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absurdio

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 25, 2003
380
0
RI, Chi, and/or NY.
all of my songs are in aac. generally when you right-click on a song, you get the option to "convert selection to mp3." However, I only get "conver selection to aac," which makes very little sense, since the selection already IS in aac. So I don't know what's going on. Does anyone?
 
Yes, its because the aac format is chosen as your current import format. If you want to change this, go to iTunes > Preferences > Importing and select which format you wish to choose.

Remember though, converting from aac to mp3 will cause the mp3 to not sound as good even close to the original...for reasons i could go into if necessary.


Hope this helps.
 
Re: itunes seems confused about mp3s/aacs

Originally posted by absurdio
all of my songs are in aac. generally when you right-click on a song, you get the option to "convert selection to mp3." However, I only get "conver selection to aac," which makes very little sense, since the selection already IS in aac. So I don't know what's going on. Does anyone?

I believe it just uses whatever you have set for importing songs. It is just a contextual menu for the Advanced>convert selection to (set format) menu item. Change your import prefs to mp3 and it should change both menu items. I am curious as to why you want to do this? Or are you just observing something.
 
Well, in the interest of getting mp3s to the non-aac part of the world (my PC for instance), having at least a couple of songs in mp3 would be a good thing.

It seems to me, though, that once upon a time the right-click menu used to say "convert to..." whichever the file was not. Maybe i'm halucinating, but that seems like it'd make sense...
 
Originally posted by NP3
Remember though, converting from aac to mp3 will cause the mp3 to not sound as good even close to the original...for reasons i could go into if necessary.

i've always been curious. why is that?
 
They're both "lossy" compression formats. They toss out data that most people can't hear anyway, just how much depends on the bitrate. MP3 and AAC toss out different parts of the sound, so going from one to the other would result in more data being thrown out.
 
Originally posted by absurdio
It seems to me, though, that once upon a time the right-click menu used to say "convert to..." whichever the file was not. Maybe i'm halucinating, but that seems like it'd make sense...

No, it's always been this way. And it's not an either/or option, since you could also rip your songs into .wav or .aiff formats if you wanted to. As Counterfit points out, though, both .mp3 and .aac are lossy formats, so I don't know that I'd want the program to allow such easy switching between the two. It would be misleading, suggesting that you could convert back and forth between the two formats with no loss in quality.

So I guess what I'm saying is that while you're right, it would make sense at first glance, it makes more sense to do it the way it's set up to work when you think about it for a little while longer.
 
Yeah, I suppose you're right. I'm not sure how i got that impression, and you're right: it doesn't make much sense to have it set up the way I imagined. Oh, well. So "convert to aac" will only work on files that aren't already in aac, I assume...or might just duplicate the file...hm. So there really is no good way to convert to mp3?...short of reimporting?
 
Originally posted by virividox
i cant tell the diffrence betwee a 192 aac and a cd, normally, but if im using really good headphones and playing a cd i can hear it. but i find 192 aac better than 192 mp3

one the major reasons of the existence of AAC is that it sounds better at the same bitrate than MP3, but if you converted an MP3 to AAC, the AAC would sound worse because it throws out data from the source, in this case a source that has already thrown out data.
 
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