Getting To Know Your Mac

Previously I wrote about whether iTunes suck or not. Conclusion is that it doesn't suck but the MP3 CD burning sucks big time.

Today I tried to burn a MP3 CD with iTunes for the very first time. I dragged all the albums I wanted to a new playlist. Then I hit the Burn Disc button and waited. Then it said: 56 songs out of 102 songs cannot be burned since they are in wrong format. Well yeah, they are in MP4 format but so what? Why can't it just convert them temporarily into MP3's so it can burn the disc? Turned out it just can't.

So, I had to find a way to manually convert them into MP3's. I wanted to sort the playlist in a way I could easily select all songs that are in wrong format. I hit the secondary mouse button over the playlist's title bar and checked Kind. They all say MPEG Audio Format. Nice. I decided to burn those MP3's first, remove them from the playlist, convert the MP4's into MP3's and burn them to the same CD.

I found a Create MP3 version from Advanced menu. iTunes started to convert the songs. When finished, it kept the MP4 versions so I ended up with duplicate songs! Burning a CD hasn't ever been this hard.

Now I had to select all the MP3's from the list that contained both MP3 and MP4 versions of the same songs. Remember the MPEG Audio Format info that didn't help previously? So I checked Date added from the title bar meny and re-sorted the playlist. I removed all the MP4's from the playlist - and then from the library - and hit the Burn disc button. iTunes ejects my CD and asks for a blank CD. Whoa, this sucks - big time.

Dear Apple, if I want to burn a MP3 CD, could you automatically do all the converting so I don't have to spend 1,5 hours to burn one disc?

Of course you could store all your songs in MP3 format for the first time, but what's the point when there's a newer format available?

How do you burn your MP3 CDs?

Tags: burn, cd, iTunes, mp3

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Software, Usability, iTunes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.