Batch music compressor.

[HappySnail]

I recently bought an creative Zen as it was half the price of the ipod Nano and i'm looking for a simple mp3 compressor as it only has 4Gb of space. I have a lot of music but i'm not looking to lower the quality too much just squeeze a bit more music on there. Some of the songs i have are 9 or 10Mb and i think lowering that to 4 or 5 won't harm the quality too much, but i have no idea about it, i can re-convert the songs in itunes but that takes ages and is difficult to do for every song as some are at different compressions and are different sizes. Anyone got any ideas on software or know how much i could lower the size by without damaging the quality too much?

Cheers.

 

[Blue Velvet]

If you have to do it, at least burn and archive all your current files on DVD or CD first... you'll never get that quality back.

I'd use iTunes because it would keep all your tags and library settings, including artwork. Set your compresssion scheme in iTunes preferences, to maybe 160mp3, if the Zen has problems with AACs. If not, then 128AAC is the absolute lowest and the type of files I'd go with.

Set up a smart playlist to include all files added today that are your chosen bitrate... this may come in handy later.

Then select every track when in list view and Go Menu>Advanced>Convert to mp3 or AAC etc. Then wait till it gets through them all. They should be all in your new playlist. You can then see whether it's compressed them all enough and use that playlist for your Zen. You'll also have the originals as well.

If there's not enough of a space saving, then delete the files added today, then change the settings for more compression, change the smart playlist's settings and repeat.

 

[HappySnail]

Thank you, this is the method i'm using, it works but it takes a while. I just discovered ACC as i was using MP3 on my ipod and that will compress them even at the same bitrate i believe so shave off even more (i think ACC has an even better compression rate than MP3).
I was still wondering if there is a software made for this as it takes a while on itunes and i need to keep checking all of the files.

 

[dolphin842]

You can set up a really simple Automator workflow to speed things up a bit.

First, make sure you have your iTunes encoding settings all set up properly.

Then open Automator and create the workflow shown in the picture. Then go to File-->Save as Plugin and choose Finder plug-in. Now whenever you have files on your hard drive that you want to convert, just select them, right click and go to More->Automator->[name of workflow], and off it goes encoding. This process will only put the lower-bitrate ones in iTunes and keep the higher bit-rate ones wherever they are on the hard drive.