Conversion from .m4a to .mp3

Turbulent Bill

Hi,
I've just bought a Zen Vision:M, but have a lot of .m4a files on my PC. What's the best way to convert these to .mp3? The Vision:M doesn't seem to support .m4a, and I'd like to normalise the volumes across the albums. Would the transcoding have any effect on the sound quality? Thanks.

Kolodny

I downloaded 'Tunebite premium' for doing this. It works by recording a playback of the protected file and saving it as .mp3 and the sound quality doesn't seem to be compromised. Bit time consuming, that's all, although you can record in double time. Can't post a link as I'm 'google-restricted' at work but it's easy to find. I'm sure there's probably a better way - I haven't researched it much.

Turbulent Bill

Thanks, but the files are .m4a rather than .m4p, which means that they're not protected (I think). I thought there might be something that does a direct conversion, rather than a recording/encoding of a playback. Any other suggestions?

Makaveli

dBpower Amp, it doesn't come with the m4a codec built in but you can download it from the codec page.

Transcoding will result in some loss of quality though.

tywy

Itunes does it for ya aswell, well it does on the mac anyway.

Edwardius

Makaveli wrote:

dBpower Amp, it doesn't come with the m4a codec built in but you can download it from the codec page.

Transcoding will result in some loss of quality though.

It's also quick as hell.

Turbulent Bill

Excellent, dBpowerAMP should do the trick. Thanks!