Convert Your Songs to MP3s Using....iTunes?

Hopefully, not many of you use iTunes. Quite frankly I think it is a bloated memory hog that is vastly overrated as a system of playing music and movies and downloading said media. This said, some of you may have ripped your tracks from CDs using iTunes, unaware of the evils that may ensue. Much to your dismay you then realized that iTunes had ripped them to a format that didn't work on your awesome MP3 player (anything that isn't an iPod). I personally noted that none of my songs worked on my brand new PSP. Unable to contain my dissapointment, I franctically searched for a way to convert the files.

First, I found MediaCoder, an app designed for syncing various media to a most audio devices, including the PSP (in fact they have a PSP version). This application worked quite well....for everything except my songs. It masterfully encoded my movies to a format that the PSP could comfortably play fullscreen at the native PSP resolution, but converted the songs to mpeg-4 files, destroying the tags I had created for them. Thus, most of the songs on my PSP were gracefully titled "07 Back in Black -" with no artist or album cover. Not wishing to pursue MediaCoder as a solution, I instead browsed the web for various third party applications that claimed to accomplish this daunting task. But wait? What is this? Someone has posted on their website how to use iTunes to convert your songs to MP3s? A simple yet hidden setting in the preferences menu actually allows users to create MP3s from songs ripped from CDs or other methods (just not any songs downloaded from the Apple store). Here's how you do it (I wish I noticed this earlier, iTunes actually allows you to rip songs automatically to MP3s...):

1. Open up iTunes and head to Edit > Preferences.
2. Select the "Advanced" tab and under that the tab labeled "Importing."
3. Change the "Import Using" field to "MP3 Encoder."
4. Click ok multiple times to close these windows.
5. In the main iTunes window select the songs you wish to convert and then head to Advanced > Convert Selection to MP3.

After this wait some time (it takes an average of 30 seconds per song), and eventually your tunes will be free to play on any media or MP3 player!