I bought a Dell XPS configured with Ubuntu and immediately put Fedora on it. It works really well. There was a hardware problem with the display and they arranged for a guy to come to my house and fix it. I have fought with drivers for laptops to run Linux many times and it is a PITA. ndiswrapper, etc etc. No need for any of that with this machine. Did I mention it works really well?

On the Dell site look for "open source pcs" - it's not that prominent but you can find it.

I worked with some guys who brought up a cluster of machines named with disease names. I think one was 'schistosomiasis' (not sure of the spelling)

The users didn't like the idea of logging into diseases and something else was eventually put in place.

I just tried your "menu:advanced" recommendation. iTunes tells me that protected files cannot be converted to other formats.
I also think that if you burn and rip to get it in as mp3, you lose the ID3 tags, but I don't feel like verifying that right now.

QT Fair Use and another program I don't recall converted everything to mp3s quite nicely though, as I just switched from an ancient iPod to a Creative Vision