12-16-2005, 05:02 AM

Hi All

I am completly new to the world of mac and have had my new Imac for about 3 days. I have had some big problems mainly in terms of me not understanding the new system but I do have a word of advise for anyone moving from WMA to Apple Music formats.

I had amassed 150gb of music and I would say that around a good third of this was music i had ripped using the windows lossless wma format. I had struggled and struggled to try and get my new mac to work with these wma files but understandably why would it want to!

I found though that Itunes for the PC does enable straight forward conversion from wma formats including lossless to apple aac and my copy of Itunes on the pc detected that the file output would be apple lossless. So I have had to setup itunes on my pc laptop- connect the external drive let the pc version fo Itunes do the batch conversions and then unplug the drive and plug it back into my Mac. Now the time per song conversion was about 5-10 secs and if you consider I had around 5,000 songs in Wma lossless it took a fair while but it was worth it and now i am all singing and dancing.

I would be interested if other people tried other ways to do this.

Also what is with the whole installing programs on my mac????
Is it that easy? I think years of Windows abusing my senses has left me with an inability to accept easy processes.

12-16-2005, 05:36 AM

Yes drag and drop, oh and don't forget to uninstall most if not all programs, just drop them in the trash :flower:

Excellent advice, there is also:

http://www.easywma.com/

Vicky

12-16-2005, 05:52 AM

Cheers Vicky yes I did buy that software but it does not support the WMA lossless file type so really a PC with itunes is the only way to sort this.

I can only hope that Itunes in future Mac incarnations will support an easier method for converting media files. If they offer it for the pc then it should be made available for the mac version, i think this will further encourage switchers to make the move!

12-16-2005, 06:01 AM

Wow, I didn't know that, thanks for pointing that out to me!

Indeed the way you went about it does seem to make the most sense. I think the issue is more that the codecs are readily available on Windows for WMA (surprise), and iTunes for Windows uses these to convert or AAC or MP3; whereas on the Mac these codecs aren't as readily available, and Windows Media Player 9 for Mac really only serves to play embedded videos in webpages or music samples, and it doesn't even do that very well...

I'm not sure whether iTunes would import WMA files with the Flip4Mac WMA codecs installed or not. (http://www.flip4mac.com/)

Vicky

12-16-2005, 06:32 AM

Cheers for that Vicky- might save me messing around with further video conversions etc...