itunes and non ipods

[Rachel]

i have recently started using itunes, and i was wondering if there is a way of tricking it into thinking that i have an ipod, or something, and allowing me to use itunes to add music to my mp3 player...? does anyone know? (does anyone even understand the question?)

[Sandmaster]

Not that I know of. Depending on how your mp3 player is set up u can just drag and drop the songs u want onto your mp3 player and itunes will think it's just a hard drive. but it all depends on how your mp3 player works really. u could setup a playlist too so u have all the songs u want grouped together easily. what type of mp3 player are u trying to use?

[Uncle Xyzzy]

It would have to play the format used by iTunes, which I think is proprietary. There may be some sort of hack, but it's doubtful.

[mazil]

As the people above me have kinda said, "probably no" and "no", depending on your question (thought I'd re-iterate, to clarify)

Can you use the iTunes program to sync to a non-ipod mp3 player? Probably no. As Sandmaster says, you can drag songs from iTunes to your mp3 player (which should come up as a drive in "My Computer" when you plug it in, I think?). But... there are rumours of iTunes plug-ins that might allow you to add and remove songs from within iTunes itself. I did find one plugin, but I'm not not sure how safe it looks!

(it's a different story for Mac users, for some reason... apparently the OS X iTunes supports some other mp3 players)

Can you play songs bought from the iTunes Music Store? The short answer is "no". They are in a special iTunes format, and there don't seem to be (m)any converter programs around. The main other way to get them to mp3 format is to burn the songs to CD and then rip them (pretty time-consuming).

[Sandmaster]

It would have to play the format used by iTunes, which I think is proprietary. There may be some sort of hack, but it's doubtful.

iTunes by default uses their format but when starting it up you can change it to .mp3. It's under the preferences, advanced, importing menu if that makes sense. Which is what I've done to make things easier. So you could do that to make life easier if you didn't have an iPod or wanted to "loan" some music out.

Also what Mazil said is correct in the iTunes store stuff. It's not fun burning the songs to cd to get them to an mp3 format but if your computer crashes and you don't have your purchased music backed up on an iPod or whatever you're out of luck. That's what really bugs me about the purchased music.

[Rachel]

It would have to play the format used by iTunes, which I think is proprietary. There may be some sort of hack, but it's doubtful.

iTunes by default uses their format but when starting it up you can change it to .mp3. It's under the preferences, advanced, importing menu if that makes sense. Which is what I've done to make things easier. So you could do that to make life easier if you didn't have an iPod or wanted to "loan" some music out.

Also what Mazil said is correct in the iTunes store stuff. It's not fun burning the songs to cd to get them to an mp3 format but if your computer crashes and you don't have your purchased music backed up on an iPod or whatever you're out of luck. That's what really bugs me about the purchased music.

i didnt mean the format of the files - i've changed that so that all my files are in mp3 format. i dont like the way itunes sorts the files either, so i have that switched off and use a different program to rip cds. i just meant the actual transferring of the songs onto my mp3 player.

[WIS]

It would have to play the format used by iTunes, which I think is proprietary. There may be some sort of hack, but it's doubtful.

iTunes by default uses their format but when starting it up you can change it to .mp3. It's under the preferences, advanced, importing menu if that makes sense. Which is what I've done to make things easier. So you could do that to make life easier if you didn't have an iPod or wanted to "loan" some music out.

Also what Mazil said is correct in the iTunes store stuff. It's not fun burning the songs to cd to get them to an mp3 format but if your computer crashes and you don't have your purchased music backed up on an iPod or whatever you're out of luck. That's what really bugs me about the purchased music.

i didnt mean the format of the files - i've changed that so that all my files are in mp3 format. i dont like the way itunes sorts the files either, so i have that switched off and use a different program to rip cds. i just meant the actual transferring of the songs onto my mp3 player.

What I just do is drag the iTunes folder of all my songs into my MP4. o_o;;

[Rachel]

i dont want all the files as i only have a small mp3 player (and am happy that way - i often dont fill it up completely)

I have discovered that i can just make the playlist, hilight them all and then drag them across onto it in windows explorer, like someone suggested - so yay!

[NeoPet_online]

Actually, now that they've opened the music store up to un-DRM'ed songs, currently just EMI, I think iTunes will begin to support more and more MP3 players.

[Rachel]

it's annoying that the itunes format files don't play on my mp3 player though - if i have any files in non mp3 format i have to convert them.

[Dylan]

If I were you I would just drag & drop the files into the device.

Dylan

[Uncle Xyzzy]

it's annoying that the itunes format files don't play on my mp3 player though - if i have any files in non mp3 format i have to convert them.

The device's firmware could theoretically be modded to support the filetype; I have a program for my NDS that can play AAC.

The problem, though, is modding a simple mp3 player's firmware. It's probably quite specialized. But if it's doable, than someone could make it.