Making a CD with iTunes purchased music. How many songs can you put on a CD?
I've bought quite a number of iTunes songs and want to burn some of them to a CD. Can you put as many Apple AAC songs as will fit on a CD when you burn it like you can with mp3's?
Can you do folders with Apple's iTunes music like you can with mp3's?
Is there a way to put song in an order you want without putting numbers in front of the names?
Thanks to all who answer.
- Mark
Can you do folders with Apple's iTunes music like you can with mp3's?
Is there a way to put song in an order you want without putting numbers in front of the names?
Thanks to all who answer.
- Mark
Comments
The long answer is that you could, with a bit of work burning and re-ripping to and from intermediate audio CDs, and with a small loss of sound quality (how small depends on how you do this and how sensitive your hearing is to such things), convert your iTunes purchases into MP3 files, and then burn an MP3 CD with, say, 8 hours worth of music (assuming MP3 files with an average bit rate of 192 kbps -- you don't want to try to convert 128 kbps AAC to MP3 files that are also only 128 kbps). Even if Apple's DRM didn't get in the way of making this task easier, you'd still have to suffer the small sound quality loss which will arise when converting music from AAC to MP3.
If you simply burn the still-compressed DRM-laden AAC files you get from Apple to a data disc, you'd be able to get up to around 12 hours on a single CD, but you'd be hard pressed to find a CD player that will play any sort of AAC, and none are licensed to play Apple's DRM-burdened AAC. The only thing you could do with such a disc is play the files on a computer that has iTunes installed, and which is one of the five authorized computers for your iTunes Store account.
You can burn them however you want, but they won't play on anything other than a registered computer if you burn them in their native format. You have to burn them as a regular audio CD unless you strip the DRM.
I've made a few audio CD's with Apple's music and it played fine in my car's CD player.
Thanks for the reply BRussell.
- Mark
The short, simple answer is that you'll be limited to a max of 80 minutes worth of music on a CD. That's the only simple, straight-forward thing you can do using iTunes. iTunes will not permit iTunes-purchased music to be burned as an MP3 CD. You can burn a data disc for file back-up, but the resulting disc is not a very playable thing.
This is the info. I was looking for although I don't like the answer. Thanks.
The long answer is that you could, with a bit of work burning and re-ripping to and from intermediate audio CDs, and with a small loss of sound quality (how small depends on how you do this and how sensitive your hearing is to such things), convert your iTunes purchases into MP3 files, and then burn an MP3 CD with, say, 8 hours worth of music (assuming MP3 files with an average bit rate of 192 kbps -- you don't want to try to convert 128 kbps AAC to MP3 files that are also only 128 kbps). Even if Apple's DRM didn't get in the way of making this task easier, you'd still have to suffer the small sound quality loss which will arise when converting music from AAC to MP3.
Thanks for the suggestion.
If you simply burn the still-compressed DRM-laden AAC files you get from Apple to a data disc, you'd be able to get up to around 12 hours on a single CD, but you'd be hard pressed to find a CD player that will play any sort of AAC, and none are licensed to play Apple's DRM-burdened AAC. The only thing you could do with such a disc is play the files on a computer that has iTunes installed, and which is one of the five authorized computers for your iTunes Store account.
So your saying that if I simply copy the music files to a CD and burn it (not as an audio CD), it would store about 12 hrs of music? I didn't know I could do this.
Thanks for the tips and information shetline.
- Mark
As far as the Apple DRM, Apple allows you to burn iTMS purchased music UNLIMITED TIMES, BUT only allows you to burn FIVE versions of the exact same playlist of purchased music.
You can break Apple's DRM by burning it to an Audio CD.
Once you re-rip that CD, you will have fairly effectively circumvented the DRM (I've often wondered if burn/re-rip alone isn't just as potentially legal or illegal under the DMCA as some "other" DRM removal methods (which haven't worked for a while anyway)), but I wouldn't call burn/re-rip a method for breaking DRM.
For me, truly breaking DRM means getting directly at the raw, original, unencrypted data behind a DRM-infested file, with no loss of signal quality and no gain in file size. Anything else, while it might be more than satisfactory for many people under many circumstances, isn't truly breaking DRM, it's just a compromise work-around.
Once you re-rip that CD, you will have fairly effectively circumvented the DRM (I've often wondered if burn/re-rip alone isn't just as potentially legal or illegal under the DMCA as some "other" DRM removal methods (which haven't worked for a while anyway)), but I wouldn't call burn/re-rip a method for breaking DRM.
For me, truly breaking DRM means getting directly at the raw, original, unencrypted data behind a DRM-infested file, with no loss of signal quality and no gain in file size. Anything else, while it might be more than satisfactory for many people under many circumstances, isn't truly breaking DRM, it's just a compromise work-around.
The music you download from iTMS is ~CD quality. When you burn that to an Audio CD, you again have music that is ~CD quality, only limited by the original quality of the track you are burning. The quality difference between the protected version and the original version is almost nothing, if anything at all.
The music you download from iTMS is ~CD quality. When you burn that to an Audio CD, you again have music that is ~CD quality, only limited by the original quality of the track you are burning. The quality difference between the protected version and the original version is almost nothing, if anything at all.
Au contraire!
I posted this listening test a while back, and ran a poll associated with the test here on AppleInsider. Most people had no difficulty at all telling a first-generation 128 kbps AAC file from a 128 kbps second-generation of the same (meaning that the first gen was decompressed and then recompressed, the equivalent of burning a song to a CD and then re-ripping it to the same bit rate and format).
(Damn AppleInsider's search engine! Forget just the old post of mine I'm talking about, the search claims there are no matches at all for "lossy compression" in the whole damn collection of forums, except for some bad joke about the 'rm' command.)
First of all, a lot of people would argue the "nearly CD quality" claim. Personally, I find the quality of most stuff from iTMS pretty decent, but "nearly CD quality" is stretching it.
Second, there are some special problems which arise from multi-gen decompression/recompression cycles using lossy compression. Maybe I'll get into the technical details later, but for now I'll just say it can be an ugly thing. The best way to circumvent the effects of two-gen compression is to use a higher bit rate for the second generation. For my own tastes, I'm pretty pleased with using 192 kbps for the second pass. Just going up that 50% in bit rate seems to make a world of difference.
For instance, with some songs I've purchased on iTMS, I've wanted to add a fade-in or fade out to cut off a spoken intro to a song, dragged out audience applause in a live recording, etc. That means decompressing so I can use an audio editor, then either recompressing or dealing with a big lossless (AIFF or Apple Lossless) file as the result. I chose to go with 192 kbps AAC for such things, and I'm pleased with the results.
In the meantime the best (although expensive) solution for the car is to use an iPod and a stereo head unit it will interface with. That's what I've done. There are plenty of similar solutions for the home as well. This pretty much eliminates having to mess with discs at all. (And, it's a bit off-topic.)