Hey guys. I've been thinking about a problem that I'm hoping one of you has come up with a good solution for. Essentially my problem is that I have a lossless library that I want to sync to a laptop (MacBook), but in lossy format.

I think I can kludge together together an applescript to parse the iTunes XML file which handily includes a path to all files in the iTunes library and output a lossy version of the songs in question to a folder which can then be synced to the laptop as needed.

Howerver, I have to think there is a more elegant solution out there. Any ideas?

Any ideas folks?

Even if you do manage to output the lossy files and get them onto your MacBook, how do you propose keeping them in sync with your master iTunes library, without constantly going through the entire process, or - even worse - manually converting and copying over any new files?

If you just wanted them as files within a folder structure, you *might* be able to use some AppleScript to check existing files against new files, and then dump them all in a shared folder on your network, or a service like iDisk or DropBox depending on the size of your library. But I wouldn't exactly call that 'elegant' either, and it wouldn't work well with iTunes unless you were to manually add to your library each time.

I toyed with a similar idea in the past as I have my master iTunes library on my iMac which is full of ALAC files, and wanted a second iTunes library of the same files but in a lossy format for portable use (MacBook + iPhone). In the end, I just started ripping my CD's twice - one in ALAC for the desktop and one in AAC for the MacBook. Now I don't even bother with that and just use ALAC for portable. I have to be more choosy, but it's less of a headache.

If you figure out a simple and workable way to do this, I would be more than interested to know how.

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Ah. but I will have the iTunes library on the laptop to cross check with. Basically I will load both libraries and cross check the entried for any differences. This should allow me to avoid transcoding files that have not changed. I would also maintain a local directory of lossy files to speed up the proces (IE, not working over a network)

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Its on my list of things to do. I will be investing some time this summer into it for sure.