Memorex MP3 Player

*there is software included with the MP3 player, but it is not compatible with Macs. Someone said something about drag & drop, but into what?*

If your player shows up on your Mac desktop when connected to the computer you can drag tracks from iTunes (just highlight the track or tracks in your iTunes music list, hold down the mouse key and drag the song directly to the MP3 player icon on the desktop). You also need to make sure the player supports AAC (MP4) format (you refer to it as an MP3 player, is that the only format it can play?) If you imported anything from CD into iTunes using the AAC encoder then they will need to be converted to MP3 before you can move them: How to convert a song to a different file format format

*I know I won't be able to transfer protected music, but how can I look up which songs are protected?*

Add a "Kind" column to your iTunes list view and look for any track that says "Protected" (Right click at the top of any column in the list view and choose Kind from the menu of options

Connect the player to your Mac. It should mount as a standard removable drive. Then, if I'm reading the instructions correctly, just "drag and drop" the MP3 tracks to the "PLAYLIST" directory on the player.

how can I look up which songs are protected?

Select to show the "Kind" column in iTunes (control-click on the header in the list of music and select the Kind column). Any track that is listed as "protected" is indeed that, copy protected. The Memorex says it supports MPEG-4 which indicates it should play your non-protected AAC files, but any non-protected track should be convertible to MP3 if the player indeed won't handle AAC.

Hope this helps.

Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer

The Memorex player says it only supports MP3, WMA, WMA-SRM (WMA protected files) & JPEG - Obviously this doesn't say MP4 or AAC.

Then you'll have to convert your tracks to MP3. Except for the ones with copy-protection (see my post below), iTunes should have no problems converting. See:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1550

Does "WMA protected files" mean something like MP4 or AAC?

Not in the sense I think you mean, no. WMA is an audio compression format proprietary to Microsoft. iTunes does not support WMA and no tracks you purchase from the iTunes Store or import from CD using iTunes will be in WMA format.

*if I convert my iTunes files to MP3, will the conversion effect my iPod in any way?*

Not particularly, the iPod can play MP3 format files. However one thing to remember, converting creates a copy of the original file in the format you choose to convert to so if you were to convert all your AAC format songs you would end up with twice the number. Half would be the original AAC versions and half would be the new MP3 versions. You would have to choose whether or not you wanted to retain the original versions. Also you can't directly convert copy protected files. Also, if you are syncing your whole library to the iPod, unless you take some action over the duplicates you'll end up with all the tracks on the iPod.

*Under "kind" most of my songs read "MPEG audio file". Is that MP3?*

Yes

I'm wondering how this ended up. I recently had the same situation and followed the advice in this discussion. I successfully converted my AAC files to MP3s and dragged them to the Memorex drive and into the "Music" folder. Worked fine. But, I discovered that each file transferred as 2 separate files, one that the player could actually play, and the other that gave back a "decode error" message. This rendered the whole exercise useless because it would not skip over the bad files which were half of the total content. Did anyone figure out how to make this work?