FLAC, OGG, MPEG and M3U

[Christopher]

Does anyone know how to convert these various formats into MP3 so I can store in I-Tunes?

[Mark Thomas]

The number of programs that claim to do this are legion but they almost all demand some form of payment. I've done a quick (but I wouldn't claim exhaustive) check and can't find one that does it all and which is Freeware. You may have to build a little collection of free utilities which will handle different pairs of formats....

[JimL]

Funny.  I don't know if this is a similar problem, but when I downloaded one of the works here it was in WAV format.  When I transferred it into my iTunes the program automatically converted it into an MP3.  Have you tried simply transferring the file to see if your iTunes will do that?

[Mark Thomas]

This might help.

[TerraEpon]

Sigh...

Ok. First off, M3U is a playlist format. It's not music.
Ogg (Vorbis) is lossy, and thus you DON'T want to change it to Mp3. Quality will be lost. You could change it to lossless (ALAC if you wanna play in iTunes) but this adds pointless file size.
FLAC of course being lossless you can convert all you want. There are quite a number of free ones, though a good option is Foobar, which could just play those Ogg files or anything else instead (though I use Winamp as a media player, personally)

[eschiss1]

... on a Mac or PC? On a Mac I use Switch (search for switch.app audio os x ) which converts many of those formats and is fairly flexible -again, many is as good as you're probably going to get... I also keep another program (both are more or less shareware but don't turn off if you don't pay) called MAX from sbooth.org which converts another couple of kinds of files. The one kind of conversion I find myself needing most on this site (which Switch is good for) is wma to mp3/m4a/etc. since iTunes doesn't play wma files.
The latest Mac iTunes has also, in the great tradition of losing functionality with upgrades, apparently lost the ability to convert certain kinds of files to files it can play (or inbetween different types). I think it no longer "converts" midi to MP3, for example (which is not so much conversion as creating audio based on instructions) (Switch will do this, though).
If you're using a PC (Intel? .. not sure what to call them. "PC" doesn't seem quite right.) will have to leave advice to someone else

[MikeW]

I use dbPowerAmp for my conversions which is a very popular, powerful and easy to use PC solution. Usually I just right-click the files I want to convert, pick my poison for output format and more minute settings, and then let it go.

[JimL]

Well, I just noticed that the second option down (below Play) on my right-click is Convert.  I forget the program it uses, but I generally don't have to use it, because I think it automatically kicks in whenever I transfer a WAV file to iTunes.

[MikeW]

If I was facetious I would say that transferring anything to iTunes is a lottery. So I won't say anything.

[Elroel]

A little late reaction on this.
I myself work with FORMAT FACTORY, which is a free program and can change many sorts of files, but apart  from music files it also works with video formats and pictures.

So far it never let me down (over a year now)

[jerfilm]

Roxio Creator lets you change formats between lots of file forms, too.

I hate itunes - I have an IPad2 and I love it for some things but I hate having to constantly deal with Apple.  They have a lock on everything.  It irritates me no end that I can't just go in and look at files and folders and manipulate them......

Sorry, I digress

Jerry

[JimL]

Funny.  I have iTunes for PC on my system and it works just fine.  I can title an "album" or work, put in performer information and movement titles, move the entire album onto a playlist, burn the playlist to CD, and do pretty much anything I want.

[TerraEpon]

Yeah but if you ever use iTunes to transfer to an iDevice, they completely rename the files to random four letter titles. I only use an old iPad for occasionally car listening, but I still use Rockbox on it so I don't have to have iTunes on my computer.

[MikeW]

You can't trust iTunes  (or Windows Media Player) with your original files as they will still mess up your tags irrespective of the user settings chosen. Also since iTunes refuses to natively handle a number of common formats, it just makes horrible lossy conversions to Apple's blessed formats. I feel dirty when I have to use it.

[Amphissa]

The most versatile and easiest free tool I've found in WinFF. It runs on all flavors of Windows and most flavors of Linux. Not Mac. WinFF will convert an amazing number of video and audio formats. It's very easy to use, but it is not commercial software, so don't expect fancy splash screens.

http://winff.org/html_new/