itunes is surprisingly flexible when it comes to importing songs in MP3 format. In the advanced setting you can choose from 16kbs to 320 kbs settings and variable bitrate encoding. A 10kz cutoff and a few other bit saving/quality enhancing settings are also available.
As much as I dislike MP3s as a source library (I use apple lossless) they are extremely useful for mobile devices and making some very long play CDs for the car, where critical listening is not an issue.
I record an MP3 version, as well as apple lossless archive version and iTunes seems to not have problems with a couple copies at various bitrates(usually).
I don't think there is any other music organization system that is so flexible and makes searches so easy.
It's easy to set up all the physical music files to be stored on a seperate hard drive, away from the itunes application and the data base containing playlists/lyrics etc. If you check the "keep organized box" in the prefences, it's even easy to retrieve the tracks without itunes, since the music files get organized by artist- album-track.
At least set up an itunes library and carefully study the preferences and advanced settings, before deciding itunes won't work. I suspect itunes can. There's even a third party application that allows one to make a seperate library, say one for lossless and one for mp3s. Forgot the name, but it's suppose to work well. I will make a seperate library using this app, but with 15,000 songs, I'm very conservative in fiddling with multiple libraries, after a few mishaps, and want ot avoid making 15,000 errors!
Since Apple hides the nuts and bolts of the itunes workings the structure is not obvious to me, nor does it seem very logical.
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Greenjeens