Backing Up or Reformating iTunes Music
Category: Apple/Mac OS... Music...
Posted Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 04:33 PM [GMT-6]

One of the misconceptions I sometimes hear about music purchased via Apple's iTunes Music Store (ITMS) is that the songs cannot be converted to another format for back-up purposes, or for playing on your home or car stereo without using an iPod. The confusion arises because music purchased from iTMS is downloaded in MPEG-4 AAC format rather than the more familiar MP3, and it has DRM protection built into it, so that right out of the box, so to speak, it won't play on anything but iTunes or an iPod.

The fact is, however, that you can convert your purchased AAC music into regular old uncompressed AIFF files -- the same kind found on any commercial audio CD. In fact, iTunes itself provides you with the capability of doing this, and if you want to make a back-up copy of your purchased music (and also play it via non-Apple outlets), here's how to do that.

Note that the following instructions apply to the Mac version of iTMS, but they should be similar, if not identical, on the Windows version.

First, insert a blank CD, then open iTunes. Select the "Advanced" menu item under iTunes Preferences, and then click on the menu option labeled "Burning." Select the appropriate settings for your CD burner, but make sure the radio button labeled "Audio CD" is toggled on. You're going to make an audio CD, not a data or MP3 CD. Once you've made the appropriate selections, click "OK."

You should be back in the main iTunes window. If you haven't already done so, create a new Playlist containing the songs you want to backup to CD. Keep in mind that the songs being recorded to the new CD will be uncompressed and thus more than ten times larger than the originals. I recommend using total minutes rather than file size to determine how many tracks you can burn to the CD.

Once you've created your Playlist, click on it to highlight it and the "Burn Disc" icon in the upper right corner (see screenshot at right) of iTunes should be clickable. Click it to start the recording. The end result will be a CD containing the songs in AIFF format, and it should be usable in any car or home CD player.

There are some downsides to this approach. First, since you're working from a compressed source file, the quality of the resulting AIFF will be somewhat lower than if you'll find on the original CD of whatever music you're backing up. Whether you'll notice the difference in quality will depend on the sensitivity of your ears and your stereo system. I'm guessing that 95% of us won't be able to tell the difference, but your mileage may vary.

Second, you'll lose all identifying information for the tracks you backup: album name, artist, song name, album art. If this is important to you, you'll want to create a copy of the disk you just made and use the copying software to manually add that information.

Now, there are a couple of other things to keep in mind. First, this is not intended to be a process whereby you bypass the DRM and make a bunch of copies of purchased music for your friends. We'll all be terribly disappointed if you do this. OTOH, I'm not your mother.

Second, this process is useful for another purpose and that's to edit purchased music. Why would you want to do this? Well, that's up to you, but here's one recent example of why I made a copy of a song. The original version of the song is about eight minutes in length, a nice catchy hip-hop tune with good lyrics...but the last two minutes contains a bizarre recording of a series of messages from an answering machine. I'm sure the artist's vision required that this be included, but I don't share his vision, and I certainly don't want to listen to those messages everytime the tune pops up on my 'pod. So I converted the song to AIFF, fired up Sound Studio, cropped the song at the point the music ends and the messages begin, added a tasteful five second fadeout, saved the new version to another AIFF, then imported it back into iTunes in AAC format. I not only saved two minutes on my 'pod, but I eliminated something I didn't want to listen to. (I did keep the original version intact.)

One last note. If all you want to do is make a back-up copy of your iTunes Library, you're much better off copying it to DVD. Use the same process as described above, but in the Preferences/Advanced/Burning panel, select "Data CD" (even if you're going to burn a DVD).