M4A's and MP3's

[scotty34]

I've noticed a lot of the songs I am downloading now are coming in M4A format rather than MP3. I tried to burn a couple of CD's to listen to in my car using Nero. The first one said I had an M4A converter trial period, and burned it fine. After that, it said the period expired and I would have to purchase the converter from Nero if I wanted to burn M4A's. [censored] that. Does anyone know of a way to convert these to MP3's without having to purchase anything? Will any CD burning software burn M4A's onto a disk that can be played by a car CD player (I'm not extremely computer savvy, and don't know exactly what an M4A is). iTunes maybe?

[touchfaith]

From dbpoweramp (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/spoons-audio-guide-formats.htm)

[ QUOTE ]
Mp4

Successor to mp3, mp4 is basically a container, it can store many sub-formats, the main audio format would be Advanced Audio Compression (AAC). Adding ID tags to mp4 seems to have standardized on the Apple iTunes format. Files ending in .m4a are audio content only, .mp4 can contain both audio and video. See also AAC.

[/ QUOTE ]

I have been using this converter for some years now and reall like it, mainly because it embeds itself in Explorer (when you right-click an audio file, conversion options are available)...

dBpowerAMP Music Converter (dMC) (http://www.dbpoweramp.com/dmc.htm)

[scotty34]

Perfect, thank you.