Lossless for Apple TV, AAC for iPhone - how to manage?

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Level 4

2,239 points

Lossless for Apple TV, AAC for iPhone - how to manage?

I have the ongoing dilemma of how best to manage having my imported CD's in Apple Lossless format to use in the highest possible quality on my Mac, Apple TV and iPod Classic, yet also keeping AAC versions for my iPhone.

It seems that when Apple introduced HD TV shows they provided both versions - I presume iTunes recognises them as being the same item, and uses the appropriate version to sync.

I gather that the iPod Shuffle encodes a low quality version 'on-the-fly' but I presume this would be too slow for the 10GB or so to put on the iPhone.

Currently I have made 224kbps AAC copies and have 2 sets of playlists - one that includes iTunes Purchased music and AAC 224kbps and another that excludes AAC 224kbps (I chose 224kbps AAC because it's fairly good quality, but is an uncommon bit-rate, so I can selectively exclude these songs without fear of excluding non-duplicate songs). The problem with this solution is that if, for example, I browse by Artist or by Album on the Apple TV it shows me both versions (and worse still, I cannot tell which is the higher quality version).

Does anyone have a good solution to this problem?

Mac Pro 2.8Ghz 8-core / MBP Unibody 2.4Ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.6), 8GB RAM, GeForce 8800GT / 2GB RAM

Posted on Jan 14, 2009 1:46 PM

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Answer 1

varjak paw

Level 10

170,200 points

Jan 14, 2009 2:20 PM in response to bilbo_baggins

I don't know if it's a "good" solution, but one approach is to keep two separate iTunes libraries, one for your Lossless tracks (which I presume you'd sync/stream to the Apple TV) and one for the AAC tracks for your iPhone. You can create a new library and, once created, switch between them as needed by holding down the Option key while launching iTunes. Sorting your library by the Bit Rate column should make it fairly easy to separate out the tracks which you can then import into the second library.

For future CD importing Max (freeware) can import CDs and create multiple versions at once which makes it easier to keep two libraries for different versions of your tracks.

Hope this helps.

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