Here is my situation: I've got lots of CDs, I have a huge amount of HD storage space, and I've also got an iPod mini. I'd like to rip most of my CDs to my HD via iTunes and Apple Lossless Encoder... the only problem that I then have is putting ALE files on my iPod mini...kinda defeats the whole idea of "mini" Is there a way to take a ALE file, and encode it to a 192k AAC file w/o deleting the original ALE file? Also for file management (Library).. I believe I would have two copies of each track that has been AAC compressed. I would have "Track 1" (ALE) and "Track 1" (AAC). I could then make two smart playlists to seperate the ALE files from the AAC ones, but what would be best?

Or should I just rip and encode everything @ 192kbps AAC and not worry about the ALE format?

thoughts? suggestions? recommendations?

/thanks!

You didn't state whether you used a Mac or Lin/Win type pc.

I'm a firm believer in rip once, transcode often. If you only have to touch your cds once, then they can be put away in an environment for long term storage. I realize this is the AAC forum so my suggestions below are just what I've found to be best practices in my case.

If using a PC, what I would (IMO), would be to rip the entire library to Flac (No DRM, Many different libraries on different platforms, etc.) and then use a transcoding library to move your tunes to the iPod.

I don't want to start any kind of religious codec wars, but Flac seems to be the best starting point for archiving a library that I've found. And Using Foobar2000 to transcode my flac libraries to mp3, ogg, aac, and others has been trivial. So far I've processed 886 CDs this way, and have no complaints.

If your interested, you can take a look at my v0.0.1 EAC Guide that I've just started.

Best of luck,
Cal.

I'm sorry I forgot to add that I am a Mac user... no PCs here.

edit: transcoding is taking a"lossless" file and encoding it to MP3, AAC, etc.? It basically means you don't have to re-rip your music to encode to MP3, AAC - right?

Don't bother with FLAC, it's nice but for your uses ALAC (or ALE) makes much more sense. Rip and tag everything to Apple Lossless, then go into the importing preferences and change it from Lossless to AAC 128 (AAC 128 should be fine for most uses, most people don't hear the different from the CD. Only on boards like these where the freaks hang out do you find people who can (or think they can in a lot of cases)), anyway, once you've set it to AAC 128, you should be able to select tracks in your Library and choose "Convert Selection to AAC" from the Advanced menu. The original lossless file will remain. Then make the appropriate playlists and you'll be set.

Awesome! Thanks. I just don't want to rip 200+ CDs and in a year or two re-rip everything again to another format... I like the idea of ripping once and transcoding later!

I am a Mac user as well and my encoding scheme now works like this:

1. Rip the CD using CDDA2WAV with paranoia turned on.
2. Encode tracks to both Flac and MP3 (using lame --preset standard).
3. Import the MP3s into iTunes for playback. Flacs can be played with VLC, if needed.

(Note that items one and two are performed by a shell script.)

While Apple Lossless is cool, I prefer to use Flac for archiving because it has wider OS support than Quicktime/iTunes does. And for me, Lame with "--preset standard" is pretty much transparent.