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USB, Music Files, Best way to transfer from iTunes?

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I know iPod and iPhone do not play music through USB. Reading forums, most are going with USB flash drive.
My understanding is music files must be .mp3 or .m4a. MS will not play .m4p

How do I convert from .m4p?

What is best way to copy music to USB? just transfer playlists or individual songs to the USB?

Using latest iTunes on iMac with Mountain Lion. Does USB Flash drive have to be formatted to allow MS to recognize?

Thanks
 
How do I convert from .m4p?

Since that's the old protected format with DRM, you can either (a) upgrade them to DRM-less files via iTunes plus ($), or (b) write audio CDs and then convert the audio CD into MP3 or M4A (with a loss of quality). You can't just convert them in one step without doing one of those--that's part of the point of DRM back when Apple used it, and the 'p' files have the old DRM on it.

There's also iTunes Match, and some people have used match and removed their old files and downloaded the matched ones, which are DRM-less (this costs, I forget, is it $50/year? but you only have to do it once), but due to some issues I've read about with Match, I wouldn't use this as a way to upgrade the old protected tracks. But there are articles about it on, for example, Macworld.com--how to do it, caveats, issues, etc.

No doubt there's some DRM-stripping tool out there on some shady, virus-infested site; I wouldn't go looking for that, personally.

Of course the other thing you can do is to use Bluetooth, then you don't have to copy the files anywhere. If you have a hard-drive-based iPod (no Bluetooth), you could get an FM adapter or a Bluetooth adapter. (I use an FM adapter with my 160 GB iPod.) So you don't really have to mess around with converting/upgrading tracks if you don't want to.
 
WAV and FLAC are both open, non-proprietary formats that provide excellent audio quality. FLAC is essentially WAV compressed with a lossless algorithm such that your music does not lose quality. Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is also lossless and suffers no loss of quality, but is closed, proprietary, and will continue to lock you into the Apple ecosystem.

With WAV and FLAC being technically equivalent, much more widely supported, and entirely free, I recommend to people that they switch to WAV or FLAC instead of going to ALAC. FLAC, of course, is about half the size of WAV so it's generally preferred.
 
WAV and FLAC are both open, non-proprietary formats that provide excellent audio quality. FLAC is essentially WAV compressed with a lossless algorithm such that your music does not lose quality. Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) is also lossless and suffers no loss of quality, but is closed, proprietary, and will continue to lock you into the Apple ecosystem.

With WAV and FLAC being technically equivalent, much more widely supported, and entirely free, I recommend to people that they switch to WAV or FLAC instead of going to ALAC. FLAC, of course, is about half the size of WAV so it's generally preferred.

While ALAC is only on Apple hardware, isn't it technically open source now?
Apples ALAC codec is now open source | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog
 
Yay! One of those cases where I'm glad to be wrong. :)

Still prefer FLAC, but I withdraw my criticism.

FLAC is more widely supported I think so probably the safer bet but if you have all Apple hardware (iphone, iPad...) like I do, ALAC might work. That's what I'm doing but FLAC probably better choice anyway as if I move platforms, the other platform is unlikely to support ALAC. I e-mailed Tesla about supporting ALAC since it was open source so hopefully they add it.
 
FLAC is more widely supported I think so probably the safer bet but if you have all Apple hardware (iphone, iPad...) like I do, ALAC might work. That's what I'm doing but FLAC probably better choice anyway as if I move platforms, the other platform is unlikely to support ALAC. I e-mailed Tesla about supporting ALAC since it was open source so hopefully they add it.

It would be nice of Tesla would support ALAC. It would save me the conversion.
 
I have read and tried to absorb all the info on the best way to transfer my CDs to the model s. I have a 64 gb flash drive that I used to rip my CDs and used mp3 on my iTunes program. I think the quality is less than desirable so would like to use ALAC, but tesla does not recognize this. So could use FLAC, but apple does not have this available. So thought about having an outside company rip my CDs to FLAC. Can anyone tell me their thoughts on this.
 
I have read and tried to absorb all the info on the best way to transfer my CDs to the model s. I have a 64 gb flash drive that I used to rip my CDs and used mp3 on my iTunes program. I think the quality is less than desirable so would like to use ALAC, but tesla does not recognize this. So could use FLAC, but apple does not have this available. So thought about having an outside company rip my CDs to FLAC. Can anyone tell me their thoughts on this.

You can do it yourself. Just pick one of these programs to do the RIP: FLAC - documentation


With a bit more work, you can modify iTunes to play the FLAC files.
 
So I cannot seem to find the information on the music capacity of the standard sound system, I know on the premium it says 3000 songs. Does anyone know?

Originally they said 500 songs, but who knows? It's 0 for everyone, for now. ;-) But yeah, supposedly 500, or at least at the time when I wrote down my preferences.

I hate the "# of songs" method, though; Tesla should talk in MB or GB. # of songs is useless--FLAC or low-quality MP3? ;-) Length of track, format, quality, etc. make the size of a "song" vary wildly. I know it's not just Tesla--lots of companies talk like this--but for example, Apple tells us the space on an iPod as well as giving the "# of songs" estimate. /rant, sorry. ;-)
 
Right now, the S can't use its internal storage for music so you need to plug in a thumbdrive or stream off Bluetooth.

Music CD's typically contain 750 MB or less data. 75 * 750 MB = ~56 GB total. If you convert the CD WAV files to FLAC, the files will be about 50% smaller (~28 GB total). So 75 FLAC-encoded albums should fit fine on a 32 GB thumb drive. If you convert to 256 or 320 mp3, you'll reduce the size even further (another ~50% so down to about 14 GB).