AAC is the abbreviation of Advanced Audio Coding, which is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format. AAC is generally higher quality and slightly smaller than MP3 files of the same song. But AAC is less widely supported than MP3, it only can work in iTunes and with
iPod, on
Microsoft's Zune,
PS3 etc. Addtionally, some AAC music from iTunes is protected by Apple FairPlay DRM, this also prevent playing iTunes AAC songs on other non-apple devices. So many music lovers need to convert AAC to MP3 for more wide utilization.
How to convert iTunes AAC to MP3 (DRM-free) for utilizing AAC music widely
For unportected iTunes AAC files, iTunes can convert them to MP3 for free. And for protected AAC music, you can burn the album to a disk, then re-import the music off of the burned disc. Obviously this could be a pain if you have a lot of protected music but free minus the cost of the discs.
The good thing is that you can use iTunes DRM removal software for removing copy protection from iTunes AAC music tracks:
Four ways to remove DRM from iTunes AAC, M4V, M4P audio and video files