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Muffi Ghadiali, product marketing manager for the company's Digital Entertainment Products group said, 'We're not going to be supporting WMA for now.'

HP said that its decision to work with Apple was made because Apple could supply both the most popular online music store and the most popular player. The format is largely irrelevant.

Apple has previously rejected calls for the iPod - and by implication iTunes - to support WMA, for which, of course, it would have to pay a licence fee to Microsoft. CEO Steve Jobs is reported as saying, 'I'd rather spend our engineering dollars on enhancing the iPod and the iTunes Music Store.'

Nonetheless, some observers are predicting that HP may still have to consider developing some kind of fix, as many of its customers may already have a significant amount of music already encoded into WMA. HP's iPaq PDA, which running Pocket PC only supports WMA, could also be a factor.

However as long as they have the original CD they should have no problem re-encoding into iTunes - it's the same issue that any iPod purchaser faces. And if they don't have the original CD, they probably shouldn't have the WMA files.