AAC, AIFF, Lossless, MP3

I found myself in similar situation. 800 + cd's ripped to apple loseless on my mac and a handfull of ipods, nano, mini, shuffle, video, etc. for different family members. I found an apple script that takes selected apple loseless tracks, rips them to AAC transfers the AAC to your Ipod, then deletes the AAC from your itunes library. Now there isn't a mixup of which files to toss and trouble keeping track of multiple trascks ripped to different compression ratios. here is the link.

http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts07.php

pete

I continue to be stuck on some recurring thoughts every time this conversation pops up in a new thread:

* I still don't understand how someone else knows what I or anyone else can or cannot hear.

* I am sure my ears are not as golden as some on this forum, but for me, the difference between MP3 and WAV was clearly audible using an iPod played through my Nakamich car stereo in a Porsche Boxster S with the top down.

* Hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper so why all the emphasis on saving disc space?

* Given that you might be using your Nano for commuting or going to the gym, do you think that, say, 10,000 songs instead of 50,000 might be sufficient to get you throw your 30 minutes on the elliptical machine or whatever?

* This is AUDIOgon, not CONVENIENCEgon

* In summary, could anyone please contribute more information and keep us updated on how we can have bit for bit, uncompressed WAV files, easily tagged with track information and playable on the hard drive based device of your choice?

Cwlondon: Here, here.

The best solution that i have been able to discern so far is: (1) hard drive to external adaptor (e.g., Trends Audio UD-10 or Empirical Off Ramp Turbo 2 via USB, (2) external adaptor to DAC via your preference of digital cable (both adaptors mentioned above come in different flavors; UD-10 provides multiple outputs), and so on through you system.

I know of no way to utilize WAV files and preserve tagging; seems that you need to convert to some lossless codec (Apple, FLAC, etc.).

Sort of a related question regarding iTunes...

What is the highest quality download that you can obtain from the iTunes store. I don't believe that they offer downloads in Apple Lossless, is that correct? If so, how high up the chain can you go?

Thanks again!

Cwlondon, there is no such thing as a tagged wav file. There are various programs that can manage wav files and maintain a database of the same information that a tag usually contains, but the problem is if anything gets corrupted you can lose the tag info for all of your wav files at once, and this information won't get passed along if you choose another file manager.

Since the compresed formats all maintain the tag information as part of the music file, if one file gets corrupted it doesn't affect any of the others. I went with iTunes and Apple lossles because:

1. it does maintain the tags
2. IMHO the iTunes interface is the best
3. I can't hear a difference between it and wav
4. I can always convert them back to a bit perfect wav
5. I can't imagine trying to maintain and configure something as convoluted as EAC and foobar
6. It does save some space but if I thought I could get better sound I would use something else
7. I've got a lot of files and very seldom get a pop or a click using iTunes with error correction