BleepingComputer.com: Audio File Types

OK my wife and i just started an Itunes subscription. We have been using the free filesharing network service called 360share (for the past 8 years). We love it because its free, but are tired of getting crap music or the risk of viruses, or that the download takes forever.

We want good quality music, that is clean from viruses, and that can be downloaded fast.

We play music mainly on

Windows Media player
Burned CD's
Sansa Clip (music Player) (wife)
Motorola EM 330 (cellphone) (mine)

I notice that the file type for Itunes is not the same as what i have been downloading with 360share.

I really dont know the diffrence. I do know that t here have been some problems with DRM and file compabitlies. I noticed that when we copied a few new songs from Itunes to the Sansa clip, that it (windows 7) asked if we wanted to convert the files. And on the EM330, the music plays, but the Song Id's (Arist, Album, etc) are not being read. This makes finding music on that much harder.

What i want is a music file that i can trade freely among my music devices. I know that Itunes will work just fine on the Ipod, but we didnt get the Ipod because we felt that Apple was overpriced, and the Sansa Music player works just as well as the Ipod Shuffle.

So before i have to make (or buy) a diffrent file for each device, and possible take up memory space, someone please help me here with all of this.

I'm not entirely sure I know exactly what you're asking.

In terms of near universal acceptance among players (hardware and software) you probably want to stick with MP3. Itunes does primarily sell AAC files (with an .m4a extension), which play fine on Ipods. The AAC files may, or may not, come with DRM copy protection. Unprotected songs can be converted to MP3 (at 128 kbps, a "good enough" bitrate) within Itunes pretty easily by right clicking on the song from within the Itunes program and choosing "Create MP3 version" from the options. Unfortunately, I don't use Itunes often enough to know if there's an easy way to tell beforehand whether a file is protected or not.

Probably the best known competitor to Itunes is Amazon. Amazon sells songs as MP3 files, mostly at bitrates that are higher than (better than) 128 kbps. Most songs are priced at $.99 (my experience is based in the US) with albums usually discounted and there are usually some free promotional songs.

There are plenty of netlabels that offer free and legal MP3 downloads, but these are usually going to be in fairly non-commercial genres -- electronic, dance, techno, etc.

There are plenty of live concerts available for legal downloading at Archive.org, in the live music section.

There are also services that sell MP3 files less expensively, like emusic and Amistreet. These are not endorsements -- read any agreements or contracts carefully and make sure the service offers enough music that you're interested in to make it worth your while. And, of course, you can buy from a variety of sources.

What i have found is that the best thing to do is to download a song from Itunes, and then use a Free m4a to MP3 Converter. So far it seems to be working just fine. Here is a link to the website http://www.maniactools.com/soft/m4a-to-mp3...ter/index.shtml