Sometimes Macs Aren’t That Smart
If I were to ask any technologist what the primary sound file format is on the Internet and beyond, they have to say MP3. It’s a highly compressed standard that maintains the quality of the sound that’s heard by humans. That said, if I were Apple (or Microsoft), I would probably offer MP3 as a common file conversion between my programs.
Apple’s default file type is the aiff. Every heard of it? Unless you’re working on a Mac, probably not.
For you Mac gurus, I could be out of my head. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I went through quite a few programs before I could figure out how to convert an aiff file to MP3.
Garageband? Nope.
Soundtrack? Nope.
Quicktime Pro? Nope.
So I do some Googling for aiff to mp3 and find a bunch of articles on using iTunes (You know, that FREE software) and it’s supposedly possible. You just set the Import settings to Import files to an MP3 file type.
Cool! So I import the file I recorded into iTunes, voila! Ummm… no voila.
This is really starting to suck.
Eventually I happen to right-click on the sound file in iTunes and I see it… there it is…Convert to MP3. God loves me. The world is fair. After an hour, I finally am able to convert my file. Done!
Now if I only knew where it put it…
I eventually figured out how to copy out the MP3 file from iTunes and put it up on my site. I just know that the RIAA is behind this somehow. I can’t believe that every modern sound application doesn’t have a blatant feature to either work with MP3s by default or automatically export in MP3s. Ridiculous.
