iTunes lossless compression - build database.

[Penman]

I have a lot of CD's (thousands) encoded at AAC files. I'm about to move and would like to leave my CD's in storage but travel with a copy of them all, encoded losslessly, on an external drive.

However - I anticipate buying the next gen of iPod (with more storage hopefully) and want to keep my AAC's so I can travel with them in my iPod.

Is there an easy way to create 2 iTunes music folders and then switch between them (lossless for fidelity, AAC for portability).

If I create a new iTunes music destination folder and then re-encode my CD's to that using the lossless codec can I just switch between the folders at will or will I have to re-import the files each time I switch?

If I was to encode lossless files into the same iTunes music folder would the files be listed twice and, if so, could I automatically create lossless and AAC playlists (using some kind of sort by encoding format?)

Thanks in advance. I hope Apple make this easy - I can't be the only audiophile who'd like to take all his music with him.

NB: I fixed it - sort by 'kind' and create parallel playlists within the same folder. Sweet. Thank goodness for my LaCie 500 Gig extremes - I'm going to fill one of them I think.

 

[varmit]

You could do it

But it would be a little bit of a pain to do it. What you do is highlight all you music and do a conversion to lossless. Now you have two of everything, one in ACC and one in lossless in one iTunes folder, I don't know if you can sort it in iTunes by ACC and lossless. What you could do now is use the Finder and search for all files that end with .m4a, move them to someplace to separate your ACC and lossless.

Now you need to build the libraries for each by making separate folders, pointed to by iTunes for where the library will be kept. Then Add ACC files to iTunes to build the ACC library, then change to point library to lossless folder and add the lossless files to build the lossless library.

Now you have two sets of music in two formats that are kept in two iTunes folders.

Are you kind of following what I said.

To go back and forth you will just need to point to where your iTunes folder is in the preferences, which I guess you could write and Apple script for quick switching. www.macosxhints.com, try submitting this to them, they could help you out with that apple script, and would be a good hint to others.