Submission details
Allow iTunes to do on-the-fly transcoding during syncs.
This applies primarily to those with a large library of lossless (ALAC) music.
As it is Apple provides to easy way for users to automatically transcode these files to a more reasonable format for portable (iPod, iPhone) use.
How most media managers handle this (Media Monkey, Windows Media Player, JRiver Media Center, etc) is by allowing the user to define rules for what formats should be delivered to each player. These rules may say for example, transcode my ALAC files to 192kbps VBR AAC. Most implementations of such features are intelligent in the way transcoding occurs... IE: If only metadata has changed, the metadata is updated instead of re-transcoding the file. Some take things even further by implementing a cache of lossy files which can eliminate the potentially lengthy sync times when having to transcode many files.
The real kicker here is is that such basic functionality already exists in iTunes for the iPod shuffle. Apple simple doesn't allow us to use it with other devices.
Medium
Low
Not fixed
Discussion (5 comments)
I actually think you should be able to transcode from whatever format you have your music stored in, into whatever format you'd like your music on your iPhone/iPod as - and you should be able to choose those transcoding options on a per-device basis.
It's already built into iTunes - but you can only do it for iPod Shuffles.
I don't understand why this doesn't gain much more popularity. I know a lot of persons who have HUGE and I mean HUGE CD album collections. They have of course ripped all that stuff into Apple Lossless because they don't wanna settle with less quality than on the CD.
However when it comes to iPods especially the flash memory based ones, like the iPhone, the amount of albums you can put on them is tiny.
This option would allow to automatically transcode songs to MP3 or AAC while syncing to the iPod of your choice without any headaches. It's a very important feature in my opinion. It would allow you to store 10 times more stuff that way.
Right now I have 24 albums on my iPhone. I could then have 240 albums. WOW.
Please vote this up. This is a very important feature for a lot of people.
Yes please
I have my full iTunes library in Apple loseless (because apple don't support .flac). This is shared out to SlimServer for my whole house audio system. I want the best quality source here but DONT want to be carrying those big files around in my iPhone.
This is such an obvious feature. Come on Apple!
According to rumors this might be fixed in iTunes 9.1 which is due for release until next Saturday (also according to rumors)
Let's hope it's true :)
Yes this is fixed in 9.1 - even if a bit more configurability would be nice :)
kelchm wrote on February 22, 2009, 8:15pm
Changed problem description.