178 | Chapter 4: Working with Media
To convert protected files and preserve your tags, you??™ll need one of the dozens
of different DRM removal tools available, such as Tunebite (http://www.
tunebite.de/) or MyFairTunes (http://www.hymn-project.org/).
Of course, no matter how you do it, there will always be a loss in quality
when you??™re converting from one compressed format to another. The exception
is when you convert a protected file to an unprotected file of the same
format, such as .m4p to .m4a or protected .wma to unprotected .wma, provided
the software you use supports lossless conversion.
Fix Music Tags
Most music players, including both Windows Media Player and Apple
iTunes, pay no attention to the filenames of your music files, but rather read
the information (called tags) that are embedded therein. Most audio formats
support tags for the artist, track, album, year, genre, and about a hundred
other things. To get your music player to display and organize your
music properly, the tags in your music files must be correct, and unless all
your music came from the same source, some tag cleaning is often in order.
Most music library programs allow you to edit the tags of your music files.
Windows Media Player (via the Advanced Tag Editor feature) as well as
iTunes (discussed earlier in this chapter) even let you modify the tags of several
files at once. You can even edit tags for individual files right in Windows
Explorer (see Chapter 2), or multiple files if you install the AudioShell
extension (http://softpointer.
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