEG-2 standard, and Part 3 of the MPEG-4 standard. As such, it can be referred to as MPEG-2 Part 7 and MPEG-4 Part 3 depending on its implementation, however it is most often referred to as MPEG-4 AAC, or AAC for short.

AAC was first specified in the standard MPEG-2 Part 7 (known formally as ISO/IEC 13818-7:1997) in 1997 as a new "part" (distinct from ISO/IEC 13818-3) in the MPEG-2 family of international standards.

It was updated in MPEG-4 Part 3 (known formally as ISO/IEC 14496-3:1999) in 1999. The reference software is specified in MPEG-4 Part 4 and the conformance bit-streams are specified in MPEG-4 Part 5. A notable addition in this version of the standard is Perceptual Noise Substitution (PNS).

HE-AAC (AAC with SBR) was first standardized in ISO/IEC 14496-3:2001/Amd.1. HE-AAC v2 (AAC with Parametric Stereo) was first specified in ISO/IEC 14496-3:2001/Amd.4.

The current version of the AAC standard is ISO/IEC 14496-3:2005 (with 14496-3:2005/Amd.2. for HE-AAC v2)

AAC+ v2 is also standardized by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) as TS 102005. ?

AAC was designed to fix many of the serious performance flaws in the MP3 format (which was specified in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) by the ISO/IEC in 11172-3 and 13818-3.

Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MP3 format and demonstrates greater sound quality and transparency than MP3 files coded at the same bit rate.

Source{quote}

If a digital audio player doesn't support a modern standard like AAC, that is the fault of the manufacturer, not Apple. Many manufacturers, such as Sonny, Microsoft, Nintendo, Creative, SanDisk, and Palm, Nikia, Samsung, RIM, and Siemens, to name a few, do offer AAC support.

{quote}[I]f you're a purist, you may want to skip iTunes altogether and buy MP3s outright from a store like AmazonMP3.{quote}

A "purest" would not purchase music in a lossy format at all (unless it was not available in a lossless format), most likely by purchasing the CD. They certainly would not use MP3 when a superior standard like AAC is available. Nor is a "purest" likely to purchase a digital music player that does not support AAC.

[ToyotaTundra]

That didn't work for me, I still got a message stating the it's a protected file.

[tfvdw2at]

@mattflaschen: No, I am not missing the point. The author of the blog refers to AAC as proprietary to Apple and that is simply not the case. I understand that the author makes the valid point that the MP3 is compatible with more devices than the AAC format, but they are both licensed by the same organization, which is not Apple, but Thomson, acting as an agent for Fraunhofer Institute in Germany which owns the patents and software for encoding both MP3 and AAC

[holmesr]

AAC is a higher quality format than MP3 at the same bit-rates. What would be better, is for the other brands of music players to support AAC as well as the formats they currently support.
Please correct the article to point out that AAC is not a closed format, and please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvancedAudioCoding to understand a little more about it.
From Wikipedia:
No licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format.[8] This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format to distribute content than MP3, particularly for streaming content (such as Internet radio).
However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs.[9] It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement. (See below under Products that support AAC, Software.)

[imikejackson]

Go buy one because iPods have always played mp3s. http://www.apple.com...ssic/specs.html

So either find another excuse or go buy one.

Mike

[kthhrrsn]

AAC is more than just a file extension. It's a proprietary Apple format. Until Apple introduced iTunes Plus music (for $1.29 a song), their music would ONLY play through iTunes or on an iPod/iPhone. Many people who purchased iPods didn't realize that the music they purchased and downloaded from iTunes couldn't be played on non-Apple made mp3 players. If something happened to their iPod, they had no choice but to go out and buy a new iPod to continue to use their music. I buy all of my digital music from Amazon.com because I want to not only play the songs on my iPod, but I also want to have the ability to move certain songs to my 8GM microSD card and play them on my BlackBerry Curve, which is always with me. Until Apple made the decision to ditch DRM, they were limiting themselves by limiting consumers from using their music as they wish.

[jtgroth]

If the source file still has Apples DRM, iTunes won't let you convert it. You need to upgrade the song to the DRM-free version first. This may cost thirty cents per song. Also not all of the iTunes songs are available in DRM-free versions yet, but should be by the end of the quarter.