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I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 16 years 10 months 27 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

Here’s what I went through on Christmas Day, just to get songs we legally purchased through Itunes to play on my kids new MP3 players…

I will never spend another dollar with Itunes after what I went through. Tell me again why anyone would pay $.99 a song, only to (eventually) figure out that you’re not allowed to listen to them on any device other than an Apple brand music player?

This is so wrong, and I can’t believe there isn’t more fuss about this, and some consumer backlash. Who does Apple think they are, Microsoft?

Anyway, my kids received Creative Labs brand MP3 players for Christmas, and they also each received a $15 Apple music gift card.

After painstakingly helping them through the process of installing iTunes on their computer, which is mandatory just to spend the gift certificates, we sorted through hundreds of songs choosing what music to buy. I had to listen to samples from Hannah Montana, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the Jonas Brothers until my ears were bleeding, but we finally completed the process and had all 30 of our songs downloaded.

Then came my attempt to get the music onto their MP3 players, where I finally figured out that it could not be done with that music. I was shocked! What kind of crap is that? Ultimately, I had to jump through several hoops to make it happen.

In the end, here are the steps, and as far as I can tell, there is no simpler way, but it still sucks, having to burn and then throw away perfectly good CDs.

  • Buy music from the proprietary format ripoff music vendor (a.k.a. Apple)
  • From inside the application of the forced download of Itunes, assign all of your desired music to one playlist
  • After selecting the play list, highlight all songs with Ctrl – A on your keyboard, and hit the “Burn Disk” button in the bottom right of the software.

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  • Insert your blank CD, and go to the process of burning your music to a CD you’ll never need. Too many songs may require multiple CDs, but they can all be done in succession.
  • After all of your music is on CDs, uninstall iTunes so you never make this mistake again (this step is optional)
  • Open Windows Media player (I’m running version 10) – , and maximize the window so you can see the menus at the top.
  • Go to Tools > Options and select the “Rip Music” tab from the menu. Pay close attention to the location you’re going to “rip” music to so you can find it again.
  • In the “rip settings” pulldown menu, instead of the default Windows Audio, and hit “apply”. I also chose to check the box that said, “Rip CD when inserted”.

wmedia-ripcd.jpg

  • Assuming you have the CD in already,go to the main “Rip” tab in Windows media player, and highlight all (Ctrl-A) of your selected songs.
  • Hit the “rip music” button at the top right of your screen, and in just a few minutes you’ll have all of your music back off of your CD, and ripped into MP3 format, at which point you can use your regular software that came with your MP3 player to import your music.

wmedia-ripcd2.jpg

This ridiculous limitation by Apple serves what purpose exactly, other than to alienate me as a customer?

If I had known ahead of time that the music could not be played on a regular MP3 player, then I would’ve bought it elsewhere in a standard MP3 format, and I’ll never again buy music from Apple. Why is there no warning on their website and on gift cards people buy that the music use is limited?

One note of caution is that this process completely removes all of the song information, such as title and artist. For my own kids it didn’t matter, since their MP3 players had no screen for selecting songs, but for someone who wants to be able to see and select what song they are going to play on their MP3 player that would be frustrating.

If I had wanted to retain my song information, (which I bought and paid for legally), I would’ve had to use a third party program to outsmart Apple at its own game, and remove Apples DRM (Digital Rights Management)and I’ve been led to believe that one of the best is called Tunebite.

Instead of using that I’ll just choose to never give the Apple music store another dollar of mine, and instead whether for my own video Ipod, or for the kids songs, I’ll use one of the many other music services that sell you music you can play on any MP3 player, such as…

MP3.com , or Legalsounds.com, or Emusic.com, or Napster or Buy.com or Magnatune or MP3 Ninja or 100 others. Perhaps I’ll even use Walmart, where it’s only 54 cents a song, but after forcing me to waste my time on Christmas, (and today writing this blog post), iTunes is dead to me forever.

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