new iPod

[spider122]

Don't laugh, but I'm planning on purchasing my first iPod.

I've used dbPoweramp to rip all my cd's in FLAC format on my Windows Home Server and I want to copy all of them to an iPod classic in lossless format if they all fit (or 320kps mp3's if they don't).

So how do I go about doing this? Should I set up iTunes first and point it to my current collection of flacs? Will iTunes give an error when it tries to sync my flac files with my iPod?

Or should I point iTunes to a new location and use music converter to convert my flacs to this new location as ALAC? If I purchase something through iTunes though, then it won't go into my list of FLAC files which is where I access them using my PS3 at home. Although I don't want ALAC in the same directory as the FLACs or my ps3 will show duplicates of all my files.

Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I just want to set it up right the first time and I'm not sure how iTunes works.

Thanks.

[Spoon]

Re: new iPod

iTunes will not read flac, so some form of conversion has to be done (either to ALAC, then iTunes might reconvert to AAC) or you can use dBpoweramp to convert direct to m4a (AAC)

[garym]

Re: new iPod

How do you plan on using your IPOD? Why do you want lossless for the IPOD? Is it your main listening or just for car, etc.

In my case, I simply keep a mirror of all my FLAC files in a different subdirectory and use these for my ipods/iphones/ipads. I make sure my FLAC files are "perfect" in terms of art, tags, etc. Then I can simply point dbpa at my FLAC directory and create an entire mirror directory with mp3 files. I use 192 LAME VBR for my mp3 files. (I can't ABX the difference between a FLAC or WAV and a 160kb mp3 file, and these files are not my archive anyhow.)

For my home music listening, I use a squeezebox system. The Squeezebox reads the directory with the FLACs and itunes reads the directory with the mp3 files. I do this with over 60,000 tracks and it works fine (particularly given that hard disk space is very cheap these days).

[spider122]

Re: new iPod

So you have two separate directories? If you buy something on iTunes, it will go to the directory with your mp3's. Then if your squeezebox is looking in the directory with the flac's, it won't see anything you bought on iTunes. Do you have to sync up anything you bought from iTunes with you flac directory?

Thanks.

[garym]

Re: new iPod

So you have two separate directories? If you buy something on iTunes, it will go to the directory with your mp3's. Then if your squeezebox is looking in the directory with the flac's, it won't see anything you bought on iTunes. Do you have to sync up anything you bought from iTunes with you flac directory?

Thanks.

Well actually, its more complicated than just two directories. Consider the following. I have 3 directories for music:

g:\music\flac\artist\album\tracks....
g:\music\mp3aaconly\artists\album\tracks....
g:\mp3duplicates\artist\album\tracks....

So for Squeezebox, I point it to the music directory of g:\music. this picks up both my flac files and the files that I only have a mp3/aac version of...

For itunes, I tell it that g:\mp3duplicates is my music library. It sees this. Manually, I tell it to "add to library" the folder g:\mp3aaconly.
So when done, itunes has both my mp3/aac only files AND the duplicates of my FLAC files.

If I buy a song from itunes or amazon.com, I put it in the mp3aaconly directory.

There are also ways to do this with directories containing only shortcuts:

g:\squeezemusic
this has shortcuts to the flac and mp3aaconly directories in it

g:\itunesmusic
this has shortcuts to the mp3aaconly and mp3duplicates directories

edit. For songs in my mp3duplicates folder, I also create a field in the tag called "grouping" and for this I enter the value "from flac". This way, in itunes I can easily sort on this and delete all these files from the itunes library. This comes in handy if at some point I choose to create NEW mp3 versions of all my FLAC files. I can do this with dbpa with a couple of mouse clicks and then add the new mp3 files back to my itunes library.

[garym]

Re: new iPod

and to be clear, when I have compilation CDs, I don't put them in artist/album/tracks. Instead I put these in:

g:/....../compilation/album/tracks

[spider122]

Re: new iPod

And I thought this would be simple...

Thanks very much for this information. It's been very helpful as I will set something up very similar.

[garym]

Re: new iPod

And I thought this would be simple...

Thanks very much for this information. It's been very helpful as I will set something up very similar.

It really is simple once you have your directories set up. Then it just becomes standard procedure for you. Have fun!