If I burn an m4a file onto a CD, will it play in a CD player?

If you’re player is capable of playing ACC files IE itunes files that you’ve downloaded and what not then I believe so.

I don’t know of any CD players which play M4As (I could be wrong). However, iTunes will convert the music for you.

In iTunes, choose a playlist, and click ‘Burn Disc’. The ‘Burn Settings’ dialog pops up, with three choices:
1) ‘Audio CD’ makes a disc for any CD player (approx. 79 minutes of music)

2) ‘MP3 CD’ for players which support it (typically hundreds of songs fit on a CD)
Your CD player probably has a prominent “MP3” label if it supports MP3s.

3) The third burn choice, ‘Data CD or DVD’ will not work in a CD player, it simply copies the M4A files so you can take them to another computer.

Some purchased music cannot be converted to MP3, leaving audio CD as your only choice. iTunes will let you know if that’s the case.

@jaytkay If you burn the purchased music to an audio file you can re-rip them to mp3. That’s what I usually due for sharing music with my friends and it’s a good way to create a hard copy for back up purposes too. :)

@Axemusica Good workaround for M4A to MP3.

And I think these days most iTunes purchases can be copied direct to MP3, since they introduced iTunes Plus .

Bahh just noticed I typed due instead of do ack

@jaytkay oh wow didn’t know that. I guess it’s been a while since I’ve actually downloaded music, haha.

There is a utility I use called Ease Audio Converter that will convert music files from many formats into many other formats, including flac and ogg. I know it does m4a to mp3 and m4a to acc. You can also set various parameters such as bit-rate and sampling frequency. I use it to convert flac files into very high bit-rate mp3s so that I can listen to them on my iPod, but still have them in flac form to play on my home stereo.