[John151]

My music collection is stored in iTunes using Apple Lossless, which serves as the source of my two channel rig in the house.  I now have an iPhone (36 GB), where I don't care so much about music quality, and would prefer to store the music in a compressed format due to the limit capacity.  Is there a way to convert the files from Apple Lossles to Mp3 when storing on the iPod/iPhone?

[Mike Nomad]

You could do it within iTunes. In iTunes, you can set the import parameters to MP3, AAC, or a number of other formats. After you have set the import parameters to the desired type, if you do a CTRL+Click on a file in your existing library, you will see an option in the context menu for creating a copy of the music file in the new format you selected.

The copy of the new file will contain all of the metadata. So, you could simply import the newly made (smaller) music files to your new iPhone. Don't forget to set the parameters back to what you originally had before you try to import/add new files to your original library.

[srb]

I made a similar reply in another thread asking the same thing about AIFF for iTunes playback and Apple Lossless for iPod playback.
 
To my knowledge, there is no way to synch to an iPhone or iPod and have it convert to another format on the fly.
 
You will need to have both the Apple Lossless and the compressed (AAC or MP3) versions on the server.  You can select all of your Apple Lossless files and create an AAC or MP3 version (creating a copy).
 
You can then make a Smart Playlist for each filetype and use the Apple Lossless filtered playlist for iTunes server music playback, and the AAC or MP3 filtered playlist for manual iPhone synching.  You will, of course, need to create the compressed version after each new album you add in Apple Lossless.
 
There wouldn't be much sense in backing up both files, since you can always recreate the compressed version, so you may want to modify your backup routine to only backup the Apple Lossless files.
 
Steve

[John151]

Thanks guys!