Yes, this has been covered many times before.
SSL will not play AAC files downloaded from iTunes.

Unique,

thank you for your prompt response...I guess I am screwed with some of these files...

U N O

As a last resort you can burn to CD then rip back to your computer as a WAVE file. Wave takes a lot of space, however that is the best way so you don't degrade the sound further by re-encoding to MP3.

I am told that .AIFF files are the best...how true is this?

Unique,

would it work if I made myself a data CD of the songs that are locked?...and then try and import them?

unique, i'm doing that exact procedure...i'm also wasting a lot of cd-rs... would i be able to use cd-rws? that way, i can (theoretically) recycle / reuse the same cd-rws?

thanks for the feedback

I would stay away from using CD-RWs, data integrity can be quite a problem. Do you have any virtual image drive software? That way you can create a virtual volume as a CD and then copy the CD Audio from that.

virtual image drive software...not sure i know of this...
...do you have a link where i can buy/ or demo / or shareware

thanks ranedjnz for your help on this....

What mac lap top would work best with ssl? Is a new version of ssl coming out soon? I really think I'm going to buy the product but I need some help from some other mac users, or anyone for that matter

I have not really used AIFF files, I encoded a few songs in AIFF and WAVE and did not notice a difference. They both use the same amount of space though.
Try reading this, it might help
scratchlive.net

I don't think this will work. You will need to burn a regular audio CD and then re-encode to WAVE or AIFF.

Mike, you can use CD-RW's but make sure that you start with new discs. From my experience is that they have a very short life especially with a few scratches on them. RaneDJNZ has a good idea. I'll need to try that next time. I think you can use Easy Media Creator or Nero for that.

Most burning programs will allow you to create an "image" of what you want to burn.
When you get to the screen where you would normally tell the software to burn to your cd drive, there should be an option for a disc image writer or something of the like.
It will ask you for a name and possibly a format, usually it will be a .iso .cue .ccd or something of the like.
If you download and install Daemon tools www.daemon-tools.cc you can then "mount" an image as a virtual drive.
The computer now thinks that there has been a new cd-rom drive installed. Now open up the program you use to rip your music and select from your list of drives and the new image drive should be there.

^^^
Like he said daemontools is a life saver

Unique,

thanks for the tip...it works maestro!!!

RaneDJNZ, are you sure it works? AFAIK this virtual CD drive is only accessible to the burning app, so iTunes for examplecant use it.

so you mean to say i can 'burn' cd .wavs of my iTunes on to my hard drive instead of burning and wasting CDrs? wow. lemmie give it a spin.

I don't think you can do this with tunes you have bought from itunes, unless itunes let's you burn CD images, but daemon tools is fantastic program and I've not encountered anything that treats it any differently from a CD drive, plus it can mount any image you throw at it including nero images, iso and bin/cue.

sorry for not hearing yall clearly (maybe its just too late in tha evening/morning...so i still have to 'burn' cds or .m4p's i bought from iTunes, or is there a step by step way of doing this without wasting cdr's....i remember something about hymen back last year, but i understand iTune's updates put an end to that....

I was working on writing a guide how to use a virtual cd drive (which appears as a normal cd writing capable drive)... but I haven finished yet.

What software are you thinking of for the virtual drive Nik, the only one I can find is this one www.ztekware.com

Its not on my PC installed at home, thats why I didnt name it yet :) And I really cant remember its been 3 months since I looked it at. But I managed to burn CDs from an application which doesnt have an image writer, so the last step to test would be whether iTunes works with it.

It would appear this doesn't work if you are using itunes to do your burning (i'm not a big itunes user) and I assume that no other burning programs will recognise the itunes DRM formatted tunes. If not you could always give this a go www.bpurcell.org

Yeah, but its based on jhymn again.. which doesnt work with iTunes 6.0+ yet.

nobspangle, I just checked, its indeed the software from ztekware, called original CD emulator.