Actually, no matter what computer you use, you can't download music you bought at the iTunes Music Store to a non-iTunes player. Music you download from the iTunes Store is protected by the Apple DRM (digital rights management) format, which is a proprietary, protected AAC file format that Apple doesn't license to anybody.
To play iTunes Music Store files on a portable player besides an iPod, you have to first burn them to a CD as MP3 files. The DRM encoding doesn't make it to the CD. You then rip the now-unprotected files back into your iTunes library and download them to the player.
MP3 is the standard for digital audio. An MP3 music track can be played on almost ANY player, whether it's portable or computer-based. But Apple's iTunes software doesn't create MP3 files when you buy a song. The files are "protected" and cannot be played on a computer which does not have the iTunes software.
When a track won't play on your MP3 player, NoteBurner comes to the rescue! ... Just import protected WMA and M4P music files into NoteBurner
NoteBurner is a M4P to MP3 Converter. It easily converts DRM protected m4p to mp3, m4a to mp3, wma to mp3, m4b to mp3 and various audio files to unprotected MP3, iPod and other MP3 player file formats at high speed, with CD quality.
Most iTunes users are very irritating when finding out that music they paid for could not be transferred to any other MP3 unless it was an iPod.
User's experience about itunes and MP3 player:
"I've been hearing a lot about iTunes recently so I decided to check it out. I have an mp3 player (not an iPod) so it was important to me to be able to download the music I buy in mp3 format.
"Based on this I decided to give it a go. So I downloaded iTunes and purchased one song then I discovered that while iTunes player supports mp3, you cannot save songs you buy from iTunes.com as mp3 (I'm guessing because they have no way to enforce the usage license). I really like the iTune player's UI but the inability to save to mp3 is a showstopper for me. I do however understand that music vendors do need some format with digital rights management capabilities (e.g. WMA) so looks like mp3-only players are headed for obsolescence. Time to find out whether my mp3 player supports WMA then go buy music from some other online retailer."
