[iridium7777]

I recently ran into an interesting issue, I primarily use MediaHuman converter for all of my music stuff and I wanted to downsample my 24-88/176/192 ALAC files into 320AAC and for whatever reason they're completely unreadable on my KANN player.

Anything that was in 16/44 got converted with no issues, but the hi-res files are all corrupted and can't be played. I'm not sure if there's an incorrect setting that I did or something else, so my question would be what's the best (and preferably freeware) Mac SW that would allow me to downscale my high res files into AAC format?

interestingly enough the itunes somehow does this perfectly when i use my ipod and select "down sample to 256aac" but that's only on the ipod and i don't know how to extract those files out of the ipod and dump them onto the KANN.

thanks for any tips

 

[bigshot]

Why not just use the iTunes app on your Mac? That is a great app on Mac. People tell me the PC version can be funky, but it works fantastic on my Mac Mini media server.

 

[iridium7777]

i do use itunes to manage my whole library (with an audiorvana wrapper to play high res files). all my files are ALAC files, but for portable devices i wanted to save a little space, especially from the 24/192 files, and convert them into AAC. they'd be in aac only on the device, my whole library would stay lossless. and if i use itunes it'd just duplicate everything in my library and i'd have ALAC and AAC files in the same place.

unless i wanted to create a second copy of an itunes library on a different drive and covert that to AAC but i don't know how sustainable that will be in long term. everytime i'd import a new album i'd have to do it into two places.

Why not just use the iTunes app on your Mac? That is a great app on Mac. People tell me the PC version can be funky, but it works fantastic on my Mac Mini media server.

 

[bigshot]

You can convert within iTunes on your computer. Just highlight the tracks you want to convert and then go to FILE > CONVERT > CREATE AAC VERSION. It will create a new copy in your library. Highlight it and hit delete and move to trash. It will be in your trash can.

The easiest way to do it with a whole library would be to create a new library by opening iTunes with the option key held down. It will ask if you want to create a new library. You can create it on the same hard drive, it doesn't have to be a different one. You just switch between them on startup using the option key.

Drag the media folder from the original library to the new one's window. It will copy everything there. (Assuming you have copy to library turned on in the settings.) Then highlight all and convert everything to AAC in one swoop. When it's done converting everything all of the lossless ALAC files will still be highlighted. Hit delete and move to trash and it will take all the lossless files to the trashcan and you will be left with just the AAC ones. You'll have two libraries then... one lossless and one AAC.

If you want to add to the libraries, you'll have to of through this again for the new files. I don't think you can sync two iTunes libraries.

 

[iridium7777]

i'll have to try this method. but i'm fearful that let's say for an artist that has 30-50 albums, it'll dump the files into the trashcan without any library structure. so even if i "undeleted" them and moved them over to my KANN player, it may or may not catalog them properly. also, i heavily rely on the folder structure in case the auto cataloging goes bad, so i don't want to try to re-create by hand 50 or so subfolders by hand.

i may just do the second AAC library and do this once every few months.

what i like about the Media Human converter is that i can do the following:
1) copy a whole artist with 30-50 sub-albums to a temp directory
2) batch drop all of those files into the Media tool and click convert to source folder, overriding the original files

so essentially all i'm left with is a new temp folder that's 1/4-1/16 the size, with proper tagging, folder structures, etc., and then i can move that over to my portable device/sd cards. the problem is that something weird happens to high res files, that's why i'm looking for another tool that can handle it better.

You can convert within iTunes on your computer. Just highlight the tracks you want to convert and then go to FILE > CONVERT > CREATE AAC VERSION. It will create a new copy in your library. Highlight it and hit delete and move to trash. It will be in your trash can.

 

[bigshot]

The tags are stored in the AAC file. It should all carry across. Once you get used to holding down the option key at startup, it's easy to create new libraries and switch between them.