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UPDATE: If you've updated your version of iTunes to 4.5 or above, then you will find that M4P2MP4 no longer
works. And it is possible for it to no longer work even if you haven't upgraded, as is true with my current system.
I don't know how, but somehow M4P2MP4 did stop working on my system, so now I'm free to upgrade it to iTunes 4.5.
But fear not, oh thy fair-use rights seeking person you. It's HYMN to the
rescue :-)
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Because Apple's horrible tech support basically refused to help me with the below problem, I Googled around and found
that there is a program named M4P2MP4.EXE, that was written to allow us to convert from Apple's protected .M4P file
format to an unprotected .MP4 format, which could then be further converted to whatever format you want. And
from what I understand (please correct me if I'm wrong), this is a lossless conversion, meaning that the audio
quality does not suffer any more during conversion. If you have a lot of iTunes files that you've purchased, it can
be tedious converting all of them, one at a time. So I wrote a batchfile that lets you drag and drop the files to
it, automating it a bit. Here is the batchfile:
RIGHT-CLICK & SAVE-AS. After downloading, double click on the batchfile, or a shortcut to it, for instructions on how to use it. Detailed Instructions: 1) Create a folder on your C drive with the name of M4P2MP4. To do this, click on [START], then on [RUN], then type in: md c:\m4p2mp4 2) Create a folder on whatever drive you want named something like MP4. Make sure this folder is as close to the root folder of the drive as possible though, as I've seen that M4P2MP4 will crash if the files you're trying to convert are buried deep in subdirectories. 3) Place a copy of my batchfile in the M4P2MP4 folder, then make a shortcut to it, then place that shortcut into the MP4 folder. This is to make sure the actual batchfile remains safe, and to make it easy to drag & drop the M4P files to it (via the shortcut) for conversion. If you want to laugh, CLICK HERE to read my correspondence with Apple's horrible tech support. For convenience, here are three links I found to download M4P2MP4 from: |
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THE PROBLEM: (This was written before finding M4P2MP4 or HYMN, both mentioned above)
On my last three computer systems, QuickTime has NEVER worked properly. When I play any QuickTime file, either from my hard drive, or from streaming online, it has always sounded splotchy and cut-up. So you can hear an example of this problem, I captured, and made a small .MP3 of a segment of a song I just downloaded from my brand new (and currently useless) iTunes account. Since iTunes uses QuickTime to play the downloaded purchased song files, any song I purchased via iTunes is horribly unlistenable, as you will agree after listening to the segment. Click Here to download and listen to it. [300kb] When I purchased the two songs from iTunes, I was mistakenly under the impression that they would be .aac files, of which DO play properly on my system. Since this has been the case on my last three systems, my system configuration should be of little concern, but this has happened with Windows 95, Windows 98 SE, and now WIndows XP Pro. Although I think I used the same Creative Sound Blaster Live (first generation) sound card in all three systems. But nothing else is the same, including operating systems, motherboards, CPUs, memory, cables, CD or hard drives. But keep in mind that I have absolutely NO other audio problems, what-so-ever. And I am a music buff, so I do a lot of audio stuff on my computer. I use programs such as Cool Edit Pro, Exact Audio Copy, Winamp, and tons of other audio/video oriented programs, as well as many different file formats (Monkey's Audio, FLAC, LPAC, Etc...) Please let me know what my problem might be, if you have any clues. Thanks, Tom |
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