[jpr703]

I ripped all my CD's to two hard drives in .wav format using EAC and put all the songs for each album in a folder named using the name of the artist and the album. In other words "White Stripes - Elephant" would contain .wav files for each song on the album. I have well over 200 gigs of albums done this way.

What I'm trying to do is to use iTunes to convert these files to AAC files and put them on another hard disk so that I can then sync it to my iPod. I don't really care if I maintain the file structure for the AAC files since iTunes should show them by album anyway, but I'm having a fit trying to get iTunes to do some sort of batch conversion.

Anyone have any advice on how to do this before I lose my mind?

 

[Nospam]

1) Go to your iTunes preferences and set the "Importing" settings to AAC.
2) Select the songs you want to convert (create a smart playlist, if it helps).
3) Go to the "Advanced" menu and select "Convert to AAC".

However, you will have to manually move the resulting files to the other drive.

 

[jpr703]

I managed to get iTunes to convert the files by importing the M3U file that EAC created with each alubm, but it takes time since you can only do 1 album at a time.

Also, iTunes seems to know the name of the album, but dumps all the AAC files into an Uknown Artist file. When I sync to the iPod, I can't browse by album name.

Help me, I'm in iPod Hell!!!!

 

[blessingx]

You may want to glance over at Hydrogen (check AAC and lossless forums). WAVs won't keep tag info (AIFF does BTW). There's some suggestions over there about converting from lossless to WMA lossless to ALAC or AAC, but being on OS X I didn't really pay attention.

BTW, are you going to convert your WAVs to ALACs also?

 

[sigma]

Use Foobar2000's diskwriter (with the AAC plugin). Get the FreeDB plugin too, because WAVs don't contain metadata.

 

[jpr703]

Can anyone point to a resource that will help me figure out how to use Foobar to do this?

 

[jpr703]

I give up, I'm just going to re-rip everything with iTunes. I could have gone on a rampage last nite when I realized that all those wav files that I made with EAC are basically useless. That's a whole lot of time down the toilet.

If you're planning to use the AAC format with your iPod, save yourself a lot of time and heartache and just stick to iTunes.

 

[blessingx]

I really doubt they're useless as others certainly have been in a similar situation and there's bound to be various solutions (besides the two mentioned above). Did you search Hydrogen's AAC and Foobar forums?

Another options is DBPowerAmp. I dont have any experience with it (again I'm on OS X), but a possibility.

 

[jpr703]

Thanks Blessingx, but I already spent quite a bit of time over at Hydrogen and I just haven't gotten it figured out. I'll probably back the Wavs up to DVDs and hold on to them just for the heck of it.

I work most of the day on a computer, so I'll just take one shoebox of CDs with me to work each day until I get them all ripped to 256 AAC with iTunes.

Right now there are just so many possibilities with digital audio that it's hard to find a lot of information on one "best" way to do things. I think most beginners would do best just to stick with iTunes and wait until the vast array of formats and software settles down to a few good and widely understood choices.

That being said, I still do appreciate everybody's suggestions.