[Songforyou]

I burned all my CDs (around 1500) in Apple lossless to play around the house (from my computer through airport express).  I love the convenience and can direct the music to different rooms or outside.

I've now inherited an 8G ipod from my daughter (she seems to get a new one every Christmas).  I want to download songs to the ipod to play in the car, but even my rock collection is about 70G.

Are there any options to allow me to download at a different bitrate?  What else can I do?

Thanks!

[Crimson]

Hi,

You have two options:

1. Create playlists: An 8 gig iPod will store anywhere from 20-40 albums in ALAC. Load them up and swap them out accordingly.
2. Create a copy of your entire library to 128 kbps AAC (assuming you want your entire library on your iPod).

I personally do option 1 above (even less with AIFF), reasons being a) it's kind of a pain managing multiple bitrate libraries, and b) I'd have to convert my entire library to < 64 kbps to fit it on a single iPod. I load up with a playlist (on an 8 GB iPhone) and swap out tunes every week or so.

[Watson]

This is my only serious beef with iTunes... you simply can't transcode to a lower bitrate on the fly, *except* with iPod Shuffles, and there it's limited to 128kbps AAC. You'd think someone would find some way to edit the iTunes binary to at least set that to 256kbps, but no one has yet.

If you're on a Mac, you have a third option:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=losslessaccworkflow
This is a set of scripts that handle transcoding and syncing metadata (e.g. play counts) for your scenario. It's not as nice as a semi-automated solution, but it works.

[Songforyou]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm running itunes on a PC.  If I wanted to create a copy of my library (or a portion of it) at 128K, how would I do it?

Thanks again.

[Crimson]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm running itunes on a PC.  If I wanted to create a copy of my library (or a portion of it) at 128K, how would I do it?

Thanks again.

Assuming you're running the latest version of iTunes, go to Preferences > Import Settings and set it to AAC at 128 kbps. Click OK. Then highlight the songs in your main library that you want to convert, go to Advanced > Create AAC Version and iTunes will create copies of your selection in AAC.

Doing this will result in your main library containing track duplicates in AAC. Creating smart playlists (based on bitrate) will help in your library management.

Good luck!

[Songforyou]

Excellent.  I think that will work fine for my purposes.

I guess it's also possible to use ACC and set the bitrate higher than 128 (like 256 for better sound)?

[dB Cooper]

No question 256 will give better sound, with the obvious tradeoff of halving the capacity. 128K is probably satisfactory for the car. A better solution than multiple bitrate libraries, IMO, is to simply get a bigger ipod and just stick with the lossless files. A 120GB (current) Classic would store probably 250-300 CDs at that rate. (if you can find one of the recently discontinued 160GB models, probably 350-400.) Since you encoded to Apple Lossless already, you would save an immense amount of time and tedium transcoding, as the ALAC files will play on the iPod as is. (How much is your time worth to you?) Alternatively, a 16GB Nano would give the same playing time capacity as your 8GB, assuming encoding at double the bitrate.

[Watson]

No question 256 will give better sound, with the obvious tradeoff of halving the capacity. 128K is probably satisfactory for the car. A better solution than multiple bitrate libraries, IMO, is to simply get a bigger ipod and just stick with the lossless files. A 120GB (current) Classic would store probably 250-300 CDs at that rate. (if you can find one of the recently discontinued 160GB models, probably 350-400.) Since you encoded to Apple Lossless already, you would save an immense amount of time and tedium transcoding, as the ALAC files will play on the iPod as is. (How much is your time worth to you?) Alternatively, a 16GB Nano would give the same playing time capacity as your 8GB, assuming encoding at double the bitrate.

You can also go smaller. If you can live with an iPod Shuffle and its limitations, iTunes will give you an automatic conversion to 128kbps option and takes care of syncing play counts, etc. automatically.

[Songforyou]

Great.  Thanks for all the suggestions.  I'll probably fill my 8G nano with 128 stuff now and think about actually buying an adult size ipod down the road.