How To Make All Audio Files Accessible Through iWeb

Posted 11/15/2010 at 2:31pm | by Steve Paris

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I’ve been working on a personal website for quite some time. I’m using iWeb because it’s pretty simple. However, my uploaded audio files (entirely ethnic songs) from iTunes can only be accessed by Macs or the very latest PCs. Since this personal website caters to my friends, most of them in different parts of the world, very few use Macs and most are using older PCs. When I asked a friend overseas to test my website, he didn’t see any of the audio files at all.

Not all computers are compatible with the tracks produced by iTunes, and this may well be the reason why your music isn’t working. Apple encodes songs using the AAC format with an .m4a extension, and purchased songs from the iTunes Store before Apple ditched DRM have a special .m4p extension. If you want to be compatible with as many computers as possible, you need to use MP3 instead. Don’t worry; it’s very easy to reconvert your songs within iTunes itself.

Use iTunes Preferences to select the MP3 Encoder.

Here’s what you need to do: First, go to the iTunes Preferences window. In the General tab, click the Import Settings button toward the lower right. Change the Import Using pop-up menu from AAC Encoder to MP3 Encoder. In the Setting drop-down, choose a quality setting (we like Higher-Quality 192kbps, but the High Quality 160kbps setting is fine for the web). Then click OK. Now any CDs you rip into iTunes in the future will be in MP3 format with the compression you just selected.

But you still need to convert the audio files that are already in your iTunes library before you’ll have MP3s for your iWeb site. So right-click (or Control-click) the song in your iTunes library and choose Create MP3 Version from the contextual menu. You can convert multiple tracks at once by holding down Command while you select them all, then using the contextual menu or selecting Advanced > Create MP3 Version from the menu bar. Make sure you use the new MP3 versions of your songs in iWeb, and this should solve your problem.

Now you can easily convert unprotected songs to MP3.

If you get an error message when attempting the conversion, it’s because you’re trying to copy a protected song that has iTunes’ own .m4p extension. iTunes won’t reformat those for you unless you trick it--the easiest way is to burn a CD of all your protected songs by adding them to a playlist and clicking the Burn button at the bottom right of iTunes. This will transform the song into an AIFF version (the usual format for standard audio CDs) and strip its protection. You can then re-import that CD into iTunes. Since you’ve already set the encoding to MP3, the right conversion will be done for you, and you can then proceed to add the songs to your website.