Downconverting my iTunes library

Back in April, 2004, when Apple announced iTunes 4.5 would support a new audio format called Apple Lossless, I downloaded the new version and immediately changed my default import format to use the new lossless format.

At that point in time, my iTunes library had 19,629 songs and occupied 71.96GB on disk. Since then, I’ve been adding more music as I’ve purchased new CD’s, and I’ve also purchased a few tracks from iTunes. Here’s a breakdown of my library as it stood recently, broken down by format:

Format	Items	Size
AAC	19,629	71.96GB
Apple Lossless	8,154	201.63GB
MPEG-4 Video	2	13.4MB
Protected AAC	77	298.9MB
Protected MPEG-4	29	4.35GB
Total	27,891	278.24GB

Obviously, making the switch from AAC to Apple Lossless has come at quite a cost in terms of storage—less than half of my songs are in the lossless format, and they are taking more than 2/3 of the space. It’s not that big of an issue for the hard drive on the Mac Mini, since I have a 500GB drive and I wouldn’t mind adding another if and when needed, but the problem comes when syncing these files to the iPod.

The iPod Shuffle I have will automatically down-convert from Apple Lossless to AAC during the sync, but unfortunately, this feature is not supported for the iPod Mini, Nano, Photo or Video. The iPod Shuffle has a very small storage capacity (mine is the big 1GB), so I can understand why this feature exists. What I don’t understand is why the feature is hidden from other iPods. I’d still like to get much more music on my other iPods than I can today because I’m using Apple Lossless.

My ideal preference would be to have all music on the computer in Apple Lossless (since I play music on the computer through my home entertainment center, and quality matters there). I would also prefer having a choice between quality and capacity for the iPod, regardless of what iPod it is. Yes, I realize that down-converting takes more time to sync, which is why I’m asking for a choice here, not a change to the default behavior.

After reading a lot of articles on various strategies people have for working with iTunes and multiple formats, it seems that workarounds are more work than they’re worth to me. They either involve keeping and managing two copies of the library on the computer (which sounds like a very big pain to maintain) or using alternate approaches for syncing using scripts or other hacks that just don’t feel right to me.

Well, after considering the options, I’ve started an automated process tonight to down-convert all of my Apple Lossless tracks to 160kb variable AAC. It’s a bit of a compromise in terms of quality, but it’s a much better use of space and will make backups and syncing much faster. Oh, and it looks like it will take about 3 days straight to run—which means it won’t finish before I leave for the U.K.

Doing this will create duplicate tracks at the lower quality, and will copy all of the metadata for each track, except for the playcount (and skipcount I would assume) since the new track has not in truth been played. That’s unfortunate—since my intent is to replace the old tracks with the new ones, I really would have preferred iTunes to give me a choice to retain this metadata as well, especially given its importance in building good smart playlists (such as highly rated but not recently played tracks).

Once the automated copy is done, I need to delete the old Apple Lossless versions of the tracks from my Library.

I’ve backed up my entire library to 65 DVD’s before doing this, so I can always go back if it doesn’t work out as I hope it will. Of course, I’ll need to switch my default import format to 160KB variable AAC after completing the down-convert. That means that I won’t have Apple Lossless backups any longer, but I’ve got the original CD’s as master backups but I hesitate thinking about going through and correcting all the metadata and losing playcounts, etc. should I ever reimport from the masters again.

Update [10/9/2006]: I’ve completed the downconvert process and replaced all of my Apple Lossless files with variable-rate 192Kb encoded AAC files. My library breakdown is now as follows, which is a great improvement:

Format	Items	Size
AAC	28,528	115.1GB
Apple Lossless	0	0GB
MPEG-4 Video	2	13.4MB
Protected AAC	77	298.9MB
Protected MPEG-4	31	5.5GB
Total	28,613	115.6GB

There were a few consequences of downconverting:

• Although my ratings were preserved for the AAC versions of the lossless files, I lost the playcount and last played metadata for each AAC copy. The AAC versions are reset to zero, presumably under the argument that they have not been played. I understand this, but wish iTunes would have asked me if I wished to copy this metadata to the new tracks, especially since this is valuable information for smart playlists.
• My manual playlists got a bit out of whack, since the files that they referred to were the original lossless versions. Egads.
• My smart playlists lost a bit of their smarts, since many of them were based on playcount and date last played.

In hindsight, I’m still glad to have made the switch, for it gives me far more space to grow into, and allows me to fit much more music on my iPods.

Next post (newer)

Week 19 results

Previous post (older)

Quick and easy chicken soup