Is Apple finding an alternative to wma format?

I was wondeing if Apple is trying to find an alternative to the dreaded wma format. I know I saw a couple floating out there but my question is: Is there legal issues with record companies concerning using an alternative protected format? It would be nice if there was an alternative format since then Apple can finally give out subscription services like Napster does. It would be a shame if the record companies and the goverment are being bias to Microsoft. The goverment can't allow this "legal" monopoly to grow any bigger. It doesn't benefit consumers in the long run.

+It's the one thing that keeps me and many others from buying an i-pod. Not many can afford to buy 120 gigs of music in their lifetime.+
Current iPod models go as low as 4GB in the nano and 1GB for the Shuffle. People who buy the 160 GB model are likely to be using it with video as well as music.
Of course, if you prefer the subscription approach, that is available from other companies.

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TS1424 I have all my previous music files in wma formats from PC Windows xp computer. But now I had decided to purchase an iMac computer, and there is a lot of information I would like to bring to the Mac, but I'm having problems with my music file, and o

I have all my previous music files in wma formats from my previous PC Windows xp computer. And only two weeks ago I decided to purchase an iMac computer OS X Maverick, and there are a lot of files and information I would like to bring to the Mac, but I'm having problems playing my music file, suited to the PC but not with iMac as yet. So, I hope you can help on this...
Kind Regards
Robert Klaassen

WMA files are 'window media audio' files, which is a Microsoft format. If you want to add them to your iTunes library on your Mac then you will need to convert them into a compatible format first. If you still have your windows machine then iTunes for Windows can convert them from WMA to MP3 format : https://discussions.apple.com/message/24158701#24158701
Or try a search for, for example, 'convert wma to mp3' to find programs to convert them.

WMA formats, How do I import into iTunes?

Hi There, This is my first time here...
I purchased a new CD and wanted to add it to my library, but I couldn't. So I asked their "tech support".
I have cut and pasted their response.
My questions: How do I copy the songs to iTunes?
and in the last para of the response, they make it sound like Apple is the hold up for making this process easier, is that true? is there an easy fix for this?
THE EMAIL BEGINS HERE......Thanks
Hello Tangela,
Thank you for contacting us. We appreciate your purchase of the Anthony Hamilton CD and will be happy to assist you with the music transfer.
Please follow the instructions below in order to move your content into iTunes and onto an iPod:
If you have a Mac computer you can copy the songs using your iTunes Player as you would normally do.
If you have a PC place the CD into your computer and allow the CD to automatically start. If the CD does not automatically start, open your Windows Explorer, locate the drive letter for your CD drive and double-click on the LaunchCD.exe file located on your CD.
Once the application has been launched and the End User License Agreement has been accepted, you can click the Copy Songs button on the top menu.
Follow the instructions to copy the secure Windows Media Files (WMA) to your PC. Make a note of where you are copying the songs to, you will need to get to these secure Windows Media Files in the next steps.
Once the WMA files are on your PC you can open and listen to the songs with Windows Media Player 9.0 or higher. You may also play them in any compatible player that can play secure Windows Media files, such as MusicMatch, RealPlayer, and Winamp, but it will require that you obtain a license to do so. To obtain this license, from the Welcome Screen of the user interface, click on the link below the album art that says If your music does not play in your preferred player, click here. Follow the instructions to download the alternate license. PLEASE NOTE: This license is only necessary for playing the copied songs in a media player other than iTunes or Windows Media Player. If you are just trying to use iTunes, simply continue with these instructions.
Using Windows Media Player only, you can then burn the songs to a CD. Please note that in order to burn the files, you need to upgrade to or already have Windows Media Player 9 or greater.
Once the CD has been burned, place the copied CD back into your computer and open iTunes. iTunes can now rip the songs as you would a normal CD.
Please note an easier and more acceptable solution requires cooperation from Apple, who we have already reached out to in hopes of addressing this issue. To help speed this effort, we ask that you use the following link to contact Apple and ask them to provide a solution that would easily allow you to move content from protected CDs into iTunes or onto your iPod rather than having to go through the additional steps above. http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipod.html
Please let us know if we can assist you further.
Thank you,
Rob
SunnComm Tech Support
CLIENT: [email protected]
How do I import the songs into iTunes so that I can play them on my iPod?
iPod HP laptop Windows XP
iPod HP laptop Windows XP

To answer your Question in short, yes apple is the hold up. A more detailed answer follows.
THe steps they tell you to do are basic steps for removing protection or "DRM" usually. Most record companys today go all out to protect there copyright songs by putting DRM "Digital Rights Management" or protection on them. Almost all the world (Last I looked it was roughly 95%) of the world uses a PC with Microsoft on it. Since Microsoft installs windows media player on all windows, the record companys have found it most easy to have there songs copied with the program in the "Protected WMA" file format.
Apple and Microsoft are from 2 different worlds and have went against eachother pretty much the whole 20 something years modern computers have been around. Since Microsoft made and owns the WMA format, any company that makes products that will play this format have to pay what they call a "Royalty fee".. Apple isn't about to pay micorsoft for anything like that, as they themselfs are pushing there own royalty fee based format of AAC. Apple does offer in iTUnes to convert UNprotected WMAs.
The steps they gave you to do (as they didn't mention to you cuz they don't want you to know) is steps for actually "Taking off" or "Removing" the protection off the song. the industry has yet to figure out how to keep protection on digital songs when its being burned to a CD. So when its burned to the CD and the protection is off, now iTUnes has full access to the music

Converting iTunes music to MP3 and/or WMA format

Have a bunch of music (99% of which was originally loaded from my CD library) in iTunes on my Laptop. I periodically sync that with my iPod Touch 3rd Gen. Question: Can a portion of this music be converted from iTunes to MP3 or WMA format? My car can play music from an SDHC Card but the format has to be one or the other only. How do I achieve this? Your time and specific suggestions/solutions are very much appreciated.

gruntvet wrote:
Hey Ed2345;
Followed the instructions to convert songs to MP3. Quite cumbersome. You would think Apple would have detailed instructions on how to keep the different formated songs separated, filed or whatever would be best to manage them. Not sure if I need to create a separate playlist for them or library and how? I tried to export a playlist of 16 converted songs to an SDHC card. Thought I did but when I put it into the car stereo, nothing happens! Wow, I may as well give up. Would you be so kind as to possibly help? Your time and efforts appreciated. Joe
Gruntvet,
After the conversions have completed, put your Music library in Songs view, and sort by "Date Added." All of your newly created MP3s will be together at the top.
From there, you can just drag them to the SD card.

Wma format to ipod (beginner)

Will ipod be able to copy music from my WMA format to it?

You'll need to convert WMA files to a format compatible with the iPod.
Formats you can use are:
MP3
AIFF (CD)
WAV (with no compression)
AAC
Apple Lossless Encoder
There's more information here: About the Add to Library, Import and Convert functions

How can I convert video in a WMA format to play in QuickTime Pro?

I have installed my QuickTime Pro, but cannot play any of my videos that I already have stored on my computer. They are all in the WMA format. Is there anyway I can convert these files to play in Quicktime Pro? I also cannot figure out how to download a video from my digital video camera into QuickTime Pro. Can you help me with this? Additionally, I cannot figure out how to download from my digital camera into QuickTime Pro. All of these functions I would like to do, are so I can take these videos & pictures and download them to my IPOD. HELP - thanks Mike Mirsch

Hi again Mirsch,
I have Mac OS X and I have Quicktime 7.1 Pro.
I know that you can record a movie by making a new movie recording. Use the fire-wire connection to do this and have you camera in playback or deck mode. This is probably not the best way to import video to your pc. I say this because it might not be a lossless ingest of video (depending on your quicktime preferences>recording settings.
Try saving your dv video onto your pc using a program like premier (i use iMovie and Final Cut Express).
Good luck,
José Cuervo

I am having trouble with the Jpeg icons and also now thumbnails not being visable in bith teh Apple finder and now also Adobe Bridge. Can anyone shed any light on this ?

I am having trouble with the Jpeg icons and also now thumbnails not being visable in bith teh Apple finder and now also Adobe Bridge. Can anyone shed any light on this ?

Argh - once again, I find my solution right after posting this. Left out one modification to the SWIG script, now it runs in 29 seconds vs C 16 seconds, I can live with that.

Just bought my 1st mac. I have some wma format music files which wo'nt play on i tunes. How best to convert these files so they will play on iTunes?

just bought my 1st mac. I have some wma format music files which wo'nt play on i tunes. How best to convert these files so they will play on iTunes? Any suggestions much appreciated

Try using VLC Media Player 2.0.6. EasyWMA 3.3.5 or Music Converter 1.5.1 should be able to convert them to .mp3.

Apple Finder webdav client launch many GET requests when I explore a folder

Hi,
I write a WebDAV server in Python.
I found one issue with Apple Finder WebDAV client and I've noticed same
issue with apache mod_dav server.
Issue : when Finder explore a folder, Finder download the totaly of all files !
I don't know who do all this GET requests ? Spotlight ?
This is very boring because if I've some big file in a folder, all this data
are transfered on my bandwidth.
Have you see the same issue ? Who does this request ? How can I disable this
transfert ?
Thanks for your help,
Stephane

Same issue explained here :
http://code.google.com/p/sabredav/wiki/Finder

How can I tell iTunes to NOT convert certain files from wma format?

I just got an iPod classic, and downloaded iTunes and it automatically started adding all my music. I have almost 5000 songs that are in wma format, and it started converting them all. Then after it got almost 2000 songs finished, it just stopped. For no reason. So I tried to continue it, and apparently there is no way to just continue where it stopped. It started over at the beginning and is now re-converting all the files it already converted.
It took over 24 hours to convert those first 2000 files. It seems completely unnecessary that it should have to re-convert them all over again.
Is there any way that I can tell it NOT to convert those specific files? I figured that you should be able to right-click the file and say "DO NOT CONVERT" or something along those lines, but that is not an option.
The only other way I've been able to figure out that I could do this is to manually add only the files that it didn't convert last time. But that is over 3000 files, and they are not in the same order on my hard drive that they are on in iTunes so I would never be able to figure out what files were done and what files were not done.
There HAS to be a way to just highlight certain files and tell iTunes NOT to convert them. Hasn't there?
Someone please help me. This is really irritating, and I do not feel like waiting for another 3 days for this to finish. I have other things I need to do on my computer, and it seems that while iTunes is converting, it is making everything else very slow.
Thank you.

I know they need to be converted, but the problem is, 2000 of the 5000 have already been converted. now it's trying to convert them again. but there is no reason for that. i want to know how to convert the other files that weren't converted yet, without having to re-convert the ones that were already done.
I would move the ones that were done to a separate folder, but I don't know exactly what ones were done. In iTunes, they are the first 2000 or so in the list, but on my hard drive they are not in the same order.
Does anyone else know if there's a way to do this?

Problems with slow finder and com.apple.finder.plist

I have four users in my marketing department, all running Mac Pros with 10.6. and Adobe CS5 and some other software for design work. Each one has a slowness issue using the Finder (by itself and inside programs (ie, within Photoshop and going to Open)) when accessing our network drives. Other people, including myself, can access those same directories without slowness.
'Slowness' is an understatement. What would normally take a second is taking 5 to 10 minutes to show content in folders.
When I delete "com.apple.finder.plist" off their systems, and reboot, everything snaps back to being speedy, but it doesn't last and they need to remove that file once a day.
I have two saved plist files before they deleted it, but I don't know what do look for when I view the contents with a plist editor.
Can anyone offer some suggestions on why this could be happening? Or how can I view and see what this file is being hung up on?

Download and run all the cleaning and maintainence aspects of the free OnyX while each machine is offline and reboot, leave offline until all are completed and then put them back online.
See if that clears the issue or reveals some more issues with the checks.
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx
OnyX also has a plist checker under Verify.

After installing Mavericks I had problems copying to the server. Was advised to remove the com.apple.finder.plist from Preferences. This worked - but now I have lost the menu bar from my second screen! How do I get that back?

I have tried re-inserting the com.apple.finder.plist into my Preferences folder and re-booting - this didn't work.

First, that cannot be an iBook G4 as that machine cannot run Snow Leopard let alone Mountain Lion. To run Snow Leopard it has to be an Intel processor, not a G4. What does it show as the Model Identifier in About This Mac, More Info, System Report, Hardware, Model Identifier?
Second, if you have erased the hard drive there should not be remnants of any prior content. Even though Disk Warrior is saying nothing is wrong with the hard drive, it sounds as though there are problems. You may want to consider simply replacing the hard drive so there are no questions about faults. A good source is OWC, http://www.macsales.com where they also have on-line videos showing how to do the replacement.
Third, you could also try again to restart using the Snow Leopard DVD/CD and use Disk Utility on that install disk to erase again, and do it a couple times, then try to install. If it continues to refuse, then it sounds as though there is a fault with the hard drive.

I have the apple tv but it say invalide format on my tv but then wen i do the hared rest u see the apple logo but then it go back to invalide format how to fix that problem

i have the apple tv but it say invalide format on my tv but then wen i do the hared rest u see the apple logo but then it go back to invalide format how to fix that problem

Hi richardwilliams51,
If you are having difficulty connecting to the Internet using your Apple TV, I would suggest troubleshooting using the steps in this article -
Apple TV (2nd and 3rd generation): Troubleshooting Wi-Fi networks and connections
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4546
If that does not completely fix your Apple TV, you may need to restore it, using this article -
Apple TV (2nd and 3rd generation): Restoring your Apple TV
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4367
Thanks for using Apple Support Communities.
Best,
Brett L

How do i get itunes to play WMA format music

I want to play windows media music in itunes.how can i do that? is there any way i can convert or something

iTunes for windows will automatically convert unprotected WMA formated audio. Just add the content as you would any other track.

WMA format and iTunes

Greetings: I am trying to download audiobooks from the Riverside County Librrary. The Help person sent this to me. Quote "Note: You cannot listen to an eAudiobook in protected WMA format in iTunes."unquote. I have iTumes 10.1. If iTunes can;t open WMA Format is there anything out there that can for an iMac? I have an Intel 2.4 core 2 duo Moc OS 10.6.4. What can you Tell me about this?
John

What about Flip 4 Mac? That plays WMV's
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/windows-media-player/wmcompo nents

Is Apple finding an alternative to wma format?

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