Down with AAC

I am so aggravated because I have just wasted an hour and a half of my life trying to find a way to get my iTunes music converted to mp3 files without having to pay for it.  I already paid for the songs the first time around, I see no need to pay $60 for a means to play them wherever I want.  I have downloaded nearly 7 different software trial versions thinking I would be sneaky and convert them all at once and then uninstall the program.  Well, clearly I am either not quite so sneaky or the programmers are not quite so stupid because yes, you can download them during the trial...and end up with 1582 one minute versions of your 1582 songs.  And of course they don't give you a heads up.  You know...just to drive home the lesson.  You can hear their chuckles with your first "what the...uggghhhhh".  So essentially there is now an entire market subset benefiting from iTunes monopoly over the portable media market.  It is ridiculous.  I am on the verge of readiness to pirate the software to illegally convert the protected music I ALREADY OWN.  The only thing stopping me is the certain virus that comes with the pirated license key that throws a thousand pop up screens while blaring "I AM WATCHING PORN".  My computer hasn't successfully updated from April 2009 until today.  This very day.  They have finally patched whatever it was that was blue screen of death-ing my machine.  The last thing I need is the red screen of "you should have known better than to download pirated software from illegal Russian sites".  Today's battle may have been lost but the war is not over.  And yes, while it will probably end with me paying $29.99 for someone to profit from my misfortune, their profit will only come as the last straw.  And let's just say that I've got a lot of straw.