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iPod two libraries: aac and lossless?

donga

donga

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
May 16, 2005
841
1
AZ
on the heels of this thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/566268/

what do you do if you want home theatre quality (apple lossless) and music portability (regular aac, i use 192)?

do you audiophiles keep two separate libraries? or have both tracks in the same library? how do you organize what you put on your ipod and your home system?
 
I suck it up and transfer the lossless files to my iPhone. I don't wanna deal with multiple copies. :(
 
Galley said:
I suck it up and transfer the lossless files to my iPhone. I don't wanna deal with multiple copies. :(
Click to expand...

I do the same because I refuse to compromise on lossy music. I make a playlist and put all the songs I want to listen to on my iPhone. I then sort that playlist by play date. Then I copy the first 200 or so songs to another playlist that syncs to my iPhone and then arrange the songs in the order I want to listen to them.
 
I keep all my files in Apple lossless on an ext HD, and keep AAC's on my MBP. iTunes sucks for this. It's a pain checking boxes, transferring files and just keeping track of the whole drawn out process in general. Better support for multiple libraies was on my wishlist for iTunes 8 but instead we get Genius.

Ironic isn't it... You have to be a genius to manage two identical libraries, but any idiot can pick out music!:)
 
Lossless To ACC on the fly

Hi,

The above link is for Mac users only, but this is so far the best way of getting the work done. My Only issue issue is that it does not keep Album art, everything else is kept though. Save's on the whole 2 library's.

Shame this is not a feature on iTunes, that way it could transfer everything then.

Hope it helps
 
I am just about finished ripping my CD collection into lossless. I have done this to preserve quality for my home system. However, I like to carry around on my iPod classic my entire library and need to downcode to AAC. I know there is a script to do this on the fly, but I'd like to preserve album artwork. How do I "batch convert" my ENTIRE library, preserving artwork and all data? Should I store it as a second library, or as a playlist?
 
eawmp1 said:
I am just about finished ripping my CD collection into lossless. I have done this to preserve quality for my home system. However, I like to carry around on my iPod classic my entire library and need to downcode to AAC. I know there is a script to do this on the fly, but I'd like to preserve album artwork. How do I "batch convert" my ENTIRE library, preserving artwork and all data? Should I store it as a second library, or as a playlist?
Click to expand...

There is a way dude, but you'll be taking up space on your storage devices. The only other way would be to convert it all, put in the Grouping field text like "iPod copy". With this you can create a smart folder to collect all the AAC track with this text then, copy onto your iPod and delete the tracks. I'm looking into the on-the-fly encoding at the moment via Applescript but trying to preserve the track data & art work.
 
the best way to do this, is to select the music you wish to convert, place it into a folder. Once all the tracks are ready (& in Lossless format), select all the tracks in that folder & using the Applescript provided above, select the option to copy straight to the iPod which will then delete the AAC file yet retaining the Lossless files... Whilst also preserving the album artwork...

Done
 
ive been recently converting the songs I listen to the most to apple lossless, 10 gb for around 400 songs, some of which arent lossless(drm, etc)

might have to cave in to get a 120 or 160 ipod later down the road
 
ajumbaje said:
ive been recently converting the songs I listen to the most to apple lossless, 10 gb for around 400 songs, some of which arent lossless(drm, etc)

might have to cave in to get a 120 or 160 ipod later down the road
Click to expand...

If you're converting from a lossy format such as MP3 then all you'll end up with is huge files with the same lossy quality. Once the information is thrown away, there's no getting it back.
 
I just convert lossless to aac, then after adding the aac to my iPod I just remove them from my library but keep them on my hd.
 
I have my whole library (minus a few iTMS purchases) in Lossless and comes in at about 320GB. Obviously, I can't get all this on an iPod, and have real trouble getting all the songs I want on an iPod. I favor lossless mainly for home listening, and I would be willing to accept the decrease in fidelity resulting from a reduction to 256 AAC on my iPod. However, playcounts and other metadata is too important to me to keep two copies in my library.

That said, when i bought my first iPod Suffle back 2005, I fell in love with the preference setting that allows iTunes to convert lossless and other big files to AAC for the shuffle as it syncs. I have peppered Apple with requests that this feature be added to ALL iPods - and maybe even the ability to choose the bitrate that the tracks are converted to - ever since. I have no idea why they do not extend this feature, since I can see no reason why it wouldn't be beyond simple to do so.

So that's my advice - if you really want this sort of feature, repeatedly ask Apple to give it to all iPods. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say.
 
+1 for having a lossless library, i just had to be ruthless on what i wanted and what i really listen to in my library. so my music went from ~2500 to 504 =/, at least it all sounds awesome is about all i can say.
 
Foxer said:
That said, when i bought my first iPod Suffle back 2005, I fell in love with the preference setting that allows iTunes to convert lossless and other big files to AAC for the shuffle as it syncs. I have peppered Apple with requests that this feature be added to ALL iPods - and maybe even the ability to choose the bitrate that the tracks are converted to - ever since. I have no idea why they do not extend this feature, since I can see no reason why it wouldn't be beyond simple to do so.
Click to expand...

I am hoping for this addition as well, but the one reason I can imagine for Apple not implementing it is - you remember how long it takes for the iPod Shuffle to convert like 150 songs to a 1GB device? Now imagine this for a 80GB iPod classic. I guess they could add it to iTunes without problems, but the user experience would be too bad so they probably decided not to.
 
I just bought myself a 1TB external hard drive so I can store my video and music. I've been looking around for a solution for me.

Lossless on Ext. HD. in one library.
AAC on iMac. in another library.

Is there any easy way to do this? Right now my entire library is lossless and I am going to move it to the Ext. HD.
 
lorenwade said:
I just bought myself a 1TB external hard drive so I can store my video and music. I've been looking around for a solution for me.

Lossless on Ext. HD. in one library.
AAC on iMac. in another library.

Is there any easy way to do this? Right now my entire library is lossless and I am going to move it to the Ext. HD.
Click to expand...

I would just keep it on The Ext & then use the Apple Script from Dougsscript's. There really is no point in keeping the same file on the same system, it's just wasting resources. That way you can just convert on the go. That's if you really carry that much music around with you?
 
c-Row said:
I am hoping for this addition as well, but the one reason I can imagine for Apple not implementing it is - you remember how long it takes for the iPod Shuffle to convert like 150 songs to a 1GB device? Now imagine this for a 80GB iPod classic. I guess they could add it to iTunes without problems, but the user experience would be too bad so they probably decided not to.
Click to expand...

I remember that it took quite awhile, but it doesn't seem to take as long anymore. Whenever I charge my shuffle (which is about every other month), I swap out the songs. I haven't timed it, but it seems to be a matter of minutes, not hours. Of course, on a 160GB iPod, it would take hours and hours, but you'd only have to do it once. Right? I mean, it takes hours to load my lossless files onto it if I have to reset it. I'd just like to have the option.
 
Library Hell

I have almost 30,000 tracks of which 80% are Lossless, so this is a big problem for me. My first iPod was a shuffle. When I got a newer one I was shocked to find the automatic conversion to AAC was missing. I also have suggested it to Apple to no avail. I tried to maintain multiple libraries but that became too time consuming. I tried both formats in my library but that was too confusing with all of the selecting and deselecting. I've used some scripts and those do help, but basically the best solution is suck it up, by a bigger ipod and have less music on the player.
 
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