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castlema

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 21, 2003
137
101
I have been trying to convert the songs I put on my iPod Touch to 128 since iTunes 9.1 came out without success. Everytime I try the process gets stopped and I get a message telling me that the file cannot be read or written. Each time this happens it is a different song. Has this happened to anyone else? Any guesses as to whether it is a problem with iTunes, my iPod or with the files themselves?
 

0098386

Suspended
Jan 18, 2005
21,574
2,908
I'm having this problem too.

Last night I thought I'd go for a long walk whilst it resynced all my music with the 128kbps AAC option enabled. I got back and it had thrown an error at me and only synced 6000/8000 songs. I clicked Sync again and it had added another chunk of 1000 songs, now there's about 500 left but it just throws an error up every time. "Can't convert X song, error -50".

For now I've disabled the auto convert option until they fix it.

Funny thing is I've had this option enabled on my iPod Shuffle since I bought it back in 2006/2007 and its never had a problem.
 

itickings

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2007
947
185
I tried it on my iPod 30GB (G5) to see how much space I't save and to evaluate the sound quality with my earphones.

It stopped after exactly 2000 songs, then wouldn't convert anything anymore... Arrival of iTunes 9.1.1 soon wouldn't surprise me at all.
 

0098386

Suspended
Jan 18, 2005
21,574
2,908
Arrival of iTunes 9.1.1 soon wouldn't surprise me at all.

I hope so. It almost halved the amount of space music took up on my iPod so I'm keeping it enabled once it's fixed.

It also analysed the gapless playback every time I tried to sync it.
 

GermanSuplex

macrumors 68000
Aug 26, 2009
1,532
29,967
I wish this option was customizable... I really don't care about converting mp3 or iTunes Plus tracks to AAC on the fly, but I would like to be able to get rid of my lossy files for albums which I have Apple Lossless tracks of. If you could customize it to only convert Apple Lossless tracks to 128kpbs AAC, that would be great... and much quicker, since it wouldn't re-encode ALL of my music (since pretty much all of my music is above 128kbps).
 

castlema

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 21, 2003
137
101
No solution here, but it would be helpful to have a list of the type of files that are throwing errors. Maybe a pattern will develop...

I have not been able to discern a pattern to the problem. Each time I tried to do this the program would quit at a different song so it does not seem to matter whether it is an AAC or an MP3 file nor does the original bitrate seem to matter.
 

itickings

macrumors 6502a
Apr 14, 2007
947
185
Are you all using Windows?

Thanks, but Snow Leopard here.

I forgot to mention it earlier, but I did try to restore the iPod as well. Still flaky.

No biggie at the moment though. It managed to sync enough songs to start evaluation of the earphones with the converted lossy->lossy tracks to see if 128kbps AAC is a good idea or not to begin with.
 

GermanSuplex

macrumors 68000
Aug 26, 2009
1,532
29,967
I ran into the same issue on Windows 7... unprotected, 192kbps mp3 songs would turn up the -50 error. No clue why... this happened with random tracks, and converting within iTunes is slow, roughly half the speed of dBpowerAMP. I chucked the idea.

I would love to get rid of my duplicates, but I'll have to wait until this feature works better and is customizable.
 

duncyboy

macrumors 6502a
Feb 5, 2008
724
1
2nd Gen iPod Touch, latest firmware and my Mac is running Snow Leopard- iTunes and SL bang up to date. I didn't have the error message when trying out the 128 kbps AAC but I did have problems syncing.

First time went fine, converted/synced all my tunes. Noticed that some of the tracks' lyrics didn't work on my iPod Touch but overall not that bothered. However, whenever I'd reconnect the Touch it would re-sync or 'update' tracks that I'd recently played in iTunes since my last sync, as if it had to re-sync to update the play count or something?

It would then run 'Determining Gapless Playback...' for every track every time it connected. AND THEN :)p) the message 'Sync Complete' would come up, the iPod screen would return to normal and it would reconnect to iTunes and re-sync again on its own. Tried restoring and re-syncing- no joy.

On the offchance it'd work I tried unchecking the 128 AAC box to just put my standard mp3's back on- touch wood, it's worked fine.

I found the sound quality definitely good enough for me on 128 AAC but I'll wait until Apple's ironed out the bugs in this one.
 

pigubaoza

macrumors newbie
Jun 9, 2008
2
0
hey guys. im experiencing the same problem with my iPod touch 2nd gen.
had the problem even before iOS4, but im on iOS4 now, same problem.
anyone still facing the same problem or have found ways to solve this?

running vista btw.

thanks! :)
 
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