iTunes convert to AAC WITHOUT losing playlists??

R

roninsmurf

Registered
hiya. i want to convert all my music form MPEG to AAC -- but WITHOUT LOSING my playlists -- the order of the songs etc.
Seems impossible.
I have chucked all my old cds, so i can't "replace original" which is a trick I read about.

The way it's been so far, i can't just go into my library and highlight all the music wiht MPEG and just alt click and convert em to AAC.
unfortunatley i have over 100 playlists, so losing that would be time consuming.
it seems whenever i do convert songs, i then have to delete the old MPEGs and thereby lose the song order in any playlists with the original mpeg.

say it ain't so!
if this is the way it has to be, i'm loooking at a lot of work -- i guess going into every playlist, converting each batch and then manually getting the order back to where it was...
thanks to any who can help. i'm macbok pro. 10.4.11 itunes 8.02
 
Why _would_ you want to convert lossy MP3 to lossy AAC? The only thing you gain from it is a quality loss! I can't think of ANY reason why converting here would give you anything...
 
Gotta agree with fryke here -- going from MP3 to AAC is like taking a cassette tape, then dubbing that onto another cassette tape. Or like taking a JPEG and saving it as a JPEG again. Each time you do either of those, you lose a little quality.

You're not going to gain anything, and you're going to introduce more distortion and quality loss into the resulting AAC file. Even if you take a 160kbps MP3 file and convert it into a 256kbps AAC file, your file will never sound better than a 160kbps file (and, with enough conversions, it will sound worse). The only thing you're doing there is taking a 160kbps file, which, say, is about 5MB in file size and putting it into a file that's now 8 or 9MB in size but sounds no better.
 
huh -- there seems to be a consensus online that AAC is better quality and less memory drain than mp3. no?

re: backing pu and restoring the playlists -- great! thanks. does that work with new files, tho? if i erase the old "midnight show" song (etc) will it find the new AAC version and suck it into the new/restored playlist??
 
Your playlist saved is whatever it is at that exact moment. No more, no less.

AAC can be better quality, but you have to get that format to start with. Once you get to mp3 you've already lost the top and bottom of the frequency range plus stuff in the middle. Moving to AAC isn't going to increase the quality; once it's lowered you can't raise it again.

I set all my downloads to mp3 because I don't want any AAC file restrictions and I don't notice any degradation in file quality, but that's only because I don't listen to music on anything more hi fi than my headphones and computer speakers.
 
AAC file restrictions? Those DRM issues are only active if you _buy_ DRM´d music afaik.

About compression... A very simple illustration:

On CD, you have very much information. Say your file goes "abcd efef dokl abcd". A compression algorithm might now mess with it when the file is encoded as an MP3 file (i.e. downgraded). The algorithm sees that "abcd" is there twice, so it can, for example, simply save "abcd" once and say that it also comes up at position 2, 3 etc. This would be lossless. Lossy algorithms say "well, this looks almost like "abcef2doklabc". Some information is lost, although it might not be heard by the human ear. However, if you now translate the MP3 to AAC, it _again_ tries to simplify this file. Not only have you ALREADY lost information at the first step, you now lose information _again_. AAC may or may not be better at compressing audio, but going from one lossy file (it already isn´t the full information that once was on CD) to another ends up as a _very_ lossy file. Going directly from CD to AAC is what you´d want to do instead. If you don´t have the original, you can´t do that, of course.
 
yeah- just from doing a lil converting from mp3 to aac i seem to be saving 1/3 in memory (and i need the extra mpegs...)
seems to be no loss in quality....
 
gracias for the compression explanation -- helpful

but: back to the playlist worry:
if i DO convert (suspect tho that may be ;)
how does the computer throw the new AAC versions in an old playlist? i'm guessing it wont and i'll be looking at a lot of annoying work....
 
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