Own your iTunes Music

Have you ever wanted to play your music that you purchased from iTunes on an mp3 player only to find out that you don't really own it. Well you can play it on your ipod/iphone and that's it, you can't play it on your friends ipod never mind your brother or sisters. Well that's what Apple want you to think. But for the price of around 9p per album you can take full ownership and play it anywhere on anything.

It takes around 10 minutes per album but once you've converted them you can play them where you like and on what mp3 player you choose.

Here's what you need.

1] A free program called Audio Grabber,
2] A blank CD
3] An Internet connection and you might need to manually ad the cover so you'll need to gt the covers yourself. A great website for your album covers is http://www.cdcovers.cc/
4] About 10 minutes per album

First you'll need to create a new playlist in iTune, click on file on the top menu bar and then create new playlist and name it temp.

Now find the album you want to convert. select all the tracks from the album, keep your finger on the ctrl key and click once on each track. Now drag them to your new playlist called temp. Put your blank CD in your computer right click on your temp playlist and click on burn to Disc. That's the first stage complete.

Now you'll need your new program (Audio Grabber) that you've already downloaded and installed ; - ) Audio Grabber is a sinch to use. First click on the penguin that's the CD Database, this will fill in the name of the album and all the track names as iTunes does not carry this across onto the audio CD. Once all the names are filled in make sure you tick the mp3 box and the click on the Grab buton, the tracks are stored in a folder on your C: drive called audiograbber when Audio Grabber has done its stuff you'll need to create a folder and copy/cut all the tracks and paste them in the new folder. I usually call the folder the same name as the album. Now you've got your album in mp3 format that can be played on any mp3 player even your mates ipod/iphone. Its that easy.

Album Art, to start you'll need to open iTunes. Its probably best to delete the original album out of iTunes, don't worry iTunes will ask you if you want to delete the files from your computer, click on no, after all this is proof you actualy own the album. Now click on file and Ad folder to library and choose the folder with the converted mp3 tracks, this will now appear in your iTunes music library as before but with no Album Art. First use the get album Art fuction in iTunes, this should do the job If this does not work you'll need to select all the tracks in the album until there all highlighted, then you'll need to right click on them and click on Get Info,this will open an info box, now tick where it says Artwork, then double click on the small square to the right, you will need to point iTunes at the CD cover you saved to your computer earlier. You'll need to rename the image as most of the time when you download covers they come with very long names and iTunes doesn't like it, just give it the same name as the album. Now just click Apply then OK. Now the Album has the cover associated to each track. In fact its nearly identical to the album you bought. The only difference is you now own it, after all you have paid for it.