What's the best way to convert all WMA to MP3?

Hi, i'm a new Mac user. I just switched from Windows Vista.

I have a problem. I moved all my music from Windows' "My Music" to my Mac's Music folder, and I have many many WMA files. I don't even know where exactly they are. I believe iTunes does not import the WMA files.

I'm new to itunes too and I discovered something strange. When i play my music with itunes, it actually imports them and stores duplicates in the iTunes folder in a folder called iTunes Music. This effectively creates duplicates of all my music files, thereby eating up another tens of gigabytes of space on my HD.

Can someone please teach me how to automate the process of searching for and converting all my WMA files to MP3 files? because it is really impractical for me to search through my hundreds of folders to look for WMA files and then convert them one by one.

Also, why is iTunes designed to duplicate my files? What should I do? Should i let itunes duplicate and copy them to the iTunes music folder, and then i delete those original copies in the Music folder? In this case, how can i make sure that all my music are completely copied to the itunes folder? this is important because I used to buy original CDs, rip them into my windows vista PC, then dump the CDs because they take up space. If i lose my digital copies I'm done for.

Thanks for any help!

Let me answer your one question first. Look at the pic below. Open Preference under iTunes and select the Advanced Tab. Be sure that there is no check mark by Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library. With that unchecked, it will use the file where it is and not copy it to it's own folder system. Why does iTunes do that default? It's the way it works, but like I said, just Uncheck it and it will do what you want.

On the WMA files, are they protected by DRM? If so, what I am going to recommend will not work. For just normal WMA files with no DRM, google EasyWMA. Been using it for years and it works great for converting WMA's.

http://www.easywma.com/

Not sure if there is anything else, but there probably is. I have always used EasyWMA and never needed anything else.

Hope this info helps.

hey thank you! unchecking that option solved the problem! i must have seemed really dumb to ask that question. i'll try the easyWMA later.

but i realised another thing. I am unable to change some info about the MP3 file by clicking the "Get Info" option like i used to be able to do by clicking "properties" in windows. the data in "Get Info" cannot be changed. how can i change data of an mp3 file then?

a million thanks..

You can change meta data in iTunes

It would be nice to be able to do this in the OS X finder, but you can use iTunes

dtravis7 said:

Been using it for years and it works great for converting WMA's. http://www.easywma.com/

Click to expand...

Thanks for that link dtravis.