Lossless in iTunes and lossy on iPod

[treefrog]

Please choose the appropriate forum for this topic. Thank you. Hi there,

I'd love to be able to have all my iTunes songs stored in the lossless format, but also have a parallel 'mirror' copy of all tunes in the lossy AAC format for use on the iPod.

The Play Count/Rating/Last Played etc. attributes would also be mirrored as if only one version of the song existed.

At the moment the choice seems to be to either store files as lossy AAC's - and put up with lower quality on the desktop, or have lossless files, and put up with less storage on the iPod.

Am I just strange, or would other people find this a real killer feature?

Dave

[alex c]

i think i can see your point, i'm not too much of a audiophile and don't have the most expensive audio setup in the world for my PC so i really don't think it could make any noticable difference to my audio quality, 192-320 AACs seem to do just the trick for moi.

besides, how many tracks do you have? if it's more than 4000 your talking 4-5mb average for aac and 20-30mb average for lossless, right? that's a hell of a lot of storage (probably dedicating the majority of a 120gb drive to music... a bit wasteful perhaps? i can't see too many people doing this in all honesty.

[treefrog]

The thing is, apart from 'audiophile' benefits - lossless encoding has one other major advantage - you can recompress into every future format you want without having the original source CD's.

For example, I originally ripped my collection as WAVs - and so to create AACs, WMAs etc I've simply had a PC running for a few days doing this automatically. It's much more practical than sitting by a PC changing hundreds of CDs!

Audio formats change all the time, and lossless encoding is the only future proof way of doing things I think.

Regarding space, I wouldn't buy a new drive for storage with a capacity of < 250GB these days. By my estimation this could hold over 800 albums encoded losslessly. How many people have this number of CD's?

To be honest I can't really see how disk space is much of an issue for lossless encoding, as few people have such huge collections - and those that do can probably afford another hard disk or two!

[divad6719]

I tend to think of Lossless as more of an archival format, keeping a full quality copy of my (favourite/ important) CD's on my PC incase one of them gets trashed or something. Then I don't have to bother buying a new copy of the CD as I can just decompress the Lossless and burn it to a CD-R. (I've been using FLAC though).

I suppose portable support is a nice bonus but I've been using AAC at 192 and find that it's very good already. Whether it's a good idea for Apple to throw another format into the mix, I'm not too sure. It all kind of ties you into using iTunes in the future, at least with FLAC I can use whatever format or program I want.

The biggest thing to me is that I might not always have an iPod so using Lossy AAC is fine just now but I've still got the comfort of having my FLAC's (for easily re-encoding to another format) incase I change to a player that doesn't support AAC in the future.

[treefrog]

I know what you mean... but it just seems a shame to have to use the AAC on your PC when you've also got a nice lossless version sitting around! If Apple had some way of storing two versions, and syncing them together, that would be great... still something for the future I guess.

On the plus side, you're unlikely to be locked into Apple's lossless format... WMA -> WAV converters already exist, so I'm sure they'll come along soon for Apple's lossless.

[wco81]

Some folks at Arstechnica are talking about doing this, keeping a lossless file for the computer and a lossy one for the iPod using the Smart Playlist feature and setting it up so that iTunes only syncs the lossy files with the iPod.

Maybe a future update to iTunes will do this automatically?

[qub333]

Hey, i know that they prefer if we avoid OS specific comments here, but if ur running a mac there are literaly thousands of plugins that may do exactly as you desire, i havent searched them myself, but if ur really savvy u could even write one urself, i think either java or perl are used... im only familar with java.... but reguardless i would look about for a iTunes plugin/3rd party program that can do as u wish. I know that i can be done if u make a separate copy in lossy format upload it to ur ipod then delete the actual files in ur comp, but dont tell iTunes that u deleted them, it wil lthink they are still there, but u wont lose the hd space, of course if ur already using like 160 gigs of lossless, wahts15 gigs of lossy........

[divad6719]

Maybe it's all wishful thinking but, while your at it lets add the ability to encode to Apple Lossless and AAC Lossy at the same time. :cool: :eek: :)

[Tazwolff]

This is how I do it, make note that I use WinXP and have 4 200GB SATA HDD?s and my system is made by me for use as a HTPC.

Point your iTunes folder to a new area (main partition should only be used for the OS) or drive. Then rip your CD?s into iTunes in the lossless format. Then select all tracks and convert to your choice of AAC bitrate, and only move those tracks to the iPod. Also, I do not use the auto-sync feature of iTunes with my iPod. After all of your new aac files are on the iPod, select the ones still on your system and delete them, keeping only the lossless ones. While this is not a simple or quick method to do it, it does get the job done so you can enjoy your lossless music on the home stereo unit, and having your lossy format on your portable player.

This is the same method I used when I had the Zen using the WMA Lossless format. I?ll add a side note that I find no difference between the new Apple LL or Windows LL formats. Both output the same quality and file sizes.

[SouthsideIrish]

This is the reason I gave up on using iTunes. Most of this is a piece of cake, in MC10, and I don't have to manual sync. The only real problem with this system is the conversion process to lossless and AAC, since it has to be done in a couple of steps, since there is a normalization process I go through. Still, I wouldn't want to have to go back to manual sync, so MC10 is the best program for me.

Bill

[hatliff]

What I'd like to see is an option so that when you sync lossless files to the iPod, it compresses them to your choice of lossy format as it does the copy. There is then no need for a 2nd copy of the tracks on your PC and the play count etc. problem is solved. It would be good to be able to do this on a per-playlist basis so you can still keep some stuff in lossless on the iPod if you want.

MusicMatch can do this with MP3s...

[thabenksta]

Just set your ipod to manual mode, and rip two copies of each album, put the lossy ones on your ipod, and delete them off your computer.

[treefrog]

That looks like the closest we'll get for now, but of course it then isn't possible to keep ratings, play counts, last play dates etc in sync between the two files.

Effectively iTunes becomes separated from the iPod, which is a shame as the integration is a great advantage when using both products (for me anyway).