wma to mp3 to iTunes

kspietz

I am trying to get some of some wma music from my old PC into iTunes on my Mac following a hard disk crash a while ago after which these files were recovered. They will play in QuickTime, they will convert to mp3 in the trial download of Switch, and they will import into iTunes. However, iTunes will not play them or convert them to ACC. There is no error message. When selected for play, iTunes jumps to and plays the next song in the listing. Virtually all of these are from CDs my kids and I owned, but they are spread across the family now as the kids grew up and moved out. If this is a matter of copywrite protection, is there any away I can recover them for use in iTunes? Also, I can't open the wma's or their mp3 conversions in Sound Studio.

[deleted]

Try using a different media player to see if it's able to play the files. It may be that they were too damaged which is why iTunes won't play them. As you converted them to mp3s, I don't believe it would be a DRM issue.

kspietz

None of my existing mp3 files that survived the disk crash are damaged. They all can be loaded into iTunes. Also, all the surviving wma files will play in QuickTime. Therefore I do not believe the files are so damaged that their conversion to mp3 to be rejected by iTunes. I loaded the files from iTunes to my iPhone and they behave the same. Can you suggest another mp3 player that I probably have access to to use as a test?

kspietz

More information...I tried to open the converted mp3 files in Sound Studio 3.5. They appear to load, that is the window has the file name in at the top, but there is no visible audio waveform as expected and of course they will not play. Sound Studio does not open wma files at all, I believe. Also in iTunes, the converted mp3 files show a size that is about 1/10th of the average working files, and their "Time" is zero.

When I converted in Switch Plus, I also checked Normalize assuming they would be serial processes. It looked as if it was normalizing the file, taking a few seconds and appeared to be processing data. I tried turning off Normalization and now the wma to mp3 conversions work in iTunes.

Go figure...probably a rookie issue. Thanks for your help.