iTunes Music in FCP
 

I want to use some songs that I downloaded (and paid for) from the iTunes store. But for some reason, after I import them, they show up as blank in FCP HD. Is there some kind of encryption on these songs? Is there a way I can play these?

Thanks

What I did was burn the songs to CD then imported them into FCP. Kind of arcane, but it worked.

good luck,

=gb=

Wow thanks for the speedy response. I'll give it a try!

Yup, it worked!

Anything you buy from the iTunes Music Store is DRM'ed and at a lower than CD quality. You can burn a CD of the music from iTunes to create non-DRM AIFF files, but you are starting with a compressed AAC file that has lower quality.

There's a better way.

I use iMovie to "place at playhead" the iTunes song I purchased. That places the song in the audio track. Then I "Share" the audio as an aiff file. The result is an aiff version of the song I purchased.

No need to burn a CD.

Or you can use the program Hymn to strip the drm info from the file.

http://hymn-project.org/

Much quicker, without the CD middle man.

mike,

ive got a *.m4a song file here and ive tried numerous times to place in playhead but each time imovie crashes and when i restart it the program asks me if i want to either ignore or trash the unused .m4a file which supposedly 'doesnt belong' in imovie.
any idea whats happening?

Glad to see I'm not the only one with this problem

Just use Hymn to strip the DRM from the file, then do a normal conversion using Quicktime. It works like a charm, and takes less that a minute from bang to buck.

Hymn doesn't work with iTunes 4.7.1, at least thats what some message boards are saying.

Hymn only works on the music file, not with iTunes. It strips the DRM part of the file so that it can be played in any other music player (in this case Quicktime -> FCP) but does not remove your personal info from the file. iTunes 4.7.1 picks up on this manuver and will not play the edited file. But for our purposes (converting an ITMS song to FCP) this is the most efficent way.

Sidenote- there is another program called JHymn that will remove EVERYTHING from the ITMS song file so that it can be played again in iTunes 4.7.1.

My previous post about how I use iMovie to convert from protected iTunes format to something else, like AIFF, still holds. At least it did for iMovie 3 and 4. I just tried iMovie 5 and found a little wrinkle has been added, but its not a big deal.

Open iMovie
Select Audio
Select a song from the list
Click on Place at Playhead (takes a minute to convert)
New step - Put some video in the timeline (any video, doesn't matter what, doesn't have to be same length as the song, in fact shorter is better)
Turn off the audio of the video clip with the check box on the right.
File->Share opens the Share dialog
Click on QuickTime, select Expert Settings popup, click on Share
Save file dialog appears: fill in song name, choose location to save it
Select "Sound to AIFF" in the Export: popup
Save

Is this AIFF only or will it work with mp3's as well in some other configuration? I have a ton of Mp3s I transferred from my pc to mini mac and FCP (as I've always known) hates mp3's. They skip and don't play back correctly, I even had this problem on a g5 so I always had to burn onto a cd then rip off wavs. Will this work to skip the cd middleman for mp3s as well?

Yes, it works with mp3 files as well.

Mike.

JHymn didn't work at all. It tried to contact the Music Store, to no avail. Could not strip the M4P file. The trick in iMovie worked though.

Ahhh... edited post: after importing the aif file into fcp there appeared to be no sound in the file. Nothing. Also quicktime cannot play the aif output from iMovie.... to be continued..

Make sure you use "Place at Playhead" in iMovie to actually put the music in the timeline. If you try to drag it into the timeline, it looks like something happened, but nothing really did.

iMovie generated an "aif" file (with the name of the project as filename). I'm sure I did "place at Playhead". Will try again though.

One other thing - newer versions of iMovie insist that there is video in the timeline before it will Export/Share. It does warn you when you try to Share without the video. You didn't mention seeing this warning but I wanted to mention this requirement.

When you do the Place at Playhead, the song gets converted before you see it in the timeline. There is a progress dialog shown during that process. If you don't see it, then no conversion is taking place.

After Place at Playhead, does the song play from the timeline? If not, then that's another clue that no conversion is occurring.


Mike.

open the aac in quicktime then export it as an aiff. easy.

what is an aac? In what version of QT? Not the player...?