iTunes music for home and on the go?

Personally, I just used iTunes to compress the less, um, significant tunes in my collection. Then I left the stuff I really care about in Apple Lossless.

This got me under 113 GB, which to my memory is about how much an iPod Classic can hold (i.e., 120 GB minus the software, etc.).

Personally I wouldn't listen to compressed files even on my ipod. The ipods are pretty cheap nowdays for 120GB and storage is super cheap. Don't waste your time ripping files to MP3. There is a dullness to the sound that is audible on an ipod plugged into a car stereo and it's just not worth it.

I think you'd have to have another complete copy to reduce the file size, so you'd have to keep your original and then make another copy and reduce the size, then you'd have 2 qualities floating around in your itunes for your home system.

I rip all of my CD's to FLAC (lossless) format onto my Linux machine that is used by Squeezecenter for my Squeezeboxes. I wrote a program that creates MP3 files from the FLAC files in a parallel file tree, and this is run every night to seek out the new FLAC files that don't have MP3 equivalents. I point iTunes at these MP3 files. It took some effort, but it works like a charm now.

Michael

Ripped CDs that I wanted to FLAC and then moved them to iPod 120GB.

Cherry picked songs from iTunes (only high-quality music with 256-Kbps AAC encoding) and then synced to iPod.

If you use a mac, google Doug's scripts. You'll find a little program that compresses losless on the fly for your ipod, but keeps the original ones in AL.