[warnsey]

Ok.. So i'm trying to get my head around this encoding and decoding buisness. I'll tell you what i'm hoping to do using Itunes and if anyone could tell me if it works and how to do it would be great.

I'm planning on getting an external harddrive and using itunes to rip all my cd's to lossless. However, I then when I use them on my IPOD I want them on as AAC 256kb VBR.

My questions is:

1. Can I convert lossless to AAC without ruining the original lossless files on the hard drive using Itunes. If I do that will that totally confuse the Itunes Library?
2. Will I then have a duplicate on the hard drive of both lossless and AAC or will the AAC just convert to the IPOD.

I'm a traditional cd in the cd player man so this portable buisness is new to me so be gentle

 

[OverlordXenu]

Don't ever use iTunes to rip. Ever.

EAC is the best cd-ripper. You can pretty much gaurentee bit-perfect rips, if you do it right.

http://jiggafellz.isa-geek.net/eac/

 

[mirumu]

You can convert a lossless file to AAC, this will give you two copies of the track, one lossless and one AAC. It's usually not obvious which is which so I'd recommend that you open the "View Options" dialog and enable the "Kind" column which will let you see whether the file is AAC, Lossless or whatever. You can swap the columns around just by dragging them.

You can make the iPod only synchronize selected tracks and this is controlled by the checkbox shown at the front of each track in you iTunes library. If you check this checkbox on all AAC tracks then this will only copy the AAC tracks to your iPod.

That will all work, but it may make your iTunes library a little hard to use with all the duplicates. You could make a lossless playlist and an AAC playlist to keep them separate. To save maintenance work later I'd recommend you make them smart playlists so they automatically update as you add new music. For the smart playlist rule, set each to only contain tracks where the "Kind" matches the files you want in each playlist. This means if you you could then guarantee you were only playing the lossless files through your computer when you were playing from the lossless playlist and only AAC files in the AAC playlist.

 

[warnsey]

Thanks for the reply guys.

Overlord.. Will EAC work with a MAC? Also does that mean that I would get EAC to do the ripping and then just import the files into Itunes to synch with the IPOD.

 

[nfusion770]

Plenty of people rip with itunes and it works perfectly fine. The benefit of EAC the way I understand it is for severely damaged CDs, but I digress from discussing this topic for the 3 billionth time. Probably a good idea to turn on itunes error correctionm however.

If you want to use both aac and lossless files in itunes, your only real hope is to use smart playlists as mirumu described. I don't ever use lossless in itunes so I keep 2 seperate libraries, lossless and lossy.

When you are done ripping your lossless files into itunes, you then:

1. change your import settings to aac (256vbr or 320 are best)
2. select all the files you would like to convert
3. right click- convert files to aac.

This will give you lossless and lossy copies in the same directory. Smart playlists will parce them up for you, but it is a pain in my book.

If you'd like to keep separate directories for lossless and lossy (like I do), you just copy the lossless files to your backup directory before converting to aac. Then after you convert, use the itunes categories to sort for lossless files and delete the originals. This will leave you will a backup directory of untouched lossless files to use however you wish for the rest of your life, and a directory of lossy itunes files that could go up in flames for all you care, because you have the originals backed up.

I guess there is a way to do both flac and mp3 in EAC, but this is a lot easier as far as I'm concerned.

Hope that helps

 

[OverlordXenu]

The benefit of EAC is that it makes bit-perfect (or almost, sometimes use 99.99% or something) copies of CD's.

Also, anyone that uses itunes to rip cd's should not be allowed to own a computer.

 

[warnsey]

Is there an EAC equivalent to MAC. What do you encode your cd's as?

 

[krmathis]

You could use the Doug's 'Lossless to AAC Workflow'.
This script allows you to transcode Apple Lossless files to AAC, copying them to the iPod, and leaving no traces in the iTunes Library. Aka, no duplicate files..

For CD ripping I recommend Max.

 

[nfusion770]

Quote:

Originally Posted by OverlordXenu /img/forum/go_quote.gif The benefit of EAC is that it makes bit-perfect (or almost, sometimes use 99.99% or something) copies of CD's. Also, anyone that uses itunes to rip cd's should be allowed to own a computer.

Um.... great point.

 

[mirumu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by OverlordXenu /img/forum/go_quote.gif The benefit of EAC is that it makes bit-perfect (or almost, sometimes use 99.99% or something) copies of CD's. Also, anyone that uses itunes to rip cd's should be allowed to own a computer.

All rippers attempt to get bit perfect output, it's just that some are better than others. The main reason you would not get a bit perfect rip is if your CD is damaged via scratches or other problems. Also on some occasions a CD will be poorly made and this can prevent bit perfect rips. EAC tries to correct these problems by finding errors in the data read from the disc and attempting to recover the correct data by re-reading the disc in multiple passes until it gets a satisfactory result. If the disc is too damaged, it will eventually give up and this is when you'll see accuracy of 99.99% or lower.

There's no denying EAC is better than iTunes when it comes to ripping but if you look after your CDs then in most cases iTunes will give you bit perfect output as well. For the other times there's programs like EAC and Max.