Convert Higher Bit Rate Songs…
I am writing this post on my original iBook. Yes, I mean clamshell, blueberry, 3GB HD, 300mhz, cd-rom! Apple does not even make iBooks anymore. I run 10.3.9 on this computer, which alone takes up most of my disk space. It usually takes all of five minutes of surfing the web for my cache to fill up and for me to get the “startup disk is full” message, so I am surprised that I have gotten this far.
ibook and matching printer joy, circa 2002
So, why am I here on this iBook? My largest capacity iPod is an 80GB Classic. With the practice of selling songs at a higher bit rate than the original 128 kbps, this iPod has filled up in the last three years pretty quickly. It got to the point where I had 10MB available on this iPod earlier this week. I knew that I would have to do something soon, or I would lose the ability to cart around my entire library. My sister lives in a world of managed playlists, but I could never imagine such a life. One of the attractive beauties of iPod is that I can listen to whatever I want at any given moment, and I actively take advantage of this option. I had a pretty large library when I started out, but iPod capacity has grown with my library over the years. Normally, I would just upgrade, but I have neither the interest nor the funds to go get a new classic iPod 160, especially when i was fine with the 128 kbps files in the first place.
Since iPod shuffles hit the scene, iTunes has had the option to “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod.” I had never used this option until about a week and a half ago. I simply use the auto-fill from a couple of small playlists for my shuffles anyway. So far, each list fits completely on the appropriate shuffle. I wanted to be able to fit more on my first generation iPod nano 4GB, though, so I decided to give the “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC for this iPod” a try.
I started the process on my nano before I went to bed one night, and the computer had not yet finished converting the 300 or so associated songs when I awoke. It took another hour or so to finish the remaining songs. Long story short, the process takes forever.
I have around 14490 songs in my library. 5553 of which are greater than 128 kbps AAC. I started the process on my iPod classic at around 3:30am, and only 270 of those 5553 songs had been converted when I awoke. By my crude calculations, oh, it will take five full days for this process to complete! I am sure that a lot of this has to do with the processing ability of my computer, but this is ridiculous. Of, course, doing other things on the computer just makes the whole process longer, so here I am. I am not using my iMac because it is in desperate need of RAM and spends most of its time unplugged as a result. It looks like I will have to fire it up, though, just to add a “more” tag to this post as there is no button on this screen. Moreover, I cannot switch to html view to manually add a “more” tag on this iBook. Hmm.
In the meantime, my ears are limited to the set of songs that I did convert for my nano and the songs on the shuffles, some of which are the same songs. This music set includes mostly music released in the last four years plus the highest rated songs in my library from any release date. Still, I am already having a perpetual music temper tantrum that will last, oh, about five days.
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