Burning mp3 CD from AAC files?

[Al Byrne]

OK, am I understanding this correctly? Is iTunes really dumb?

I have fairly recently updated iTunes to v4 (v4.0.1, to be exact) and I've
converted my library of ~800 songs to the new AAC format; to save disk space
on both Powerbook and iPod. The iTunes importing preferences are set to
import using AAC encoding.

I have the burning preference set to burn MP3 CDs, because my car CD player
can handle only conventional audio CDs or MP3 CDs.

For the first time since the 'upgrade', I've just tried to use iTunes to
burn an MP3 CD for use in the car, and iTunes is refusing, displaying a
message 'None of the items in this playlist can be burned to disk'.

I know that iTunes is perfectly capable of converting between AAC and mp3
format, because if I adjust the importing encoding preference to MP3, the
menu item under 'advanced' changes to 'Convert selection to mp3', and it
happily does just that.

Can iTunes not do this conversion on-the-fly, and burn an MP3 CD from AAC
files? I can accept that the burn process would take much longer (because of
the conversion), but surely it should be achieveable without messy and
time-consuming manual work-arounds!

Any suggestions?

-- 
Al Byrne
albyrne (at) email (dot) com