Music conversion help
 

I recently purchased an external hard drive and loaded a bunch of songs to it. A small percentage of the songs are in M4P format (I believe protected by i-tunes). Is there a free way I can convert them into MP4 or MP3 format?

Rip the songs to a CD, burn them out, re-import them as MP3. That'll beat the encryption.

Another way I do this is to fire up SoundForge or Soundbooth (wav editing programs), get a good level, hit Record, then start the tune. This will record it to your PC thru the soundcard- it remains entirely in the digital domain. Then just clip the beginning and end of the wav, normalize if necessary, and save as an mp3. A much more involved process, yes, but infallible.

Thanks, I have about 1000 songs to convert. I was hoping to find some sort of software that would take care of it, but there doesn't seem to be any available. This will help for the ones I "have" to have.

Yes, there is software that can do a batch conversion; but even with this, 1000 tunes will take a looooong time to convert.

I use a program called WinXMedia CD/MP3 Converter. It both rips CDs to various formats, as well as doing mass conversions from one format to another. I have no idea if it'll work on protected ITunes, tho- my guess is that it will not. I'm sure you can find a free trial version of the program on the Web to see if it'll work for your purpose....

Z