My perspective about “buy once, play anywhere” is not shared by everyone in the music industry, so you’ll be using these sort of software on your own recognizance. That’s an easy fix that would help with usability.Īnd I also want to come back and address intellectual property and digital rights management. The only complaint I have about Apple Music Converter is that once you’ve converted the selected tracks, there’s no easy way to “unselect all” so that if you don’t quit the program and restart it, you’ll find that your previous tracks are still in the queue the next time you click “start conversion”. A preview of the non-DRM MP3 file from Miss Peregrine’s School for Peculiar Children Original Motion Picture Soundtrack shows what I mean: Once they’re converted you can see that everything is copied across, including all music meta-data. The conversion zips along pretty darn fast too, so you won’t have time to pop into the kitchen and grab a cup of tea. Ready to convert everything? Double checked that the output folder is correct? Then click on “ Start Convert” on the top bar and it starts to chug along… Heck, you can even extract just the audio track from an MP4 movie if you desire. Once you do you can dig through your iTunes library and pick more, from a single track to dozens of them from widely disparate spots. One thing to realize is that you have to actually check the checkbox adjacent to the track or tracks you want converted. No worries, Apple Music Converter can handle that too: What about if you just need to convert an audio file without digital rights management? Well, I often record meetings with the useful iPhone app Voice Memos and those all end up in Apple’s AAC format. The above shows how to split out the DRM. Don’t know what’s what in this alphabet soup? No worries, just pick Mp3 and know you’ve got the right format for 99% of use cases. The full list of output formats is longer than this and includes: MP3, M4A, AC3, AAC, AIFF, AU, FLAG, M4R and MKA. The lower region shows the output parameters: I’ve chosen MP3 which is really “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3”, with normal quality (high quality produces bigger files and I can’t really differentiate, personally), specified my output folder and the name of the resultant file.Īll looks good, but what other audio formats are available? Glad you asked! A click reveals: If it’s already in MP3 format, of course, no conversion is needed and it’s ready to copy onto my microSD card. In this case, it’s “ Purchased AAC audio file“. The program shows the cover art, genre and kind. In the above, notice on the left that I’ve chosen my “Purchased” playlist, and from that I’ve clicked on the title track. To be fair, it’s not particularly elegant with its interface, but everything you need is shown. I opted for Mac and here’s the main window once launched: There are versions for either Mac or Windows PC systems, both available through a quick download from their site. No bueno for this particular use case.Įnter the easy to use Apple Music Converter program. It is, of course, important to support musicians, composers and production companies so that we will continue to have great music down the road too, but that means all the music I’ve purchased is locked down and only playable within iTunes, and only that after I’ve logged in to my Apple Music account. The idea of copying my favorite 100 albums onto a flash drive and then having them always available for listening, whether I have my phone or not, is very appealing.īut all my recent music are purchases from the iTunes Store. On the Mazda the slots were just tucked in a recess of the dashboard, next to the microSD card reader (that’s only for the navigational system data, unfortunately): Look at all modern cars and you’ll find a USB 3.0 slot or two where you can plug in your phone and charge it, or you can plug in a device that just contains your music collection. And yet this issue came up again when I was test driving the brand new 2016 Mazda CX-5, because it has support for something that is only usable if you have music without DRM: USB plugs perfect for a flash drive full of music! Rent a movie on your Apple TV and it’s no big deal: you rent it, watch it, and you’re done.īut what if you want to listen to that brand new album on something other than an Apple product? To do that, you need to defeat what’s known as the Digital Rights Management (DRM) system, and that’s a bit of a gray area unfortunately. I’ve always been a proponent of buy once, play anywhere with my music and movies, but unfortunately most of the digital distribution systems have a very different philosophy, choosing to dramatically limit the functionality of the music, audio books and even movies and TV shows you purchase to within their own little world.
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