One of my friends gave me a gift card to iTunes this year for my birthday. Seeing as I'm always needing musical inspiration for either running or writing, I was excited. I have like this ongoing/everchanging list in my head of songs I like, so I couldn't wait to sit down and download them. Last night after the girls went to bed I had a few moments to myself to do this, so I pulled out the gift card and player and sat down at the laptop.
My first hurdle was the fact that my mp3 player's memory was full. I'm seriously thinking about asking for one with more for Christmas, this one barely has half a gig, which just isn't much. Anyway, I checked the memory and sure enough no space. So I hooked it up to the laptop only to find that I couldn't see any of the music on it in order ot delete some. I googled the website for the manufacturer of my player, got some tips and tried a few things only to figure out that my media player on the laptop was like 2 versions old. Thus began the download of the most current version. Once that was finally set I could see all the music, yay, so I copied it onto the computer and then went through the list and deleted some songs that I typically skip over in the course of a run anyways. Okay, so I had some free space.
Next, I headed on over to iTunes only to figure out that I had to download it in order to buy anything. That was kind of a pain becuase I don't use it for managing my media, but I was able to download it without it taking over, which is the case sometimes.
Finally, I got to the iTunes store, plugged in the gift card number to redeem and lo and behold, I have to have an iTunes account. So, I sign up for an account. Then, finally, I'm browsing through music. It takes me a few minutes to figure out how to get to where I want, but I do and I'm finding music that I just can't wait to listen to on that uphill section of my regular running route. I spent all but eleven cents and then decided I wanted that music on my player right then so I could use it today.
Wait, how do I get my music from the iTunes thingy to my player? I couldn't see any sync command within the program so I tried finding the music folder and copying and pasting into my player. It worked but that's weird, that one song I just copied is not in mp3 format. Hmmm, I wasn't sure about it, so I searched through the iTunes help quickly and found my answer.
What? iTunes will only sync with iPods? What!?!
Yeah, all that time spent on that music and its stuck on my laptop. I was too frustrated to search around too much for a solution to this problem, although I'm sure there's one out there. It just boils down to how propriatary Apple is in their products, which is why we don't deal with them at our computer store and why I will never purposely purchase anything else from them.
First of all, check the file extension on your songs and see if it is ".aac" or ".m4p" or ".mp3". If it is ".mp3", then you should just be able to transfer it using Windows Media Player or whatever you use to load your other player.
ReplyDeleteYour other option is to burn those songs to a CD in iTunes, then reload it to the computer in Window Media Player and they will be converted automatically to MP3. Yes, a bit of a hassle, but better than not being able to listen to it!