[woot7800GT]

Simple question: It seems that all the music I download through Itunes is saved in "m4p" format. What is this? Is it a proprietary itunes format? Windows media player can't play it. I want to convert it into Mp3 to burn CDs and use in a movie I'm putting together. Can I do this?

[horndude]

m4p is proprietary, most media players that will play mpeg4 will play them though

yes they can be converted with a little ingenuity

windows has plugins available to grab the sound stream off of your soundcard thru wimamp

with other OS's like linux its much easier just to convert them to mp3 or ogg directly

[woot7800GT]

So what do you recommend for converting to MP3? Winamp? Specifically which plugin?

[horndude]

dunno which plugin, just known one exists cause Ive heard others speak of it, it isnt fast, works in real time and records the stream as it goes thru your soundcard

me, I use linux and use mplayer to pipe the audio into oggenc or lame, often for people in your situation I did a dvd full of music for someone over the weekend who owns a mac

dunno what to tell you, cept GPL or open source software may be one of your few choices.......none of the software companies want to touch this for obvious reasons

mplayer can be run on windows though, and used with the command line, its even easier with cygwin(makes a linux like bash shell environment for windows)

cant be much more specific than this or this post will get killed for piracy issues

[woot7800GT]

Well I'm not intending to pirate. I just want to use some of the songs I have on iTunes in a movie. Alright, thanks for the help, I've got a few leads now.

Seperate question: When I burned a CD using iTunes, I could play it on regular CD players but not on Xbox or other PCs. What's the deal? Is this normal?

[horndude]

part of their copy protection scheme, they will play on PC's running any of the open source OS's though (which also come stock with tools to copy anything), just not in windows or apple

[EricB]

Iopener will convert an mp4 to m4a (unprotected ACC file). then find something to convert to mp3