We were on holidays in a unit and there was a TV where we were staying. I didn’t have any cables but thought it would be nice to play some music from my Macbook air through the TV. The TV had a USB port. Here’s how I got my iTunes songs onto a USB drive and then onto the TV. This should work for pictures and movies too.
1. Format the Thumbdrive to be MS-DOS compatible.
Firstly, the Palsonic TV I was trying to use would not recognise a Macintosh formatted USB disk so I needed to format it as an MS-DOS drive. Here’s how to format a thumb drive as a PC compatible drive.
This holds true for photos as well. Thnakfully if you buy a new thumbdrive they come formatted as MS-DOS compatible.
2. Convert the songs to the most generic format – MP3.
Secondly I needed to convert the iTunes songs to MP3 format because the Palsonic TV I was trying to use did not recognise AAC files. Thankfully this is easy to do in iTunes. Look at this Screenshot.
To create an MP3 version of a song you simply select the song, then from the File menu choose ‘Create New Version’ and select ‘Create MP3 Version’.
You can do this to multiple songs at once, so you can select 20 songs and turn them all to MP3 files in one click.
You then simply drag these new MP3 files over to your thumb drive to copy them. (You can sort your song window to sort by ‘Kind’ and it will put all your new MP3 files together to make this easier.)
Here the songs are sorted by ‘Kind’ so I can easily drag the MP3 files to my thumb drive.
And finally here’s a picture of the TV screen after I plugged my thumb drive in. It recognised all the MP3 files from iTunes:
The post How to play iTunes songs on a digital TV (from a USB drive). appeared first on Macintosh How To.
