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.
It seems to me that keeping multiple copies of your music would save you time in the long run. How long does it take to transcode these WMA files? I typically add a lot of music at time to my ipod and wouldn’t like to have it syncing for a half hour or hour while it converts four or five hundred songs.
It’s strange that out of the 500+ people that have read this post, only one has left a comment.
You’re probably right in saying that you’d save time in the long-run. However, if you want to achieve a balance between quality and file size, this would probably be handy, as hard disk capacity will only increase
I for one, could not fit all of my music (3200+ songs, 18.6Gb) on my 40Gb iPod if it was ripped as Apple Lossless.
I’m not sure about the timing. I’ve tried to search for “WMA transcode time”, but haven’t come up with anything concrete. The best I could find was this.
Yea, but did it add the DRM automatically also?
Hi jbelkin,
What DRM are you referring to? As far as I know, Windows Media Player doesn’t add DRM when you rip/encode tracks into that format… It’s only when you purchase songs from music stores (which is what iTunes does as well).
It would not be very sensible to use Apple Lossless on the iPod . . . the size of the files would cause the hard drive to spin up almost for every song. Not a good idea if you are active while using the iPod. Not to mention the significantly fewer songs that would fit. At 320 AAC I have slightly over 4000 on my 40GB and about 2GBs left.
Yep, I know that. What I was saying was… instead of putting Apple Lossless on the iPod, why not store it as Lossless on the machine you sync the iPod to, but when you sync the songs it iTunes, it automatically transcodes or “downsamples” the songs to a chosen bitrate (such as 192). That means that when you get a bigger iPod, or want to have better quality songs on your iPod, you can just change the transcoding/downsampling quality setting, instead of re-ripping all of your songs at a higher bitrate.
Incorrect. Anytime that you rip to WMA in WMP it automatically assigns DRM to it so that you cannot move it between machines.
Hmmm… which version of WMP is that? That would be weird, considering the number of WMA files you see on sharing networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella (not that I’ve ever used them… ahem).
Mat has no idea what he is talking about. More likely, he’s just a liar. That assertion is patently false.
Actually, Mat is correct albeit ignorant; most versions of WMP add DRM by default. To see this, launch WMP (I am using v10) and navigate to Tools->Options->Rip Music. See the “Copy protect music” checkbox? If that is checked, which it usually is by default, Mat is right–you cannot move WMP-ripped files between boxes.
FWIW.
/j
Strange, i’ve never seen it on by default on any of my default wma10 installations….
either way, it can still be turned off (if on) by ticking the box.
& finally, for Jeremy Higgs, I completely agree. Due to me having a large (250gb) lossless collection, I dont want the hassle of maintaining two libraries. This keeps me from moving into the ipod route. As much as I like itunes, it doesnt give me the feature to transcode on the fly. I think the amount of hits you receive are probably due to people google searching for a solution to this on itunes and finding a lack of one!
I’ve tried to use iTunes both for Lossless (PC / Airtunes playback) and iPod syncing, and it’s a complete pain - I had to maintain two independent user accounts, duplicate iTunes configs and even then, the ‘AAC’ iTunes is rubbish at importing the lossless files. In the end, ditched it and converted to WMA Lossless for the PC and just use iTunes for iPod management.
If you’re ripping to ALAC, surely the overhead of keeping an AAC version of the same files is pretty small? Why couldn’t iTunes give you the option to ‘cache’ transcoded versions of files on disk (either created at rip time or on demand). This would give the best of both worlds - ALAC for use in iTunes and other streaming devices, but AAC versions on tap when transfer to an iPod is needed.