— Is there a way to convert the files I have imported to MP3 or am I stuck with what I have.
Easy answer to what seems like an easy question…
Yes, you can easily convert non-protected (non-iTunes purchased) AAC audio files (the variant of MP4 that iTunes by default uses), into MP3 for burning to a CD for your car.
The more complicated answer…
When you are dealing with audio there is a sort of Gold Master audio file that is uncompressed. iTunes then takes that Gold Master audio file (which usually starts somewhere around 50MB for a 5 minute song) and strips out a boatload of what is for most people, unnecessary information (per the MP4 standard for audio) making the file around 5MB. This is so that people can have more music with them and still enjoy it. It isn’t a perfect representation but it is close enough for what most people need to enjoy the music. At that point it gets sold to you from the iTunes store which is the file that you consume. These are usually nomenclatured as “Protected AAC files”. Protected because they have what’s called Digital Rights Management (DRM) attached to the file to prevent unauthorized people from being able to play it.
This is the same sort of function that takes place when you take an audio CD and encode it for your iTunes library or your MP3 player. You can select the encoder in iTunes (MP3/AAC/WAV/AIFF/Apple Lossless) when you are encoding that track from the audio cd. The default is AAC/iTunes Plus which is the same sort of compression (really pretty good) that the iTunes store scenario uses above. Now the question remains what happens when you convert something that is already a compressed file (AAC aka MP4) into another compressed format (in this case MP3). There is a generation loss as a result. Will it work, yes. Is there loss as a result, yes. Will you notice it, probably not. Could someone notice it, yes. Usually it takes comparing a first generation to a third generation before you really start to notice it. So if you compared an original CD with the file encoded to AAC, you would probably not notice it. If you compared the AAC to the MP3 you also probably wouldn’t notice much. If you did a direct comparison of the original CD to the MP3 that was created from the AAC that was created from the original CD, that you might notice, maybe.
How do you fix this:
You could simply batch process all of the AAC files by organizing them based on the Kind of file they all are. Change your import settings inside iTunes (I usually suggest MP3 and Higher Quality – 192kbps) Select all of the tracks, and choose “Advanced”>”Create MP3 Version”. That will start the transcoding and it could take the better part of a day to change all of the music depending on how many tracks you have. You will have to rebuild any manually created playlists (Smart Playlists should update automatically). This will also result in duplicates of all of the tracks that have been encoded. Once you’ve rebuilt your playlists, you can remove all of the AAC versions, but you may want to keep them, since those are of a higher quality than the MP3 versions. That is up to each individual user.
— I just assumed (you know what that means) that since they go on an iPod they were saved as MP3 files.
The term MP3 player is a bit of a generational misnomer. Many folks used the term MP3 player for the class of devices that iPods originally were a part of. Now the iPod is the misnomer and many people call all portable media players “iPods”. Kind of like “Kleenex”. An iPod, like most portable music players, can be more appropriately classified as a “Portable Media Player”. Modern (quality) portable media players can play many different formats of media. Here is the list of media types that an Apple iPod Classic can currently play.
Audio formats supported:
– AAC (8 to 320 Kbps)
– Protected AAC (from iTunes Store)
– HE-AAC
– MP3 (8 to 320 Kbps)
– MP3 VBR (Variable Bit Rate)
– Audible (formats 2, 3, 4, Audible Enhanced Audio, AAX, and AAX+)
– Apple Lossless
– AIFF
– WAV
Video formats supported:
– H.264 video, up to 1.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Low-Complexity version of the H.264 Baseline Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
– H.264 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Baseline Profile up to Level 3.0 with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
– MPEG-4 video, up to 2.5 Mbps, 640 by 480 pixels, 30 frames per second, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps, 48kHz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4, and .mov file formats
So an iPod is an MP3 player but it can play more than MP3 files. The MP3 format as been around as a standard since 1991 and since things like MP4 and various higher quality codecs have come around that are a bit better sounding.