Zumo 660/5 iTunes MP4 Audio to MP 3 - Macintosh

[duncanmac]

There may be a thread on here about this topic, but if so, I could not find it.

Have new Zumo, need to load music. Copied my iTunes Library onto the microSD card in said Zumo. Straightforward... except when I looked for something to play to try it out, there warn't anything there! Ok, better read the manual. Oops. Garmin haven't yet progressed beyond MP3 and all my music is MP4. That is what Apple does.

So I down load a free music format converter and start the laborious task of converting over 1,200 files, one at a time. After about 100, which consumed a large part of Saturday evening, I grumbled to my wife and her daughter. Daughter immediately volunteers that she worked out how to do it for one of her Christmas presents - a waterproof MP3 player. Why did I not think of this??

She steps over to the computer and within seconds, showed me how to do it in bulk, automatically and relatively quickly.

So I thought would share the benefit of the solution to perhaps save frustration for one or more inmates who are as tech challenged as I am. (This is for Macintosh, but I am sure PC is as easy.)

In iTunes, click on File, then Create New Version, then Create MP3 Version. At that point, if your music library is of any size, get a beer, wash the car or mow the lawn while you wait for the computer to perform its magic.

You will then find that your music library is doubled in size, with the AAC Audio File(MP4) files duplicated with MPEG files. (MP3)

Create a new Playlist in iTunes (in my case 'Zumo')
In iTunes main library sort the files by KIND. (You may need to create that column). That will place all the AAC's in one sequence and the MP3's in another.
Highlight all the MP3 files
Press Edit, Copy
Paste this into your Zumo Play List
Highlight all the files in your Play List, Edit, Copy
Open your SD card on your Zumo, and the Paste all the MP3 files into it. At this stage you may want another beer or something. It took over an hour to copy all my songs onto the SD Card. But, as I type this, it is playing to me. Mission accomplished; but I really must delete 'Horse with No Name'.

I hope the above is not too confusing.

Good luck!

[twowheelpilot]

i would add to change the preferences in your itunes to rip audio to mp3s when you try to copy a cd