I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the iTunes store is a great way for Apple to lock in iPod users and make it costly to migrate to competitors’ MP3 players.

When you have bought hundreds of songs (or content) from the iTunes store, you will limit yourself to iPod or iPod-compatible devices (like the iPhone) otherwise those hundreds of songs will become unusable bits.

Devices from other companies will not play back this content because of various copy protection schemes (aka Digital Rights Management).

This scenario, however, only applies to less savvy consumers.

There are programs out there (both on Windows and Mac) that will allow you to convert M4P-encoded music purchased from the iTunes store to MP3, which can then be played back on any other MP3 player.

I just evaluated one such software, called “M4P Converter for MAC”, which I will refer to as M4PConverter.

M4PConverter emulates a writable CDROM drive. You use iTunes to create an audio CD using the emulated CDROM drive. M4PConverter will capture the audio data sent out from iTunes and encode that into MP3 format.

The software works. I just converted most of my purchased songs to MP3. However, the software is not that easy to use. This is especially if, like me, you don’t like to read the manual…  I was especially confused by the appearance of a little disk eject icon on the Mac menu bar which is actually a drop down list.

I hate to say this, but Microsoft got it right in Windows XP when the Start menu pops up a bubble to tell you that a new program was installed. At least, if the new program doesn’t install a shortcut on the desktop, you are reminded as to where to look for it. With OS X, you are expected to go to the Applications folder to look for any newly installed software. That, IMHO, is not exactly user-friendly. Mac gurus will doubtlessly say: “why don’t you spotlight it?”

You have to first start the M4PConverter program (it is installed by default in the Applications folder as M4PConverter).

Then you start up iTunes and burn a playlist to CD.

M4PConverter will then convert songs in that playlist to MP3 files.

QED