Need some uber-geek help with mp3/ipod stuff

[schloaty]

Hey guys,

We have an ipod, and we buy our music through itunes.

Now, we just bought a random mp3 player for my daughter's b-day under the false assumption it could play the itunes files.

It does not.

I think Ipod files are mp4's, not mp3's.

Are there any geeks here who might know how to convert the ipod files into mp3's? For the life of me, I can't figure it out. Maybe because it's late, maybe because I'm just not smart enough....hopefully just because I'm overlooking something obvious...

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[seedjar]

In iTunes, go to the preferences/options, and under the general options, near the bottom, there will be a button that says "Import Settings". Click on that and it will allow you to specify which type of encoding you want iTunes to use by default. It used to be that you could select different codecs/containers on the fly whenever you re-encoded files, but Apple decided to squirrel that option away a while ago for some reason.
Anyhow, once you have the preferences set to use MP3s, save your changes. Then select some files, and in the "Advanced" menu on the main window, there will be an option to "Create MP3 Version". You can also right-click on a single file (or a selection of files I guess) and it should be about two-thirds of the way down in the contextual menu, just above "Add to Playlist...".
I used to have a nice batch converter these jobs, but I forgot what it's called the last time I had to wipe my drive and rebuild. iTunes is perfectly capable as a converter but obviously not optimized for users that want to do this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. One tip I can offer - when iTunes converts the files, it automatically adds them to your library, giving you duplicates of everything in the library/album/artist views. If you didn't get rid of them already, you can use the "Recently Added" smart playlist to figure out which files are the old ones and which are the new ones.
~Joe

 

[schloaty]

OMG, seed...You SO ROCK!

Thanks bud!