Expert: The Doctor - 4/13/2009

Question
I buy and have bought music from the iTunes store. Since they no longer have DRM on most of their music, I thought I'd get a different device to play my music because my iPod is long gone. This is when I realize that all of the iTunes music is in a file format called Mpeg4. I've tried finding file converters through google but they all seem to have strings attached so, do you know of any file converters that will change Mpeg4 into MP3 without all of the garbage? Sorry if this is a repeat question or similar to another of your questions.

Answer
Linux/Unix-based systems have excellent applications for the purpose of converting files between formats. You can still use many of them if you are running Windows. If you are running Mac they will automatically work in their natural environment (Mac OS X is based off a version of Unix).

Here are some applications worth looking into (using Windows versions).

LAME:
http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php

FAAD:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Audio/Audio-CD-Rippers-Encoders/FAAD-2-B...

If you are running Linux/Unix (or Mac), you may use this command:
faad -o - inputfile.m4a | lame - outputfile.mp3

You will need to do a little research on your own. You did not specify the operating system that you are using, though the links above will give you a starting point (possibly automatically doing all of the work for you).

To assist your own digging on this subject, I also encourage googling either "how to convert mpeg4 to mp3" or "how to convert mpeg4 to mp3 +free" (for freeware alternatives). When I did that a plethora of programs came up in the search engine that would work well for your purpose.

Best of luck!