I'm stumped here and hoping someone else may have faced this issue before and solved it already. I'd like to burn some MP3 CDs for my wife's car so she can just put the changer on shuffle and have a decent amount of music on tap. (No, sadly it doesn't have an aux in.)

Since I now keep my music in iTunes in lossless format, though, I haven't yet figured out a simple way to convert and burn a large playlist without subsequently ending up with loads of duplicate files needing to be purged from my library.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, it's real easy.

You already have it in a playlist? That makes it even easier.

Go to iTunes preferences, change the import settings to mp3 (and whichever quality/options you care for).

Go to the playlist, select all; right-click "convert to mp3".

Grab all the mp3's into a second folder (or just delete the alac ones if they are still in your main library) (I find sorting them on bit rate works -- everything > 320 == lossless, < 320 == mp3). Then burn to CD with the button.

Thanks Dusty! And there I was contemplating having to fart around with Applescript.

Google doug's apple scripts. I'd bet someone's written a script to do that workflow, including leaving no residual mp3 files on your computer

Google doug's apple scripts. I'd bet someone's written a script to do that workflow, including leaving no residual mp3 files on your computer

I did have a look there and there is one for ripping to MP3 and autoloading onto an iPod, but it doesn't quite repurpose if you want to move the files to CD instead.