First things first. According to Wikipedia, ALL music downloaded from the iTunes store since October 2007 is DRM-free. iTunes Plus songs were more expensive, and DRM-free, but Apple has made all music DRM-free and they remain at the 99¢ pice point I might add (this is why I was finally able to cash in iTunes cards for music for my Creative Zen).

Secondly, iTunes sound be able to convert any music you have already, the problem is that the way to do this is not very intuitive, nor is is obvious (odd for Apple...).

To begin with, let's go ahead and view only the music that needs to be messed with. Go to your library and set up all your music to be available in list format (the button the arrow is pointing at). Then go View->View Options, you'll want check only the ones circled, it'll make everything easier to look at:


From there, click on Kind to organize your music by its compression type. This'll get a little tricky, depending on what songs are showing up. First and foremost, we should remove all songs that are not AAC, the file format that iTunes natively uses.

*NOTE: before trying this, do a quick test on a single song to make sure that you don't delete it. I know the worst case scenario is it going in the trash, but if enough stuff is in there it could auto-delete.*

Just select all non-AAC files by selecting the first non-AAC song and then scrolling all the way down to the bottom and selecting the last song on the list while holding down shift. Just hit the delete key and you should get two warnings. The first one is asking whether or not you'd like to remove these from your library. The second one will ask if you want to put these songs in the trash, to this one you should select "Keep Files".

After that you should be left with the encoded files, now you just need to convert them into MP3's, which is were you'll use iTunes' "hidden" conversion feature. For this, go Edit -> Preferences. In the General Tab of this new window you should see a button labeled "Import Settings", click it.


At the top of the next window that opens you should see "Import Using: " next to a drop down menu. From that drop down menu, select "MP3 Encoder" and using the drop down menu next to "Setting", select "Higher Quality".


And now from there it'll be as easy as selecting all you're songs (Crt+A) and going Advanced -> Create MP3 Version.

I hope it works, I'm not sure if older iTunes songs (i.e. files protect by FairPlay) can be converted, but I do know that it does work for the new, DRM-free AAC files.

Can anyone who has some old iTunes songs laying around check this out for me?