Best way to reformat ENTIRE iTunes library from AIFF to Apple Lossless?

[CFoss]

My library is now reaching 300GB in size, which is taking up most of the storage in my system. As much as I love having my stuff in AIFF, it's just taking too much memory (one album transferred saves around 300MB). Seeing how I have so much music in AIFF, I was wondering if there was a faster process. Right now, transferring an album to AIFF, deleting the AIFFs when it's done, and then moving all of the music back into the playlists they were in is a pretty slow process.

So, does anyone know of a script (or something) that can reformat my AIFFs into Apple Lossless, organize them into the original playlists, and then delete the original AIFFs?

 

[krspkbl]

I don't know about any scripts. I suppose it can be done but I'm not that smart when it comes to stuff like that.

I recently converted all my music from various file types to AAC 256kbps. I just highlighted all the songs I wanted converted>right click>select AAC version and let it do it's job. The best way is to LEAVE all the songs highlighted so that when they are done converting it's just a matter of right click>delete.

I did one band at a time this way. That's most albums I did at once was 18 (Green Day). So, it's not like you're going through one album at a time.

If you want to convert ALL THE MUSIC in one go then select the far left button shown here:

Highlight all the songs, create AIFF version and wait. Again, the easiest way is to leave them highlighted then just delete when they are finished converting. If you don't want to leave them highlighted then just right click on bar at the top with Name/Album/Artist and select "Kind" and sort the music by "Kind" and then just delete all the non-AIFF files.

Hope that helps

 

[BlackMangoTree]

Keeping your music in Aiff is pointless just takes ups more space. Apple Lossless is identical in quality and takes up about 50% less space.

The poster above gave the easiest and best way to convert all your music to ALAC.

 

[CFoss]

Keeping your music in Aiff is pointless just takes ups more space. Apple Lossless is identical in quality and takes up about 50% less space.

The poster above gave the easiest and best way to convert all your music to ALAC.

There is a reason for AIFF: It's more compatible with non-apple products. It also tends to work better with my music applications. While space wasn't an issue at first, my library has just become too big to still use ALAC.

Anyway, thanks for your tips guys. Unfortunately, they do not really help me: That was what I was doing at the time, but it's too inefficient, as the converted ALAC files have no playlist information.

A script that automatically places the ALAC files within the playlist of the AIFF files would be great, but I'm not sure one exists.

 

[eternalife]

Try this: http://www.shedworx.com/musicconverter-pro

I haven't used this product butt a few of their others and have had great success with them. It will handle batch conversion and re-importing into iTunes.

 

[merelli]

Use max and/or check out http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

I recently converted all my music from various file types to AAC 256kbps. I just highlighted all the songs I wanted converted>right click>select AAC version and let it do it's job. The best way is to LEAVE all the songs highlighted so that when they are done converting it's just a matter of right click>delete.

What he says. Works like a charm, I do it all the time.

Just make sure you have space sufficient to the number of songs you convert, since you mention you lack space. But the more you convert, and then delete, the more you can convert at a time! (I hope that made sense! )

 

[scwinsett]

if you want the BEST way, get an iTunes Match subscription, let it scan and match your music, the delete and redownload ALL from itunes store at no charge

 

[krspkbl]

if you want the BEST way, get an iTunes Match subscription, let it scan and match your music, the delete and redownload ALL from itunes store at no charge

That's what I did. I had all sorts of different file types with different bit rates. I upgraded to iTunes Match for £21.99 and downloaded all the matched songs. They were all upgraded to Matched AAC 256kbps. The ones that weren't matched but uploaded to iTunes I just converted them to AAC 256kbps (VBR).

I then converted all the "Matched AAC" files to just "AAC" to get rid of the tags with my Apple ID. You don't need to do this but it just bugged me that all my songs were now tied to my Apple ID.

I have 1956 songs. 1795 were matched and 161 were uploaded. So 92% of my songs were upgraded to AAC 256kbps and 8% were upgraded to AAC 256kbps (VBR).