I am currently in the process of re-ripping my CD's onto a external hard drive which I want to use with either a couple of Slim Devices Sqeeze box 2's, or Roku Soundbridge M1000's.

I am using EAC and iTunes encode (thanks Otto for such a great programme) to produce Apple lossless files, and then managing the database with iTunes 4.9

Whilst I want the music at the highest quality for the house, I would also like to be able to carry music with me on my 20 gig iPod, but with the new size of files, am limited to only being able to store and carry a small percentage of my total music collection.

Currently, I am re-ripping the CD's at a lower (224 kbs) bit rate using iTunes, and then I have two copies in iTunes, which I then separate using smart playlists, filtering songs by bit rate.

Is there an easier way to get more music onto my iPod without having to rip each CD twice at different bit rates because with several hundred CD's to do, it's becoming a bit of a pain.

Any advice would be welcomed

Many thanks

Steve

If you are on Windows You can use foobar2000 to convert from apple lossless to something other (mp3)

Can't you just convert the files within iTunes? On the mac, you can and end up with two verisions of the same file.

I believe you can. Right click & Covert to AAC i think is how you do it.
then you can do your smart playlist stuff to sort/manage/play

Before I started using foobar's ipod componet, I used itunes to convert files to lower bitrate. It works well enough.

I have seen the option to convert the files to a different bit rate, but I was worried that converting them would do just that - change the file type to a lower bit rate, losing the larger file at the same time.

Does it actually create a copy of the file?

Thanks for the replies

Steve

Well I guess you could have tried just one file to find out. Indeed it does create a copy of the file.

Yes, the iTunes Convert functionality leaves the original there and just creates a new file from it using the current encoding settings.