copied itunes songs wont play in Rhythmbox

I copied my songs from my external hard drive onto my new linux computer and was able to add the songs to rhythmbow. They do show up but when I click play there is a red circle with a line it it next to each song. Im figuring this must be an error sign. What do I need to donwload to fix this?

 

http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT7150747782.html

You might want to try Banshee, instead of rhythmbow. I haven't tried this myself but seems to be something tested and known to work.

 

Do you have the correct codec installed? what format are the songs in?

 

the songs are mp3's and are not DRM.

 

a) Were these songs purchased from the iTunes store? b) Or did you "rip" them from your own audio CDs?

If you bought and downloaded them, you're probably not going to be happy because those files are protected by DRM (Digital Rights Management), which means only iTunes can play them. For Apple users, there was a kludge to get around the DRM by creating an audio CD and then ripping/encoding that CD into a file format of your choice - don't know if the Windows version is the same?

If it is b) can you tell us what format the files are, the clue might be in the file extension?

 

Doesn't Apple uses its own format AAC but with an MP3 filename extension?

 

they were ripping from cd's and are in mp3 format.

 

i believe apple natively burns cd's into aac format. But i changed it to mp3 so all my songs were burned in mp3 format

 

In the file browser, you can just double click the song to download the codec if it is not already installed.

 

Try to bring up in the file browser one of the files that won't play. Then right click, select the menu item called "Properties". Tell us what appears for the field "MIME Type:".

Another thing you can do is open a terminal, and issue:

$ file <path of the file>

(The dollar sign above is not something you type. That's just convention in the Unix world for marking off lines you would type at a terminal prompt.) Of course, you need to replace <path of the file> with the actual path.

 

somehow i woke up today and thought id try and play a song just for kicks. And it worked somehow. I must have downloaded something which required a restart last night.

 

Thats means it was the Codecs.

 

You'll need codecs to play .AAC files.

No benefit to .AAC whatsoever. Just an annoyance.

 

AAC is like one step up from MP3, as in the direct successor. From what I read, it's a fairly decent codec, though I personally use OGG Vorbis (and don't have an iPod).

 

Yeah, I'm thinking OGG all the way. Or FLAC for us audiophiles.