Tunebite does not remove the protection, it records the song as you play it in faster than real time. It's a recording of a compressed audio format. I'd have to hear it to judge whether it was good enough quality for my tastes.
You can pretty much do the same thing with MP3 Recorder, which I believe is free.
You can select the speed at witch you record, I have not noticed a bit of difference.
Removing protection or not you are able to put in another format then M4P.
I ended up purchasing the ipod to ipod burner for 125.00 through "sky mall". Got it a few days ago. Copied over about 300 songs that were both from itunes and from disk. Absolutely no problems what so ever!! Thing is awesome!! You can burn the songs directly to an external drive to store them too.
Funny thing is, there's some sort of disclaimer about how it will copy and burn incripted music but it doesn't authorize the use of that music.