Help! - iTunes, WMA format

[leyton]

I have a Rio Carbon MP3 player that contains a number of songs in WMA (Windows Media Player) format.

I also have a Macintosh with iTunes, and while iTunes will interface with my MP3 player it will not play any of the songs in WMA format. (I have tried to play them straight off the MP3 player through the USB cable and I have also tried to copy the files from the MP3 player onto my hard drive. Neither has worked.)

I would like to get my songs from my MP3 player onto my computer and put them into a format so I can play them there (on iTunes). Is there a way to convert them to an iTunes-friendly format?

Thanks!

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

1. Welcome to the world of proprietary, competing digital music formats.

[leyton]

2. *grumble*

The software industry is so effing ridiculous...

[gmoney]

3. Do you have any way of burning an audio CD from your Rio player?

Probably the only way it'll fly.

You could also try WireTap or AudioHijack to record your Windows Media player playback on your mac, if you have SOME way to copy the songs from the Rio to your Mac hard drive.

[AirmensMom]

4. If you can get them on your computer

you should be able to import them into iTunes. I've done it on my Windows XP computer. The WMA files were already on my computer. I think you actually use the File>Add Files (or Folder) to Library from the iTunes menu, not File>Import (I'm going by memory right now since I don't have anything to convert at the moment.)

Am I misunderstanding the question? I get that you can't get them from the MP3 player to the computer, but I don't understand why. It seems like you should be able to treat the MP3 player like another drive and just drag them over, although I've never tried it. I must be missing something.

[leyton]

5. Ah, I don't think I made my situation clear.

I can get the files onto my computer - but I can't get iTunes to play them. I do have some music that iTunes will play and I would like to be able to use one program for all my music. When I try to import the files, they are grayed out and can't be imported.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

6. You will have to use a Windows machine to turn the .wma's to .mp3's.

Where did the .wma's come from in the first place? Must've been a non Mac computer...

[leyton]

10. They came from a Windows machine

I had a lot of Windows Media Player music on a Windows machine at my house. Then I got a Rio, put my music on there, and went off to college with my iBook and my Rio, leaving all my CDs behind.

[AirmensMom]

8. OK, so iTunes must work differently on Windows.

I can get it to import all my files. Sorry I can't help.

[democracyindanger]

7. et voila

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4-0.html?tag=srch&qt=wma+mp3+converter&tg=dl-20&search.x=16&search.y=11

[samdogmom]

9. I have a program made by Sonic Foundry (now Sony) call Sound Forge Studio

It allows you to convert digital music files from one format to another. You can transform your WMA files to MP3s or another file format that iTunes recognizes. As far as I know, there's no way to do a batch convert (I could be wrong, though). You'll have to open each song file you want to convert in this program and manually resave it in the new format. This could get time consuming depending upon how many files you want to convert. Are these WMA files protected? If so, I'm not sure how the program handles protected content.

I keep all my song files in a high quality mp3 format (320 kps). I can move these files between iTunes and Windows Media Player easily and I can load them on iPods and Creative Music Players with no problem. I would recommend ripping all future music to your computer in mp3 format because it is more flexible than the proprietary Windows (WMA) and Apple (AAC) formats. Good luck!

[CanuckAmok]

11. to batch convert:

Download "CD-DA x-Tractor" (freeware).

burn your WMAs onto a CD, then put the CD in your CD drive with CD-DA X-Tractor running. It will automatically recognise all the tracks on the CD, and you can "select all" to convert them to MP3.

FWIW, I have pretty much made the change to AAC, even though I'm on PC. I kept backups of all my music on MP3, but I pretty much always use the AAC files in iTunes or WinAmp (which also reads AAC).