Any local "CD" I buy with Isaan or other local music, seems to actually be some sort of Karaoke DVD or VCD.

My DVD player recognizes what's up and I can play and listen.

What I haven't been able to do is what I normally do with CD:

Pop it into the DVD drive in my laptop and load it into Itunes.

The locally-purchased Disk consists of a number of different files and folders that neither Itunes nor I can figure out.

Any suggestions?

I really want to be able to listen to Thai and Isaan music on my ipod...

Thanks in advance. John

You have probably already thought of this, but have you looked to see if any of the folders contain mp3 files? If they do, you can just drag those files into iTunes.

Or if the CD/DVD has folders, and there are .aiff files. Those are standard CD formats. You can use ordinary conversion (I think iTunes will do it) to make them mp3 files, and then save in your iTunes library.

Thanks for the suggestions! Appreciate it.

The files that appear to contain the songs (actually karaoke vcd things) are .DAT files

There are also some .VCD files that I assume are used by the DVD player to access and control the .DAT files.

I tried to "load file into library" from the itunes file menu. It found the .DAT files immediately. I loaded one, but it didn't go anywhere that I could find.

All, or at least most of your locally-purchased Thai music seems to be set up this way (easy to pop into dvd player and/or home karaoke system).

I'm just wondering if anyone else out there has tried to read these into itunes and found a way to do it.

Thanks,

John

Since you posted this in the Apple forum, I'm guessing you are using a Mac. Now that we know you have DAT files, all you need to do is convert those to something that you can use with iTunes and your iPod. You can convert the DAT files into movie clips, or strip only the audio from them if you only want to listen to the music.

Have a look at this link for a start, or you can google for more:

http://www.picimg.info/image.php?imgid=vT8T0UcRCDRh

DAT files tend to be problematic on Macs. One solution worth trying is to use MPEG Streamclip (it's free) to convert them into MPEG files. Basically you open the DAT file with MPEG Streamclip, save them as MPEGs (I think they're automatically converted to MPEG2s). You can then use the same tool to export them as MP4s - which is the format iTunes recognizes.

It might take a little bit of experimentation, but as I say, the program's freeware so you've nothing to lose.

Might have been handy if I included this link in that last post:

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-mac.html

And just in case you're using iTunes on a PC:

http://www.squared5.com/svideo/mpeg-streamclip-win.html

Thanks again for the tips.

I'm using a PC not a MAC. Does that make a difference? Or are the tools you recommend strictly for MAC?

Thanks,

John

Oops. Didn't see you had sent me a link to a PC version.

I'll give it a shot.

Thanks again