18 hours

I finally converted my 15.2 GB itunes library of .m4a to MP3. It is now only 14.1 GB but there was about 6 hours of files that didn't convert because they are DRMed (an audio book). It took 18 hours. I used my laptop so my main rig wouldn't get bogged down or slow the conversion process. Hell, my laptop has a full desktop P4 3.2GHz HT processor so I would say it was definitely up to the challenge. I did notice a slow down after 9 hours of that I attribute to processor throttling due to thermal protection so I gave it an hour break in the middle.

You may be asking yourself "why"? Well, I don't like itunes very much. I don't really know why, I just never quite got the hang of it. I'm not one of those "let my computer tell me what to listen to" kind of guys and I didn't like making a bunch of play lists. I am kind of old school like that.
I go through my mp3 directory where everything is organized nicely and just queue it up in winamp or WMP through the right click menu. All media players have some sort of library management and I don't really like any of them, although the itunes one is the best overall in my opinion and I feel that winamp has a stronger search function.

The real problem is that when all the CDs where ripped into itunes they where given a serialized file name and stuffed in a random serialized folder. This means an album can have 3 songs in 1 folder and 6 in another but you would never know it because the folders are called f00 and f27 and the file names are ZQLFS.m4a or IGPAK.m4a
For someone who likes to browse his music collection by wandering through his folder hierarchy this doesn't help. By converting all the songs to MP3 itunes renames the files by the same hierarchy I've been using for almost 10 years now (started way back when I would record my CDs into .WAVbecause there wasn't anything else). That structure is a folder for the artist->folder for album->song files.
Compilation albums are clumped under various artist or don't get an artist folder.
Itunes follows this close enough for it's mp3s and I can now find and listen to all those songs on my IPAQ. With a 1 gb SD card I can fit enough music to get me through the week but all those .m4a files where off limits. Not anymore. It feels good to have my library consolidated and standardized. No I need to go through and weed out all the duplicates and I know there is a lot of them.

Special thanks to C1 for donating large portions of my itunes library ;)