DRM protected M4P and DRM-free WMA

iTunes: Owned by Apple, the iTunes store set the pattern for a la carte music shopping and still reigns king over the customer base. iTunes has sold more than 5 billion songs to date, and it offers excellent integration with the world's best-selling MP3 player, the iPod. It's catalog contains more than 8 million songs as well as a variety of podcasts, TV shows, and movies. The one major bummer is that most of the tracks sold in iTunes can only be played on the iPod or iPhone and not any other MP3 player. You must download the iTunes software in order to access the store, but it works on both Windows and Mac operating systems.

M4P and WMA are two popular audio formats.M4P is the Protected AAC File. AAC is the audio layer from the follow-on format to MP3. The .M4P extension is AAC purchased from Apple's Music Store (iTune) and is protected by a Digital Rights Management scheme.

Napster: Once the reigning peer-to-peer music service, Napster is now a legal music store. It recently transitioned its catalog from DRM-protected WMAs back to the ever-popular unprotected MP3 format that it slung back in its trading days and currently offers the largest selection of legal MP3s on the Web (more than 6 million tracks). Napster offers some excellent editorial content, including music reviews as well as preprogrammed playlists and radio stations. The downloadable client only works on Windows, but anyone with a Web connection can access the store online and purchase tracks.

Like AAC and Ogg Vorbis, WMA was intended to address perceived deficiencies in the MP3 standard. Given their common design goals, it's not surprising that the three formats ended up making similar design choices. All three are pure transform codecs. Furthermore the MDCT implementation used in WMA is essentially a superset of those used in Ogg and AAC such that WMA iMDCT and windowing routines can be used to decode AAC and Ogg Vorbis almost unmodified.

NoteBurner M4P Converter: M4P to WMA, M4P to MP3

NoteBurner M4P to WMA Converter is well known for its magic fast converting speed and its capability of converting DRM protected audio files to MP3, WMA and WAV, especially convert M4P to WMA, and convert M4P to MP3.

Since NoteBurner M4P to WMA Converter uses virtual burning technology, media player like iTunes, Windows Media Player or Real Player, or audio editing program like Adobe Audition, is required to co-work with the program to complete the converting. Basically, NoteBurner Audio Converter is able to convert all types of audio files that can be played by your media players, such as converting M4P to WMA, M4P to MP3.

Rhapsody: Similar to Napster in most respects, Rhapsody offers a catalog of more than 4.5 million DRM-free MP3s. It's chock-full of preprogammed playlists made by editors and other listeners and includes an innovative radio feature called Channels, some of which are offered up for free listening. Rhapsody is the only service that allows full track previews (up to 25 per month) prior to purchasing the songs. It can be accessed directly on the Web or downloaded as a jukebox (for Windows only) and offers a subscription plan as well.