I was recently told the following by someone at work and would like to know if it's true.

I was told that if you download MP3s from itunes that you can only listen to them with the iPod.

I thought you can download from iTunes, burn the MP3s to a disk and listen to them using any stereo (vehicle or home) that supports MP3s or a non iPod MP3 player.

Which is correct? Thanks.

 

Well, if you buy them through the iTunes music store, they're not in mp3 format, they're in aac. So I guess you can convert them to mp3 but they're "protected", so I really don't know I never buy them on iTunes. Sorry thats the best help I can give.

 

To the best of my knowledge, you can burn each track to an audio CD a limited number of times. Assuming that is true once you have a track on audio CD, you can do anything you want with it. The only problem there is that you will be recompressing an already compressed audio file if you want to convert it back to MP3 or some other format. Recompressing makes a big difference in quality.

 

You CAN burn them to a CD with iTunes and play them on most any CD player. However, like traben27 said, they are protected. This means that you can only copy the .aac or .mp3 (whatever form it's in from iTunes store) to as many as 5 devices (computers, iPods, etc), and you will have to authorize each device or computer that tries to play them by logging into the iTunes store when you try to play the downloaded song the first time on each device (iPod is the exception).

As far as CD's, I believe you can burn as many as you like (someone confirm this, I don't know from experience!).

I don't buy anything from iTunes store simply because of the protection junk. Even if I buy it perfectly legal, I can only copy it to 5 computers that I own legally? I dislike that.

 

Besides iTunes, were else can I get MP3s without those restrictions? Damn I miss Napster (when it was free) and WinMx. Thanks.

 

Limewire.......still free....

 

agreed. as far as i know. if you only download and not let others upload from you, you are not in violation of the law.

 

i have had bad problems with limewire in the past. Its only Ares for me all the way.

 

use torrent

 

wrong. you are in violation of the law for downloading pirated songs OR uploading them. doesn't matter. if you didnt pay for it legally, its not yours and youre getting it anyway. it used to be true that the RIAA only went after those sharing songs, but now they set traps for even those strictly downloading.

 

oh cool. thanks for the update.

 

Just go buy the CD if you don't want restrictions. That's what I do.

 

Yeah, just buy CDs from Amazon and have them shipped right to your house. Most of the time you can get them for cheap. Boy do I miss allofmp3.com.....

 

You can dl and burn an audio cd, then rip that cd using another program to rid yourself of the protection. I had to do this b/c someone gave me a $20 itunes GC, I would not dl songs from there on my own dime.

 

I still buy a lot of CDs and other I burn from friends that have older ones.

 

This is correct...you can covert the ACC files to MP3 and burn them, then re-rip them and the protection is gone. This has been true for a while unless they have changed it recently.