How get all my music stored locally

Thanks, that's a help to know. I have a product that converts MP4 (AAC) to MP3. But the harder part will be tracing down each song one by one when they're stored in various folders in iTunes's the directory structure, which as I said is based on Albums and Artists (and some of my songs are not in an iTunes folder at all but wherever I drug them into the playlist from). Is there no simple way to collect together into a common folder all the songs in a given playlist so that I could run my converstion MP4 to MP3 app on them all?

I suppose for future reference one could copy all the songs to be used in a playlist into a particular folder in advance, but when building a playlist one often doesn't know in advance which songs one will include.

Another guide after the fact might be to print the playlist to a text file and look at the location of each song, which is contained in the rightmost column of the resulting text file. But that's still a laborious process of tracing each one down one at a time...

Furthermore, is there something wrong with the way I'm burning the playlist to an Audio CD? Is it to be expected that a rather typical CD player would not recognize such a CD?

Continuing the reply I just wrote: I just realized that all my worries about how to find all the songs are nothing compared to the even bigger problem of how to get them all onto my hard drive when many are stored in iCloud instead!

Actually, I tried to burn both an Audio CD and an mp3 CD - the latter choice being adopted only when the Audio CD I built could not be recognized by my CD player. Well, it now turns out that an Audio CD of the same playlist built by iTunes from another computer DOES get recognized by my CD player, so it looks like the problem is with the computer I burned the first one from.

As to the iTunes directory structure built on Albums and Artists, is there really no way to get around it? The option to organize one's library does not seem to help. I just don't think in terms of Albums and Artists. But even when I choose the organization I find useful (either songs or genres) I'm still stuck with the same non-intuitive (at least for me) directory structure. Nonetheless, I am at least able to find where each song file resides by exporting the playlist to a text file, loading that to Excel, and looking in the rightmost column to see the URL to each file. That's apparently the only way I could find out, for each song, whether it's AAC or MP3.

Armed with that information, I tried to convert the songs in the playlist to MP3. Unfortunately, when I would select a song and click File > Convert, no MP3 option is presented, even for the m4a files. The only choices available are 'Convert for ipod, ipad, or iphone, fix ID3 tags, and Create AAC version - and those are the only choices available regardless of whether I'm positioned on an m4a file (which is already AAC, is it not?) or an MP3 file. 'Convert to MP3' appears nowhere.

Peyton

The 'Show in Explorer' solution worked beautifully, thanks!

The 'Enable column for Kind' solution also worked beautifully, again thanks!

Changing the Import Settings Button worked beautifully as well, yet again thanks!

I have some other questions, but I'll start another discussion with them so I can mark the answer so far as correct.