How in the heck do you get music off iTunes to somewhere else?

Ah the age old question…well maybe not, but I hear it almost on a weekly basis. Just today I got that question again and I thought this would be a good blog post.

First thing is first “Why does Apple make it so hard to transfer music?”

Well technically they don’t, what they are doing is making it difficult to figure out how to convert a file from their AAC format to something a little more familiar like MP3. You see by default they are having iTunes convert a file to their AAC format, but you can change that…or you can simply convert it manually in iTunes even though you have already downloaded it in AAC

Here we go

I am using iTunes 11.0.5 currently fyi

Step 1.

Open Itunes 🙂

Step 2.

If you are using a Mac you will want to go to iTunes > Preferences <-I am using Mac

If you are using Windows then you will want to go to File > Preferences

In Preferences Click on “Import Settings”

 

You see where it says “AAC Encoder”? Simply change that too “MP3 Encoder” and save/exit and you are done.

Well you are not totally done, but at this point any music you download from iTunes at this point will download as a MP3 and you can distribute it as you please to any other device that plays MP3, which is pretty much EVERYTHING!

Step 3.

Now we are going to convert existing music from AAC to MP3. Don’t worry it’s easy

 

All you have to do is go to your Music Library and select the song you wish to convert. Then go up top to File > Create New Version > Create MP3 Version. What iTunes will do at this point is create a new version of the same song but it will be the MP3 version of it.

You can also just right click on the file and click on “Create MP3 Version”. Either way works the same.

Since you are going to be creating another version of he song, iTunes will show both in the Library but they are going to look the same. You can determine which version is the MP3 by right clicking on each song and click on “Get Info”

 

Then at the bottom of the window you will see the file path. If it ends in “.mp3” then that the file

 

Step 4.

So how do you take the file from iTunes to somewhere else? Well that’s a whole other post so stay tuned.