How To Convert Audio Files To Different Formats Using iTunes
iTunes is basically a music jukebox that organizes and plays digital music as well as videos on your PC. It can easily handle several tasks related to digital media such as burning CD, syncing digital media files with your iPhone or iPod, purchasing videos and music online etc. It also lets you enjoy movies, videos, music and television shows right on your PC or Mac.
You may save your media collection in the iTunes library and browse any digital media instantly, anytime you wish. Moreover, iTunes also has an ability of converting audio files to different formats. Different users might have various different reasons for converting audio files.
- User might have AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) files on iTunes which might not be compatible with the Zune media player which is capable of playing MP3 but not AAC files.
- User might need to email a WAV file to a client but the file seems to be too big and he/she has to convert it to AAC file in order to reduce its size.
- User needs to set a downloaded song as a soundtrack to his/her music video and he/she is unable to import the song even by editing the program as it does not support AAC or MP3.
- User wishes to remove the Digital Rights Management (DRM) from an AAC audio file that he/she had purchased from iTunes store.
There are numerous other programs which convert audio files to different formats but majority of them are quite complicated and expensive. On the contrary, iTunes is fast, easy to use and above all, free. You need to follow the below mentioned steps for converting audio files to different formats using iTunes.
- Click on “Start” button to display the Start Menu on your PC. Select “iTunes” to launch the application. Incase of Mac, you will find it in “Applications” folder.
- Within iTunes application, go to “Preferences” to open the “Preferences” Window. Go to “Importing Options” screen. Based on the iTunes version that you use, the location of “Importing options” might differ.
- For instance, in older iTunes versions, there is a separate orange icon within the “Preferences” Window for importing. In the newer iTunes versions, importing options are hidden in the form of a nested tab “Importing” within the section “Advanced”.
- Select the format you wish to convert the audio files to. Note that, iTunes can covert from/ to various formats including MP3, WAV, AIFF, AAC and Apple Lossless.
- For instance, if you wish to convert an AAC audio file to MP3 so that you can listen to the song on your non-iPhone/ iPod music player, you need to select “MP3”. You are also allowed to select the bitrate quality which is set to 128 kbps by default and is good enough for any average person. You may select a higher bitrate value if you wish.
- Exit the “Preferences” Window. Now, you need to go to the iTunes library and find your song(s) that you wish to convert. If you wish to select multiple songs, you may hold down the “Apple” (“Alt” incase of Windows) or “Shift” key while you make the selection.
- Go to the Advanced menu and select the option “Convert Selection to..”. Alternatively right-click on any of the songs which you have selected and choose the respective option from the right-click context menu.
- You will notice an orange colored spinning ball within the source window of iTunes once the conversion process starts. You may click on the spinning ball to view the progress.
- The time taken for conversion will differ depending on type of conversion, number of songs selected and your computer speed. If you want to speed up, you may close other applications running on your PC to accelerate the conversion process.
- Once the coversion process is over, iTunes will notify you with a chime. A similar chime sound is played by iTunes when it finishes burning a CD.
- Incase any of the songs selected for conversion was bought from iTunes store and is not in the iTunes plus format, iTunes will show an error message notifying you that the file is protected and can’t be converted to a different format.
- To resolve this issue, you simply need to burn such song(s) onto an audio CD and import them back to iTunes.
- There are some applications such as Hymn which are capable of removing DRM protection from the songs which are bought from iTunes store. However, Apple disables such songs with DRM being altered.
- Once the selected songs have been converted to the desired format, you may search for the files in iTunes Library. There will be two versions of every song that you have converted. One will be the original file and the other one, the converted version.
- You may as well delete the old version if you wish to keep only the newly converted one. The easiest way to distinguish between to old and new version is by checking the “Date Modified”. The song with the latest date is the one that you have converted.