One thing I forgot to mention the other day in my short post on Omar Shahine's "Plays For Sure" post was that he talked about Windows Media Player automatically transcoding his WMA Lossless files:
"As an added bonus, since I rip all my audio as WMA Lossless, I have no desire to actually transfer the lossless music to my portable device as only a small fraction of it would fit. WMP10 can automatically transcode (convert) the lossless audio to a smaller version (I use WMA 128K) with some small loss in audio quality. This is a super cool feature because I don't have to maintain multiple copies of my music as I have to today with my iPod. This also ensures that any device I get can have higher and better transcoded software as the codecs improve and as device storage increases without having to ever RIP audio again."
I would *love* for Apple to implement something like this in iTunes. If I could store all my music as Apple Lossless (hard drive space willing…), iTunes could transcode it down to 192k AAC when transferring it to the iPod. If a better codec comes out, or I get a bigger iPod, I could simply up the transcoding setting, and I have higher quality songs on my iPod.
