Quote:
Originally Posted by matt8268
I had your exact same question, and ended up with a great solution using playlists. Get your lossless files set the way you like them, then use the "Convert to AAC" feature mentioned above. Then make 2 smart playlists:
iPod --> Kind...is not..."Apple Lossless audio file"
and
Home --> Kind...is..."Apple Lossless audio file"
This will filter all your lossless from your non-lossless. Now for the brilliance, which is so obvious if you already know about it, but not if you don't. While you have each of the playlists above selected, choose "Edit-->Show Browser". From now on that playlist will show the browser bar (with Genre, Artist, and Album) at the top, just like when you select Library. Sync only the lossy playlist to iPod, listen to lossless on your computer.
Another thing I do is make all the playlists I want (generically), then make an iPod and home version of each. For instance:
3stars (smart playlist which has all my 3 * songs)
then I make
i3stars (playlist is 3stars and playlist is iPod)
and
h3stars (playlist is 3stars and playlist is Home)
Then under sync options, I choose all the playlists with the little "i" in front to sync to my iPod, and when I listen from home on the computer I only look at playlists with a little h in front.
Note: If ever I want to change ratings, song names, or any other tag info, I must go to Library and do it for both copies of the song to keep them in sync. But this is the only downside, and it's not that big of one.
For those of you still with me, I actually complicate things a bit more because some songs I only have lossy. Since there is no lossless counterpart, I want them to show up in my Home playlists as well. So for my "Home" playlist I use "kind" and "bitrate" to make a smart playlist that excludes only lossy songs for which I have a lossless counterpart. I can do this because my lossless files were converted to 256AAC, which is a different format from all my non-lossless stuff. This is a bit confusing, but if you understand it it works well.
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first of all, thanks for all the info.
this is a really good idea. well executed too, it seems. the only problem i can see is that you wind up 2 versions of every song on your hard drive. this could be annoying for a variety of reasons. and there's no real way to tell the difference between the two on the hard drive. im assuming itunes would organize both files into the same folder, and not create 2 folders due to different file types....correct?
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so based on that, it seems like the best thing to do is just use the applescript to copy copy files over in aac to ipod, and then delete them. that way i'll keep just one version on my hard drive.
but then i thought of a potential problem with this. how do you get playlists onto your ipod, if you dont have a copy of the exact file on your hard drive? if you used the lossless playlist, it would copy duplicates onto the ipod, because the ipod has AAC and it wouldnt recognize them as the same file.
if i made a second version of the playlist (using the right-click, convert file to aac method as per above) then when i loaded this onto the ipod would it recognize them as the same file even though technically they arent the same file, but different copies of the same thing? otherwise, i'd wind up with duplicates of those songs in the playlists.
wheew, this is complicated!
