Lossless files on iPod

Help! If I store my music in iTunes in Apple's lossless ALAC format it seems I'm not going to store many albums on my 16Gb iPod. Is there a process whereby I can have lossless ALAC music on iTunes and lossy AAC music on my iPod?

Thanks, Tony

 

The only way I know of is to have multiple copies of the files. If in iTunes you Edit|Preferences|Advanced and set the rip rate to your preferred lossy bitrate, you then find that, if you right-click on a song, you have an option to convert the file to the bitrate you just set. The old file is kept. You could then organize these files in different places and create different iTunes libraries for each root location (lossy vs. lossless location). You can start up iTunes with a different root location (library) by holding down the shift key (in Windows) when you click on the iTunes icon. (Keep the shift key held down until you get a dialogue box - it is slow to start.) I haven't done this myself because I'm happy enough to have lossless albums on my Nano, but I know this is a possibility. Others may prefer another solution. You could look on www.ilounge.com

 

SteveC's solution is very elegant. If you didn't want to have to boot up different libraries in iTunes however, you could convert the files but store them in the same library and set up a playlist or playlists using only the lossy files and update the iPod with these playlists. On the downside, you will have duplicate files in your single library.

An alternative approach altogether might be to stick with ALAC and set up a smart playlist in iTunes that is limited to 16Gb. If you based the 'limit to 16Gb' logic on when the file was last played for instance, you wouldn't be constantly repeating the same songs (provided you sync the iPod regularly)

Finally, learn from my mistakes and don't be tempted to rip directly to mp3 - I did that a few years ago and now I'm redoing them all in ALAC. It's twice as tedious second time round...

 

I am being lazy here as I attempt to import all my CDs in one go, yes it is tres tedious. But..

Will the squeeze box play alac files?

 

You're too kind, lbr -- I'm also re-ripping from mp3 to Apple lossless -- so not so smart there, but I'm getting all the tagging right this time.

Your playlist talk inspired me to see how my collection breaks down in the re-ripping stakes: currently approaching 8000 songs Apple lossless vs. nearly 11000 other. But I've converted all of the classical and quiet stuff where I heard artefacts.

Finding out how to count them in lossless and lossy playlists led me to discover that you can make a smart playlist with a condition like "kind does not contain Apple lossless". If you want to select files for the Nano this could be useful.

PS SCott, yes SBs will play .m4a. SBs and Transporter are my main sources and play Apple lossless very nicely but IIRC the conversion is done server side, not natively, so it puts a little strain on my NAS where the server runs; nothing much to speak of though.

 

Thanks guys, then the solution is to have 2 separate files - and manage 2 libraries - for each track: one lossless and a second lossy.

I hoped iTunes may have been ahead of the game and provide it's own management of lossless and lossy files - something for the future...?

I predict a tiresome weekend coming my way feeding the computer discs, and a stressful one before that to configure my (Synology) NAS as an iTunes server. Eeek

Got to buy the media player too, but that will be the fun bit.

Tony

Thanks again!

 

Cool! I use a Synology too but to run Slimserver (SSODS) I do not use it as an iTunes server because for some reason or other the mrs and I prefer to keep our own local iTunes libaries on each of our laptops but with pointers to the NAS in addition [File | Add folder to library]