One other post-15 minute thought - depending on the obscurity of specific test tracks, they may or may not have been fingerprinted by the community, thus rely on tags... or ignore them.

Similar so I just tacked on to this thread. Sorry for being clueless when it comes to itunes and ipods. If I rip CDs using Max as ALACs and get them added to my itunes library, is there anyway that I can copy these over to my ipod but encoded in a lossy format to save space? And recommended format or bitrate? Mostly rock, so 160kbps? higher?

This is what I do:

• Change my settings to lossless;
  
• Rip CD's (usually, a batch at a time);
  
• Change my options to lossy (specifically, MP3, 228? something VBR);
  
• Select all the Apple Lossless files I just generated (sort by Date Added makes it easy, as long as I'm not doing anything else with iTunes, which I have to admit, I've done once or thrice);
  
• Right-click -> create MP3 version;
  
• Profit!
  

I actually keep them in two separate folders, too, but that also requires me to stop the thing when I hit "okay" after changing my settings.

Let me know if you need more detail, or if that helps. Bitrate is up to you -- I started out lossless, then went to 320, then went to where I am now -- and that's sufficient. This is mostly for car listening, so my requirements are even lower than yours, but I have it set higher than I can hear by a goodly margin.

Pars, there's an Apple Script that does what you want (mostly) automatically for you. I'll see if I can find it.

EDIT - Found it. http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=losslessaccworkflow

Edited December 28, 200916 yr by Salt Peanuts

Thanks. I did it manually after doing some googling and had forgotten about Doug's scripts . I'll take a look at these when I get home later this week. I settled on 192k for car use and seems OK. It woud be nice not to have to store multiple versions; just lossless then downgrade when putting them on the ipod.

One thing with that particular script - it tends to have some problem completing the transfer (to iPod) with shorter tracks. I think Doug talks/talked about that somewhere.

It woud be nice not to have to store multiple versions; just lossless then downgrade when putting them on the ipod.

You can delete them after you put them on the iPod (as long as you're not using the sync option) -- they're certainly recreatable.