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iTMS song to AIFF?

JOD8FY

JOD8FY

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 22, 2004
633
0
United States
Hello everyone,

I bought a song on the iTunes Music Store yesterday because I wanted to use it as background music for a movie I'm making in Final Cut Express. However, FCE only imports AIFF audio files and I can't change the iTunes song to AIFF because it's "protected." Is there a way to get around this? Or is there a way to get FCE to accept it as is? Is there anything good that would help on versiontracker?

Thanks,
JOD8FY
 
Do you have QuickTime Pro? If so open the file in QT Pro and export it as a movie. I think that this will allow FCE to open it (it works for me with non-protected AAC file which FCE seems to not like).
 
try..

JOD8FY said:
Hello everyone,

I bought a song on the iTunes Music Store yesterday because I wanted to use it as background music for a movie I'm making in Final Cut Express. However, FCE only imports AIFF audio files and I can't change the iTunes song to AIFF because it's "protected." Is there a way to get around this? Or is there a way to get FCE to accept it as is? Is there anything good that would help on versiontracker?

Thanks,
JOD8FY
Click to expand...
This is a work around but try burning it to a CD first. Take it from there...
 
Seems odd that FCE can't use iTMS music while iMovie can. Could there be an update that allows iTMS stuff to work on FCE?

Anyways, if you burn the songs you want to use onto a CD as a Music CD, those files will be converted to AIFF. Then you can re-import them back off of the CD. There shouldn't be any loss of quality compared to the original AAC file. But it is a two-step process (not to mention the cost of a blank CD) for something that should be automatic.
 
If you have an iPod, bring the song to it, connect an audio cable from it to the audio-in on your Mac, download Sound Studio and become familiar with interface and recording functionality, launch it, and play back the song from your iPod into your Mac as Sound Studio is recording it. Once the song has finished, edit and save the recording as an AIFF from Sound Studio.
 
I import the protected song from iTunes into iMovie then click the Share menu and export it as a AIFF file. Then I can use Quicktime Pro to get the parts of the file that I want for my own purposes.

iTunes can encode these files as mp3's as an added bonus. I don't think you lose quality when exporting to uncompressed AIFF.
 
I'm a little surprise that FCE doesn't support ITMS files, but then again, if FCE is anything like FCP3 in it's support of compressed audio, you would be better off either burning a music CD or converting to AIFF in quicktime pro. I never had much luck with not getting pops or other artifacts in FCP when using compressed audio.
 
yeah, the easiest way is to burn the song to an audio cd, then re-import it into itunes as an aiff file. im sure that apple will add support for protected aac files in fce in the future. never thought about it before.
 
Thanks for all the help everyone, but it's still to no avail. Here's the story:

1. I don't have an iPod :(, but I do have an external HD

2. I don't have Quicktime Pro

3. I burned the file onto a CD and then tried to re-import it into iTunes, but it will not import it. If I drag it into the library, it appears, but it doesn't play the song, but rather skips to the next song in the list. I converted it to AIFF anyway, and imported it into FCE, but it did not play in FCE. This could be because the software wasn't supposed to work in iTunes version 4.6...

4. I tried the Quicktime thing but when I imported it into FCE, it also did not play any music.

Any other ideas?

Thanks so much!
JOD8FY
 
JOD8FY said:
3. I burned the file onto a CD and then tried to re-import it into iTunes, but it will not import it. If I drag it into the library, it appears, but it doesn't play the song, but rather skips to the next song in the list. I converted it to AIFF anyway, and imported it into FCE, but it did not play in FCE. This could be because the software wasn't supposed to work in iTunes version 4.6...
Click to expand...
Did you burn the songs onto a CD as a Music CD? If not, then iTunes did not convert it to AIFF.

Once you've burned a Music CD, then go back into iTunes Preferences and choose the encoding option to AIFF. Then re-import the CD songs as AIFF. It really should work.
 
jod8fy,

I hadn't checked this thread in a while, but if you're still having problems, I'll post this.

To burn a Music CD (as opposed to an mp3 CD or Data CD), go to your iTunes Preferences and under the "Burning" tab, choose Music CD.

Then make a playlist with the songs you want to use. Click on Burn. Insert CD. Click Burn again. Viola!

Then the CD should contain the songs you want in AIFF format.

To import them back into iTunes as an AIFF file, go to the Preferences and in the Encoding tab, choose AIFF. Then when you import the song as usual, it'll come in as an AIFF.

ft
 
ftaok said:
jod8fy,

I hadn't checked this thread in a while, but if you're still having problems, I'll post this.

To burn a Music CD (as opposed to an mp3 CD or Data CD), go to your iTunes Preferences and under the "Burning" tab, choose Music CD.

Then make a playlist with the songs you want to use. Click on Burn. Insert CD. Click Burn again. Viola!

Then the CD should contain the songs you want in AIFF format.

To import them back into iTunes as an AIFF file, go to the Preferences and in the Encoding tab, choose AIFF. Then when you import the song as usual, it'll come in as an AIFF.

ft
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot! I'll give it a try and let you know how it turns out. :)

JOD8FY
 
Great news everyone, it worked :). I burned it as an audio CD and re-imported it as AIFF just as you'd said and it worked great! I can finally hear the music in FCE.

Thanks again,
JOD8FY
 
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