[Bryson]

I'm trying to take a song from my iTunes Library and use it as the background for a Final Cut Pro project. However, I'm experiencing two problems.

The first is FCP can't read some (but not all!) .m4a files, so I'm converting to MP3 in iTunes first. But when I import these, although they play fine in iTunes, when they're played in FCP, they're full of glitches and drop-outs.

The strangest thing is, in the FCPs Viewer the glitches are visible on the waveform.

Am I going entirely insane? What is happening here?

Powerbook 17" 1.33 1GB Ram
Final Cut Pro 4.5
iTunes 4.7

[Bryson]

Never mind. Found the problem.

For future reference, it seems that FCP4.5 does not support AAC at all (at least in theory) and it's support for MP3s is terrible. But if you resample as AIFF, you're fine.

Can be a bit of bugger if you're trying to use .m4p's though. (For non-commercial use, of course).

[Schvoo]

I had this same problem. The workaround I used was to resample as WAV files. If you want to use m4p's, you can burn an audio CD and then use those AIFF files from the CD (thats all an audio CD is really).

[Brad]

It's much easier than that, though, Schvoo. You can use iTunes or QuickTime Player to convert those files to AIFF (or WAV) without burning a CD.

[Bryson]

iTunes won't convert m4p's into AIFFs.

But it does do CDs. I forgot it even did that! Thanks Schvoo.

[RC23]

quicktime pro will then

or even any "mp3 to aiff wav" converter found on www.download.com

[Bryson]

How do you do it in Quicktime?

We're talking about m4ps here, with the integrated DRM - surely it's unlikely that some Apple software will easily and quickly remove the DRM? Or everyone would be just ripping them to AIFF and then re encoding them as AAC, rather then messing about with jHymn

[Brad]

Ah. You said m4a in your first post, not m4p. No dice, then.