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Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC


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Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC
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Jerman
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Siloam Springs, AR
 
2009-03-11, 13:39

As we all know, Apple released a new shuffle today. I was just watching the video and a specific new feature caught my eye in iTunes. "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC". This is a feature I have been dying for for years, as I have a mostly Apple Lossless collection! Of course I would love to see the ability to convert to higher bitrate options (like 256), but this is definitely a step in the right direction!

I want the ability to use this on my iPhone, as it would save battery life, and I could squeeze more songs onto it. It would also make me heavily consider buying a hard-drive based unit to compliment my iPhone. My collection is nearly 180 gigs, a lot of it being live music, so I think by converting to 256 AAC, I could fit it all and still have extra room. Of course it would take some time to process it all, so perhaps that is why Apple has made this only available on the shuffle.

What do you guys think? Is this something you could see yourself using, especially if they brought it to the entire iPod line? Maybe I am one of the few who would be interested in having my whole huge music collection, but I wonder if it would increase sales... It sure would tip me over the edge to adding the iPod Classic back into the mix...

*Mods, I wasn't quite sure which category in which to post this. Hope I got it right, if not my apologies!*
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Luca
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Join Date: May 2004
Location: Minnesota
 
2009-03-11, 13:42

You've always been able to do this. Just select the songs you want to convert, change your import settings to the lower bitrate, and hit "import."

Or are they referring to an ability to automatically convert songs on-the-fly when you're transferring them to your Shuffle, so you don't have two copies of all your music kicking around your hard drive? That'd be nice.
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chucker
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: near Bremen, Germany
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2009-03-11, 13:45

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerman View Post
As we all know, Apple released a new shuffle today. I was just watching the video and a specific new feature caught my eye in iTunes. "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps AAC". This is a feature I have been dying for for years,
Actually, that feature has been there from the very first generation of iPod shuffles.

Quote:
What do you guys think? Is this something you could see yourself using, especially if they brought it to the entire iPod line?
I'd love to have two shuffle-specific features for my nano, yes: the one you mention, and AutoFill. Though, in both cases, I'd prefer more sophisticated versions. I'd like the conversion to simply keep both versions (much like how iTunes 8 now keeps HD and SD versions of a TV show in one "item") and pick the higher-quality one on your computer and the lower-quality one on your portable player… and I'd like to tell AutoFill "15% from this playlist; another 20% from this; etc."

Quote:
Originally Posted by Luca View Post
Or are they referring to an ability to automatically convert songs on-the-fly when you're transferring them to your Shuffle, so you don't have two copies of all your music kicking around your hard drive? That'd be nice.
Yep. But, still; this has been there since the very first shuffle. (It's limited to 128 kbit/sec AAC, though. No settings at all.)
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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2009-03-11, 13:47

As Luca says, you can easily convert your music to whatever format you want, though you'll then have two copies to manage (very messy with play-counts, etc., if that matters to you). The on-the-fly conversion to 128 kbps AAC has also been available for years, though only with the iPod shuffle. A G4 notebook can only manage around 15x conversion speed, so it wasn't really practical for syncing a large library. However, with today's super-powerful processors I think it's time Apple let this feature work with all iPods, and let the user choose the format and bit-rate.
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Jerman
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Siloam Springs, AR
 
2009-03-11, 15:00

My bad, totally didn't realize it was already there! I definitely don't want the headache of managing 2 copies of each song, so that's not much of an option for me. I'm almost bummed it's been there for awhile, because it means they have not paid attention to the option for quite some time.

With faster processors, I suppose it wouldn't be so bad to do now. However, in a huge library it would most certainly take quite a bit of time to do the conversion, at least due to hard drive speed constraints.
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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2009-03-11, 16:34

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerman View Post
With faster processors, I suppose it wouldn't be so bad to do now. However, in a huge library it would most certainly take quite a bit of time to do the conversion, at least due to hard drive speed constraints.
Chucker's idea sounds great to me: have two copies seamlessly managed as one by iTunes. That shifts the burden from the CPU (still not fast enough to make on-the-fly conversion as quick as simply copying files) to the hard disk (already large enough that a low bit-rate copy of the whole library won't be a big deal for most people). Your 180 GB library is probably in the top 1% size-wise, so it might still be an issue for you.

My girlfriend's 16 GB iPod nano syncs at over 10 MB per second. With 128 kbps files, that's over 600x realtime. By way of comparison, the later G4 processors could encode AAC at about 15x realtime, as I mentioned earlier. I'm not sure how fast the Core 2 Duos are, but I doubt they're anywhere near 600x; maybe 100x at best (if anyone knows please post). So syncing with on-the-fly encoding would extend the sync time to an overnight affair (or worse).

The iPod with hard disks probably sync at well above 10 MB/s, so the comparison would look even worse with those. Chucker's encode-once idea sounds better by the minute.
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Jerman
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Siloam Springs, AR
 
2009-03-11, 22:04

I am definitely into the idea of two libraries managed automatically. Hard drive space certainly is not the issue for me, and encoding everything down from Apple Lossless to 256 AAC would take only a fraction of the space. I even have some 48khz material, etc, and some of it does not even play on my iPhone.

They could put in an option for it, and you let it run in the background for however long it takes, and then whenever you add new music, it would take care of that as well.
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Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2009-03-11, 22:28

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerman View Post
I am definitely into the idea of two libraries managed automatically. Hard drive space certainly is not the issue for me, and encoding everything down from Apple Lossless to 256 AAC would take only a fraction of the space. I even have some 48khz material, etc, and some of it does not even play on my iPhone.

They could put in an option for it, and you let it run in the background for however long it takes, and then whenever you add new music, it would take care of that as well.
I've wanted this feature ever since I got an iPod Touch. If I could keep a parallel copy of my library at 128 AAC, I could probably fit all of it onto my iPod's 16GB drive. Right now I only have about half.
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