Music Man can convert our MP3 file to a Windows Media one, but it can’t convert protected files.

I create a weekly audio podcast, using GarageBand, Audacity, and iTunes. I can do every step on my old PowerBook G4, except for converting the MP3s into Windows Media (WMA) and Real Media (RA or RM) files for those die-hard listeners who insist on clinging to those formats. My webmaster has to do those conversions on his PC. I was hoping EasyWMA would let me do this on my Mac, but it can only convert WMA to MP3, not the opposite. Any help?

We had absolutely no luck finding an application for Mac OS X to convert MP3s to Real files. (If we missed one, we hope someone writes in to let us know!) You might be out of luck there—Real Media being a proprietary format and all. 

We can’t help being tickled by the vagueness of the progress dialog.

But we did manage to dig up an app for converting MP3 files into Windows Media (which surprised us, since that’s a proprietary format too). Music Man ($24.95 download, $34.95 on CD, www.mireth.com) can rip CDs, play music files, and burn discs, and it also converts audio files to WMA, AAC, WAV, MP3, or Ogg Vorbis formats. Check out the free trial to see if it suits you. (That said, we’d probably just ditch Real Media—and likely Windows Media too—if we were you. With apologies to your die-hard clingy listeners, versatile MP3s should be more than enough.)