Most of the people who have bought the songs from outside iTunes environment and have downloaded the songs in to their ipods will not be able to the play the songs. The reason behind this is the songs will be protected by MP4 or AAC formats in order to prevent song duplication or piracy. However, people need not worry on how to covert the song into MP3 format as there is a simple way to do so.

While converting the song, the first that has to be done is to access iTunes program. Now try to convert the song. One of the most commonly found error while converting is that, it says that the protected files can't be converted in to another format. Now just go and select the convert option and click on edit. Before importing the songs, just look out for the preferences. In this menu, the using of import can be changed to MP3 Encoder from AAC Encoder. Now save the changed settings and try to convert the song.

At this point of conversion, most of the users will still encounter the same error message saying that the protected files cannot be converted. This message is occurred because only unprotected formats like WMA or WAV can be converted. As the songs that are in playlists are mostly will be in the formats of MP4 or AAC and they cannot be converted into any other format using iTunes. As of now, there are 2 options:

- The first option is to burn the songs on to a disk,

- The second option is to download a program so that it converts the songs directly to the format of MP3.

By burning a CD with either the Nero or any other CD burning program is one of the safest and easiest ways. However, it may take long period of time and is a drawn-out process. To write on the CD, you have to just insert a blank CD in to the CD drive, burn the songs that are in AAC format into a normal CD format and rip them to the system's hard disk songs that are MP3 format. This process of CD burning may take lots of time and as many as only songs can be burned on to a CD in order to keep up the exact quality of the songs in any kind CD. Do remember that the CD you use for burning has to be an audio CD but a Data CD or MP3 CD or an AAC CD.

Using some of the file converters that are downloaded from internet is quite a risky method. It is risky because the file converters that are downloaded from the internet often affect the entire coding of some of the protected formats negatively. Some of the files are corrupted in such a way that they totally unreadable. However, this way of doing is the fastest way of converting the files. In this way of converting the users have to just drag and drop the songs to get converted.