Beware of iTunes!!

[Kevin]

The other night, I went to play some of my favourite music on Windows Media Player. It couldn't detect ANY of the songs I wanted.

Being a suspicious old sod, I interrogated my sons to ask if they'd removed my music for some reason. They all denied having done so.

Going into the folder that I keep all the family's music in, I discovered that the songs were there, but that they had suddenly acquired the file extension of .M4a, rather than the .MP3 format they were originally stored as.

Upon investigation, I discovered that the new file type is used by iTunes, which I'd downloaded some time ago. How and why the iTunes program decided to change these particular files from .MP3 to .M4a, I haven't a clue! Point is, WMP doesn't recognise .M4a files, so excludes them from the library!

I insist in using WMP for all my music activities on my PC and I am rather angry that a program like iTunes can change files as it sees fit - I certainly did nothing to change the defaults myself.

To resolve the problem, I had to download a utility from the net that changes audio file formats (it's called "Switch" from NCH Swift Sound). Having converted the .M4a files back to .MP3, I then had to do a lot of editing in WMP to restore all the titles to the library in the manner I am used to.

I have accordingly removed iTunes from my PC and am about to send Apple an appropriately worded email to tell them what I think of their software!

[Monsy]

I won't have iTunes on my computer. I thought it was full of spyware, but I noticed it tried to take over everything, even though it wasn't set that way.

Windows media player will do me fine............

*switches up some new Neil Sedaka downloads, and sings*

[widget]

I download music from Limewire and transfer to iTunes, but I then burn it to disk and play in my music centre, had no trouble so far,

[dabthoms]

I used to have iTunes but as I no longer use an iPod I uninstalled the program. So, unless you want to buy music from Apple why would you have iTunes? Regarding iTunes, and it seems that upon installation, it raids the wmp music files, creating it's own library of (aac) m-peg 4 encoded tracks by default, if you want to re-encode all these, iTunes can do it. Can't remember exactly where, but in the tool bar at the top of your screen, one of the items when clicked lists "Properties", clicking on this gives you the option to convert to several file types (including MP3), and bit rates (128 for preference).