iPod Coverting masses of files to AAC?

[Zexel]

I have an iPhone 3G 16 GB that's running out of room. My iTunes library has gotten larger over the past few months and as of right now I only have 166 MBs left on it's internal memory. The majority of this is taken up my 2300 or so songs. I have noticed that a lot of my iTunes library is in .mp3 format. Now I just finished watching Donald Bell's video on CNET that explains the differences between different audio formats and from what I gathered AAC files are slightly smaller and keep nearly the same audio quality. If this is true, I want to go about converting my entire music collection to AAC format, however I can't find an easy way of doing this. I have looked in the options for Smart Playlists and I don't see any file type filter.

Do you know of any way put all the .mp3 files together and convert them to AAC all in one shot, preferably in iTunes itself?

Thanks in advance for the help.

 

[GGJstudios]

Max

 

[Zexel]

Eh, sorry. Forgot to mention I'm still a Windows user until the MBP refresh happens. :/

 

[gnasher729]

Do you know of any way put all the .mp3 files together and convert them to AAC all in one shot, preferably in iTunes itself?

I'd recommend that you go through all the menus in iTunes and try to figure out what each one does, and what settings you can change. Take especially note of the menu item that lets you make a backup of your music (you don't want to start converting stuff until you backed up everything), the bit where you specify your encoding settings, and the menu that lets you convert your music.

Better yet, get iTunes 9.1 and select the option to convert all music to 128 Kbit/sec AAC while downloading it to your iPod. Your library will stay unchanged.

 

[ReggaeFire]

You can do it, and easily, but you may not WANT to do it. The quality of lossy compression (AAC) on top of already lossy compression (mp3) means your files will sound worse than if you'd done a strait conversion of the original. If you're fine with that, all you need to do is:

iTunes Preferences -> Import Settings -> AAC (set to whatever bit rate is smaller than your existing mp3 bit rate).

Then select the songs you wish to convert and go to the Advanced menu, you should see a menu item that says "Create AAC version"

After it's done converting, select all and then sort by Kind (I know on Mac the keyboard shortcut is cmd-J to show sort by choices, it's probably ctrl-j on windows), select the mp3's and delete them.

 

[ThirteenXIII]

I'm in the process of doing this too with my library collection.
however at the moment its split evenly with MP3's and Apple Lossless rips.

Mp3s since i imported a few years ago unknowningly of the import settings at the time.

at anyrate they were either imported in itunes at 192Kbps or 160Kbps Mp3 files.
if i select Automatically convert to 128Kbps AAC for iPod/iPhone on the new itunes will it also convert the Mp3's to 128Kbps AAC?

 

[Fuchal]

Better yet, get iTunes 9.1 and select the option to convert all music to 128 Kbit/sec AAC while downloading it to your iPod. Your library will stay unchanged.

This. Do nothing else unless you re-rip or re-acquire all your music in a different format.