Create New itunes Library for MP3 only files?

How about this? Convert the songs you want into MP3 or AAC (preferably without iTunes) and save them in a meaningful folder structure on that 20GB partition. Then open iTunes, set its preferences so that it does not copy files when files are imported. Then start importing your AAC/MP3 files.

Or

Pile them all into iTunes and create a Smart Playlist with "Song Type" set to MP3. You can then search/browse this list to make playlists. Adding the MP3s to your backup routine should not significantly add to the overall backup size.

Library Manager

Back when I did the same thing you are doing, I used something called iTunes Library Manager from Doug's Applescripts for iTunes. The script worked fine, but it got to be a big hassle. I was always missing tracks from one library or another. Then when I got my shuffle, it didn't matter because the shuffle has automatic downsampling. Regardless, here is a link for an X version of the script. http://www.dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/ituneslibrarymanager.php

I know that I am not the only person who wishes Apple would put the downsampling feature on all of the iPods.

rick6502 said:

... Then when I got my shuffle, it didn't matter because the shuffle has automatic downsampling.

I know that I am not the only person who wishes Apple would put the downsampling feature on all of the iPods.

Click to expand...

What do you mean by downsampling? When you upload your playlist with AIFF or ALAC songs to Shuttle, does it automatically convert them into AAC before saving them?

theBB said:

What do you mean by downsampling? When you upload your playlist with AIFF or ALAC songs to Shuttle, does it automatically convert them into AAC before saving them?

Click to expand...

I don't know what it converts them into, but it does downsample them to a lower sampling frequency. Isn't that a nice feature?

Nice feature.

theBB said:

What do you mean by downsampling? When you upload your playlist with AIFF or ALAC songs to Shuttle, does it automatically convert them into AAC before saving them?

Click to expand...

I don't know what it converts them into, but it does downsample them to a lower sampling frequency. Isn't that a nice feature?

MP3s for CD

I see that you want to put the MP3s on a CD for your car. What I do now, is it use another apple script called "Covert and Export." I select my tracks, run the script, then save the files in a folder. I then take those files and burn an mp3 CD using toast. Since an MP3 CD is just a kind of data CD, I image you could use the Finder also, but I haven't tried that myself.

Greenjeens said:

Thanks, I'm finding it difficult to figure out the intermediate required actions to carry out your concept. Seems a bit beyond my skill level.
Any detailed instructions somewhere? If not, it's probably not worth the effort trying to explain in detail.
I don't get the part about converting without itunes? What other tool would I use to convert all my libray to MP3? An example for a meaningful folder structure?

Click to expand...

I found this tool through wikipedia:

http://sbooth.org/Max/

It seems like it can rip your CDs easily and convert existing files into other formats. It looked pretty easy to use with a nice Mac looking interface. It actually does FLAC as well, if you don't want to be stuck with Apple's proprietary lossless format.

What I meant by a meaningful folder structure was not anything complicated. Instead of dumping all of the MP3's into one or two folders, you can do something like:

artist_name/album_name/song1.mp3 etc.

However, I don't how to automate this process for your whole library. If you play around with Max, it may have some way of doing it. If you are planning to use these MP3 files just for your iPod, iTunes can sort them according to artist etc easily, so even if you dump all of them into a single folder and tell iTunes to import them it would not end of the world. I just like clean folder structures that's all.

I gotta be honest, I liked MacSawdust's "smart playlist" idea quite a bit. Why didn't I think of that?

rick6502 said:

I see that you want to put the MP3s on a CD for your car. What I do now, is it use another apple script called "Covert and Export." I select my tracks, run the script, then save the files in a folder. I then take those files and burn an mp3 CD using toast. Since an MP3 CD is just a kind of data CD, I image you could use the Finder also, but I haven't tried that myself.

Click to expand...

Can't you just burn an MP3 CD through iTunes by setting "preferences->Advanced->Burning->Disc Format = MP3" ?

Yes, but

theBB said:

Can't you just burn an MP3 CD through iTunes by setting "preferences->Advanced->Burning->Disc Format = MP3" ?

Click to expand...

While that is correct, it doesn't give you a lot of control over organization. For instance, if I want to burn all of my Pink Floyd albums onto a CD. I do what I said in the previous post, and then I place each album into a folder with the name of the album. That way they are grouped by album. To do that with several tracks in iTunes would involve much hand sorting by clicking and dragging and still they wouldn't be in folders. What does folders do? Rather than track 50, my car MP3 says album 5/track 12 (or whatever.) I know it's not much, but it makes me happy. Using iTunes would be fine for just grabbing a bunch of tracks and making a CD, but Toast offers more control over track layout.

I have played with the different scripts, but the easiest way that I have found is just to create a 2nd account called iPod on my Mac. Under that account, I imported all my lossless files in a compressed format. I just update it every so often from the recently added list in my main account.

Set your main account iTunes not to update your iPod, and then set the iPod account iTunes to update the iPod automatically. That way you can leave your iPod charging in the doc, and changing accounts will just update the iPod.

Works for me.