Music files question

[orinoco 0]

I'm planning to buy an iPod in the next few days.

My current MP3 player uses Windows Media Player, so I have thousands of tracks (about 20gb) in wma format. Can I transfer these to iTunes without ripping the whole lot over again? If I did would this lose any quality?

Tech spec (if it makes any difference): Windows XP, Windows Media Player 11, whatever-the-automatically-updated-version of iTunes is.

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give!

 

[Yuki's Passion 1]

as far as I know, mp3 format cant get any worse than it is (in mp3 format). So, if youre just transferring it over from one mp3 format to another, (theoretically) it shouldnt decrease in quality because youre not changing the format. If youre downloading music in FLAC or SHN, which is in a lossless format, then change it to mp3 you will change the quality dramatically. I hope that helps

[keba 0]

iTunes converts the .wma to .mp3 files for you, but will leave the originals in their original folder, so you end up with 2 versions of every song on your HDD. Hope yours is big enough to cope.

 

And you might notice a drop in quality, depending on what bit rate your .wma's were ripped at.

[thursday 1]

why are you planning to buy an Ipod?

[JA2340 16]

So, if the curent one is OK (you didn't say why the change to iPod) why bother?

 

+1 has an iPod, rips spoken word books to it so she can "read" at night without waking me - wonderful thing!(The books have to be mp4 format but with the extension changed to m4p or the iPod doesn;t recognise them as books and just plays the files ranodomly).

I have an mp3 player that works just as well, cost a lot less and runs with standard mp3 files.

We also have an iPod Classic, rip movies to it and play them through the 'normal' TV in the motel/pension room. That takes a bit of doing, but I use cucusoft (google it!) for single pass conversion.