I-Tunes....has anyone used it?

Are you able to store the songs on your hard drive and burn CDs? Are there any other good sources to download music?

You can store songs (in apple format) and you can burn them to any format you want. It is also a very good CD ripper and an excellent player.

I recommend it.

....I love the variable bit rate (VBR) MP3!

Sure, you can store the songs on your hard drive and burn them to a CD. iTunes will convert any 'AAC' format files to standard audio CD-ROM 'aiff' format before burning them.

Most of my songs are in MP3 format, though. I found them laying on the side of the Information Superhighway, so I picked them up.

:evilgrin:

iTunes can deal with any file Quicktime can open (including mp3, aif, wav, aac, and others with third party plugins, like ogg). It should be able to convert any of those to 'aif' and burn them to a standard audio CD.

The CD-ROMs it burns can be either regular audio CDs, or MP3 CDs. I discovered one day that my DVD player can actually play a CD full of MP3s, so I made some 12 hour audio CDs containing dozens of songs that I can pop into my DVD player (which has decent speakers, etc...). A lot of CD players can also apparently handle MP3 CD format.

I use Itunes as my audio player. It is easily the best out there for sorting, filing, playing, etc.

As for the store, it's o.k. and it lets you store them on your hard drive and burn to a disc. But it's very limiting as to the number of devices you can use it on and computers you can transfer it to.

The files are M4P format which labels them as "purchased" and thusly limited in their usage. You can also convert your own cds and files to M4A format which are higher quality, more compressed but since you ripped them from your own cds have unlimted usage, formats, devices, etc.

You can shop the iTunes Music Store from within iTunes.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/