Wow. Are you kidding me? If you are going to give false information, then don't post. It's as simple as that. Yes iTunes encrypts the music you download, but you can still burn it to a disk. And yeah it's an .aac. AACs are the same as MP3s, just with much better sound quality. Half my music collection is .aac and I can do whatever I want with it. Why is that? Because it's unprotected. Just because it's an AAC doesn't mean that it has encryption on it. Like you and I both said, the music that is downloaded from iTunes has protection on it, but just because iTunes uses AAC does not mean that all AACs have protection on it. Now if you would like a real easy way to back up your stuff, purchase a removable hard drive from Best Buy or something. With all of the Black Friday sales going on you should be able to get an 80 GB one for very very cheap.