GuruReuben wrote:Lawrence wrote:No, definitely not. The ITunes Proprietary format limits your use of the file to only 5 machines.
I believe only songs "bought" from the iTunes Store have that limitation. They only "sell" crappy 128kbps files anyway, so any self respecting music lover doesn't get their music that way.
You can however use iTunes to rip your own stuff to mp3 or Apple's AAC format (and a couple other formats, I forget which) and do what ever you like with them.
Not only did I not know that ITunes could rip MP3s, but I found the following four additional features, which has made ITunes my default ripping software.
1) ITunes has variable bitrate recording (VBR). I don't know how variable bitrate settings are handled in other software, but if you select VBR, then the bitrate you select becomes the MINIMUM bitrate for the track (not the maximum); thus, to use VBR to save space, you need to set the bitrate at LOWER than you normally would set it. You also can adjust the type of VBR, from high-quality to low-quality. Thus, you can set it at 128 minimum bitrate with "high" quality, and most of the songs will come out with an average bitrate of, say, around 200; or set it at 128 minimum and "medium" quality, and your songs will average about 170.
On the Edit drop-down menu, select "Preferences" (or hit CRTL-COMMA). In the Preferences window that pops up, select the "Advanced" tab, then select the "Importing" tab in the "Advanced" settings. On the "Importing tab, under "Setting," select "Custom" and a window will pop up with both the VBR check box (check it) and the bitrate setting.
2) You can set ITunes to automatically download the album information AND to automatically rip a CD when inserted, and then eject it when finished. Combining these three different settings eliminates much of the burden of ripping your own stuff; you can do it at work in the background without much of a distraction, at all. Just put in a CD, work, remove it when ejected and put another in. It does all the work except load and remove the CD from the tray. Note that this feature is not compatible with #3 and #4 below because #3 and #4 both involve making manual edits before ripping.
These settings are on the same "Importing" tab of the "Advanced" tab on the "Preferences" window that pops up from the "Edit" drop-down menu.
3) You can manually edit the tags BEFORE ripping, including BPM, genre, album, and so on, which stay with the MP3 as you take it to other programs. The only tag that does not go into the MP3 is "rating" (ITunes keeps it as part of the database), but all the other tags hard-code the MP3 tag that you can carry to and view in any other program. (You can edit the tags for any track in Itunes this way before or after ripping, but do it BEFORE you rip the MP3 so it is hard-coded into the MP3 instead of into the ITunes database; if you use #2, then edit the tags outside of Itunes because not all edits will stay with the MP3 outside of ITunes.)
Insert the CD, and from the CD window, right-click on any track. Select "Get info" and a info window will appear for that track. Select the "Info" tab, and most all the relevant tags will appear int he window for editing.
4) You can change and set the "start" and "end" point of the MP3 to eliminate intros and "outtros." It is not as precise as some software because it does not provide a visual graphic of a sound-wave timeline so you can locate the splice visually, but you can parse the seconds into tenths and hundreths and, using trial and error, can pick the precise moment you want the MP3 to start.
The actual MP3 will begin and end at those start points. As with #3, this feature similarly works for MP3s (and all track) that are already in the ITunes library, but it will only keep track of the setting for ITunes if you adjust it after you rip the MP3, so adjust this setting BEFORE you rip.
This setting is also on the "Get Info" window for any track. After you load the CD, right click on the track, select "Get Info," and select the "Options" tab. The start and stop times are in the middle.
Reuben, I owe you one.