Does Itunes Cost You Anything?

[Aaron]

So my sister has upgraded to an Ipod Nano from a Shuffle and is giving me the Shuffle. But I can't find anyting on the Itunes site to tell me if I have to pay for the songs or not. Can I just import my MP3s from Winamp?

[Gandalf]

Itunes is free. I'm pretty sure the podcasts are too.

Also, mp3s can easily be imported from Winamp. I actually find iTunes to be better than Winamp.

Edit: It just hit me, were you referring to the iTunes music store? Because those songs will cost.

[RedImperator]

So my sister has upgraded to an Ipod Nano from a Shuffle and is giving me the Shuffle. But I can't find anyting on the Itunes site to tell me if I have to pay for the songs or not. Can I just import my MP3s from Winamp?

The iTunes music store charges .99 a song and typically $9.99 per album (US dollars). But songs already on your hard drive can be imported into your iTunes library and written onto the iPod for free. In that case, you're just moving files around on your computer. Take away the music store, and iTunes is just a music player and music file manager that interfaces with iPods.

EDIT: The iTunes store does offer a lot of free material. Podcasts are free, as are the streaming Internet radio stations. Also, every week they give songs away for free to promote unknown bands, so it's worth logging into the music store every week just to see what's available. I've discovered a few bands I like that way.

[Aaron]

Thanks guys I didn't really want to pay for music I already had. I'll just transfer it over from my existing collection to the iTunes software.

[General Deathdealer]

Plus when you convert your music from MP3 to the ITunes format, it takes up considerably less space.

EDIT: Ignore what I just said, as you probably already know this.

[Aaron]

Plus when you convert your music from MP3 to the ITunes format, it takes up considerably less space.

EDIT: Ignore what I just said, as you probably already know this.

Actually no I didn't, thanks.

[rhoenix]

A few caveats, though.

1. Converting .mp3 files to .aac (Apple's proprietary format) does take up less space, and typically has better quality.

2. Importing your .mp3 or .aac files into iTunes is quite easy, and you can rip CD's directly into .mp3 format or .aac format within iTunes directly, if you change the settings.

3. Its entirely up to you about the Apple Music Store. Despite being on a Mac and using iTunes, I've never used it.

EDIT: Thanks to Durandal's point below, I edited out the incorrect information about the .aac format.

[DesertFly]

2. Importing your .mp3 files into iTunes is quite easy, and you can rip CD's directly into .mp3 format within iTunes directly instead of .aac if you change the settings.

In my experiments, the mp3s I ripped with iTunes sounded significantly worse than those I made with a dedicated ripper. I personally use Freerip, which, as the name implies, is a free ripper. It doesn't do anything else, but in my opinion it does that one thing very well.

[Beowulf]

I use EAC+LAME (--preset fast extreme) to rip my music. Sounds really good, but then, I don't really care about the space it takes up either. I'd recommend not transcoding your files from MP3 to AAC, because it'll probably actually sound worse. Lossy encoders throw away information, tossing something already lossily encoded through another lossy encoder will throw away different information, so it ends up sounding worse.

If you use iTunes to organize your music, it's a good idea to make sure everything is tagged correctly to begin with. Otherwise, it's a headache. In fact, if it isn't going to be used to organize your music, you still want to make sure it's tagged correctly. It's significantly easier to make smart playlists if all the tags exist.

[Durandal]

A few caveats, though.

1. Converting .mp3 files to .aac (Apple's proprietary format) does take up less space, and typically has better quality. However, those files can now only be played on the computer on which they were created.

AAC IS NOT A PROPRIETARY FORMAT. IT IS A STANDARD THAT THE MPEG GROUP LICENSES, JUST LIKE MP3.

Christ, I'm sick of people spouting this bullshit.

[rhoenix]

AAC IS NOT A PROPRIETARY FORMAT. IT IS A STANDARD THAT THE MPEG GROUP LICENSES, JUST LIKE MP3.

Christ, I'm sick of people spouting this bullshit.

Well, thank you for the correction. No offense, but I google'd this before I replied - and now haven't the faintest idea where I got my original concept of .aac.

In this case, I've no reason whatsoever to keep my music collection in .mp3 format, and I'll begin converting now.

[Durandal]

I'm guessing you got it from some Slashbot nerds' posts. Those people seem to think that anything that's not popular in their little cliques must be "proprietary" and by extension, evil.

And no one said you had to convert your music collection. Hell, you'll be killing quality in a MP3->AAC conversion. But MP3 and AAC, in reality, have the same basic license. You actually have to pay for both. It's just that a lot of open source projects don't and reverse-engineer their encoders and decoders.

But in terms of quality-per-bit, AAC is generally better.

[Jack Bauer]

Just to throw this out there:

If anyone has a Facebook account, FB and Apple have a promotion going on until Sept. 30 where they are giving away a 25 song sampler each week. Each compilation is based off of a particular genre (so far there's been Alternative, Electronica, and Rock).

It requires a .Mac account with the Music Store (but its free and takes 10 seconds to sign up). So if you have FB, look for the Group "Apple Students" and there you will find a link to the download.

[SyntaxVorlon]

The cost is infact one soul, yours or that of your firstborn child. You have to read the license agreement, it's there. I won't even speak of what's in the XP license agreement, let's just say when 100% of the population of computer users use windows Vista, revelations looks like a great big party.