Is there a portable device that you can use Napster & Itunes with?

[BC]

I got a cheap off brand MP3 player as a gift with a Itunes card and when I tried to download the music, I got a message stating "Device not found". I have been told that Itunes cards will only work with Ipods, Iphones, etc. So I went and got a Napster card and that isn't working either, so I decided to go get me a nicer new MP3/Ipod type unit, but wondered what is the best and if any of them will work with both these cards I have. Any info is appreciated.

 

[BC]

Disers are the wisest people, I know you can tell me!

 

[xCourxCorex]

If you got gift cards to iTunes, but do no own an Apple brand iPod, you can still use the card to buy your music and put it on the device, it's just an annoying time-consuming process.

I used to have a Creative Zen mp3 player, and this is what I did. Download itunes from the Apple website. Set up your account and all that. Use the card to buy whatever music you wish. It will then appear in your iTunes library. Then, you need to "convert" your music ... because iTunes has its music encoded as a certain type of file which is not an mp3. To do this, select all the music in your library (press ctrl + a) and then go to the tab up top that says "Advanced". I believe it now says something about create AAC version... it used to say Convert to mp3. either way, once you choose that option, you will notice at the top center of your itunes window, that it is converting each song, and this will cause you to have duplicates of each file. You then can transfer to converted song (the second one) to your mp3 device by burning a CD of the songs you want to put on there (which is a good back-up, since then you'll always have the CD if your itunes library or other music library crashes, etc). Or you can put the songs on a flash drive and transfer them to the mp3 player that way.


Good luck!

 

[BC]

Thanks Courtney! You're right...it sounds like a hassle, but certainly worth a try in order to get the use out of the gift card. Any suggestions on what I should type player I should buy for future use to avoid having to do that?

 

[xCourxCorex]

The only thing you can really use iTunes without trouble is any sort of iPod. But if you were just going to use any other downloading service, I don't think it would matter which player you used. I'm not familiar with Napster, so I'm not sure how they work with downloading and transferring songs.

 

[crewmatt]

So there are a few different things at play here. An MP3 file does not have any encoding for DRM (basically you can copy the file and put it anywhere and it will play, allowing people to pirate music freely). to respond to the industry demands for protection against this, microsoft came up modifications to the wma file format, and apple modified their aac format. iTunes uses aac, everyone else uses wma for the protected files. So you have a few options

1-Convert the file to an MP3 - in some cases you can do this in itunes or your standard tools, in other cases they dont want you to, however there are tools that can convert the files, tunebite is one of the more popular ones.

2-Buy a compatible player - iPods are the only ones that will work with iTunes. Apple's recently been getting some heat on this but no court rulings/etc have forced them to give out the aac technology to anyone yet. Sansa I know makes pretty nice mp3 players that work with napster or rhapsody.

 

[NotUrsula]

There's also a possibility that you have a bad port on your computer. A "device not found" error will happen if the port is bad. Have you tried using a different computer for the downloads?

 

[BC]

Yes, actually I had my "computer" guy come by yesterday and try it, but no luck. The salesperson at Best Buy told my SIL that the Napster card that they sell, (which has a Best Buy symbol on it so I guess they have some interest in it) would work with the Iphone. NOT!

 

[diznygirl]

Perhaps these links will help:

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/best-buys-5-napster-subscription-needs-iphone-compatibility/

http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/30496/Napster-now-iPhone-compatible