Convert Your iTunes Purchases to MP3s

Apple has finally bid goodbye to DRM (mostly), but if you want to play your tunes on other devices, you'll need to convert them first.

As you've probably heard by now, Apple just announced plans to ditch DRM for good. That means all songs you purchase from iTunes will arrive on your PC without the usual copy-protection shackles.

However, this doesn't give you carte blanche. Because Apple still encodes songs using the AAC format, your downloads won't play in many phones, PDAs, MP3 players, and so on.

Fortunately, it's fairly easy to convert iTunes Plus purchases (i.e. the DRM-free versions of songs) to the universally compatible MP3 format. Here's how.

Now you're all set to convert any iTunes Plus download to the MP3 format. To do that, right-click the song and choose Create MP3 Version. Wait a minute or so and presto: iTunes plops an MP3 copy of the song into your library.

Note that you'll have now both versions of the song in your library, so you'll have to do a little housekeeping.

The bigger downside is that converting from AAC to MP3 necessarily involves some loss of audio fidelity. Not much, but if you're a purist, you may want to skip iTunes altogether and buy MP3s outright from a store like AmazonMP3.

Update: AAC is not, in fact, a proprietary format. Sorry for the mistake!