iTunes purchases to MP3 with ease
So, like the iTunes newbie that I am, excited with my new car’s ability to play MP3 CDs I tried to burn such a thing from within iTunes. I hit the message that you are not allowed to do this for protected tunes, only stuff that was already in MP3.
Hmm… surely, I think to myself, a virtual cd burner would be useful here. I’d like to tell iTunes to burn an audio CD all the while having a virtual process take this output and convert to MP3 on the fly and save to disk.
Well, it exists and it works. It’s called Noteburner and you can try it for free then pay a modest $40 approx.
I just “burned” a 10 hour playlist (a load of purchased Richard Feynman Physics lectures in case you’re wondering) and lo, now I have all the stuff that I paid for sitting pretty as MP3s. Resulting files fit on a single writable CD so my travelling world is complete.
The rest of my music/audiobook collection, such as it is, is being converted as I type this.
One note of caution though, there is not much CPU to go around as iTunes sends out CD data and Noteburner rips it. Using a browser to post blog entries is fine but nothing else is going to get done.