Hello All,
I'm a new mac user who has been struggling for weeks to convert my music into a mac compatible format. All of my music is currently on an external hard -- most of it in FLAC format. I imported my music into My Documents and then tried to import it to iTunes, but quickly learned that iTunes doesn't support FLAC. I can't imagine why that would be, it's one of the most (the most?) popular lossless audio formats in existence. Failing that, I converted my library into WAV format figuring there was no way iTunes wouldn't support that, but I was wrong -- iTunes wouldn't play WAV files either. Desperate to play something, anything from my library, I re-converted all my music to universal MP3, but iTunes wouldn't play that either. Exasperated now, I spent yet another 8 hours or so converting my library to AAC format. I figured that there was NO possible way iTunes wouldn't play apple's own format... but it wouldn't play those either.
All took place over the course of several days since my music library is quite large and it took several hours to convert my library between the various formats I tried. I eventually found that iTunes would play M4a encoded audio. Unfortunately, by the time I found that out, the free trial period of the software I was using had expired.
So my question is two fold. First, what on earth could possibly be wrong with iTunes that it wouldn't play MP3 or AAC encoded audio files? I called apple tech support for this and spend nearly 3 hours talking to 3 different people about this, but none of them could help me. And Second, what [preferably free] audio conversion software would you recommend? For windows, I could use any one of dozens of different freeware programs, but the options for mac seem to be MUCH more limited. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but I need a program that won't mess up the track information on my songs.
I'm a new mac user who has been struggling for weeks to convert my music into a mac compatible format. All of my music is currently on an external hard -- most of it in FLAC format. I imported my music into My Documents and then tried to import it to iTunes, but quickly learned that iTunes doesn't support FLAC. I can't imagine why that would be, it's one of the most (the most?) popular lossless audio formats in existence. Failing that, I converted my library into WAV format figuring there was no way iTunes wouldn't support that, but I was wrong -- iTunes wouldn't play WAV files either. Desperate to play something, anything from my library, I re-converted all my music to universal MP3, but iTunes wouldn't play that either. Exasperated now, I spent yet another 8 hours or so converting my library to AAC format. I figured that there was NO possible way iTunes wouldn't play apple's own format... but it wouldn't play those either.
All took place over the course of several days since my music library is quite large and it took several hours to convert my library between the various formats I tried. I eventually found that iTunes would play M4a encoded audio. Unfortunately, by the time I found that out, the free trial period of the software I was using had expired.
So my question is two fold. First, what on earth could possibly be wrong with iTunes that it wouldn't play MP3 or AAC encoded audio files? I called apple tech support for this and spend nearly 3 hours talking to 3 different people about this, but none of them could help me. And Second, what [preferably free] audio conversion software would you recommend? For windows, I could use any one of dozens of different freeware programs, but the options for mac seem to be MUCH more limited. It doesn't have to be anything fancy, but I need a program that won't mess up the track information on my songs.
