My problem was with copy-protected song downloads. I paid for these songs, but my portable MP3 player wouldn't recognize the files. I have an iRiver, which doesn't like to play nicely with the ".m4p" files that you buy from iTunes. It also hates WMA files, which were also copy-protected and therefore a real pain in the butt to do anything with. The whole thing was stupid. These are legally-obtained files, but they won't work anywhere but on my computer? How does *that* discourage people from downloading illegally?

So, I found Tunebite, a conversion utility that actually works.

The concept is really simple, which is usually the best solution, right? Of course. All this does is re-record the songs while they're playing on your computer. That gets around the copy protection: you have a regular, unprotected MP3 file that will work just about anywhere, but you also have the original file until/unless you delete it from your hard drive.

Now my MP3 player recognizes every song that I load into the memory. And the new files don't lose enough audio quality for me to discern any different between the two files. So, I can enjoy my music wherever/whenever I want.

Side note: this software also let me convert protected WMA files to MP3s so that iTunes would accept them into its playlist. Before, iTunes wouldn't convert the files or anything.

then the moral of the story is. always download illegally?

the music industry are seriously going to have to sort themselves out properly if they want people to not use p2p and to buy mp3 [or any other random formats]. instead they occasionally make an example of some poor 13 year old girl who was downloading that latest top 40 pop singles.

The music industry is now trying to get you away from the idea and concept of "owning" a song or music and move to a model where you "rent" it, like with the new Napster service. You get access to a million songs, but as soon as your subscription laps, the songs no longer work.

iTunes can convert to MP3's with no copyprotection. Granted I have an iPod, Mac, and iTunes, so absolutely no problems. However, of all the schemes out there, Apple has developed the best balance between the need to thwart piracy and fair use. I can burn a song on to a CD to listen to in my car (or I can always just plug one of those cassette things from the iPod output into the cassatte player). I can put the songs on my two home computers and my Mac at work and still have two more machines/devices to put it on.

People, especially around forums like these where techies don't like something that's popular merely because it's popular (bloody engineers), like to complain about iTunes and iPod only likeing to play with each other. My Response is that there are a dozen other downloadable music services now, so if you don't want to use Apple's, you have a choice in the matter. Competition is good. However, that being said, Apple has created an easy (and arguablely easist) system with both iTunes (which is still hands down the best jukebox/digital music organization software on the planet for either Mac or PC) and the iPod. The iPod is easy to use, works very well, and along the way has become "trendy". Which never hurt sales. However it is that easy to use, one doesn't have to be a computer nerd part that sold the first couple generations of iPods.

Now with the Shuffle being $60 for 512Mb...there are models at all price ranges from cheap to expensive so i imagine that even more people will be using iTunes as the surpass a Billion downloads here soon.