So… a couple of years ago I spent the winter re-ripping all my CDs to Apple Lossless format. Sat there night after night with a laptop on me knee moving them from the ‘not yet done’ pile to the ‘done’ pile.

I still use iTunes and still have iPods (one in each car and a shuffle each for the gym) but I also have an Android Phone.

Up ’til now I’ve used Doubletwist/Airsync to copy selected music to my phone but I like the idea of having it all available to me so I installed Google Music Play. It searched my PC only to tell me it could only upload a tiny fraction of my music as the rest was .m4a

I understand that hell will freeze over before Google uses an Apple format (or Apple lets them) but is there anything I can do to achieve the following:
~ maintain iTunes for the iPods
~ get all my music onto Google Play
~ not having to re-rip all my CDs again

I am quite happy to have something sit there in the background and create a good MP3 copy of my music but I really, really don’t want to fanny about with the actual CDs again.

Also… when answering, please speak slowly and clearly. If, at any point, you’re typing something and think “I wonder if he’ll understand that”, there’s a good chance I won’t.

TIA,
Higs

Assuming disk space isn’t an issue (and these days it shouldn’t be – you can buy an external drive for buttons if it is) then just convert all your .m4a files to .mp3, in their own directory so that you can keep duplicates off your iPod, and point Google Play at that folder.

Free M4a to MP3 Converter

I can’t look at that right now (at work) but would I need to do it file-by-file, album-by-album or could I just point it at my iTunes library and let it chug through the lot?

I’ve not used it myself, but if not hit up Google for ‘m4a to mp3 converter’ – that’s what I did 🙂 You might want to throw the word ‘batch’ in there as well.

http://www.freac.org/

Works well – I batch converted all my FLAC files to MP3 in one go.