I won't shout flac .. but something to think about: What is the
probability that you will one day lose access to the WMA decoder, which
is proprietary and has no open source implementation (that I know of)?
It is probably small, but how small? Is it small enough to risk the
total loss of all the time you spent ripping?
I agree. I have the same situation: lots of music, some of it in MP3
format, some in FLAC. I want to listen to a mix on my iPod which doesn't
have enough space to hold my entire library in any case, so I'm always
picking and choosing which new albums to add and which to remove to make
room.
So I maintain all my files in a standard artist/album Windows directory
structure outside iTunes. I tell iTunes not to copy in files that are
added -- so when I drag & drop some new MP3s, it just adds them to its
library without making a copy, and pushes them onto my iPod from
whichever Windows folders they may be in when it comes time to sync up.
For FLACs I use a slightly different method: I use Foobar2000 to convert
the FLAC file to a WAV and then trigger a VB script that tells iTunes to
import the WAV with the tags Foobar2000 extracts from the FLAC. So in
this case iTunes does make local copies; the results are AAC versions of
my FLAC files. (I chose AAC because I think it sounds better for a given
bitrate, but MP3 would work the same way.)
Basically I just drag the FLAC files to Foobar2000, select them all,
right-click, choose "Convert", and off it goes. Tags are maintained
automatically.
So iTunes maintains a library of files (the converted FLAC files) and
pointers to files (my original MP3 files) that corresponds to what's on
my iPod at any given time (but that doesn't represent all my music,
since I have way more than the 4GB my iPod Mini can hold).
As far as the Squeezebox goes, I just point it to my music directory and
don't involve iTunes at all. My SB is very happy playing any kind of
music I may have.
If anyone is interested in the VB script and how to set it up for use
with Foobar2000, I can post it. It's not a big deal to set up, and it
means that I can use FLAC files with iTunes almost as transparently as I
can use MP3 files.
(And again, this all works for me because I don't use iTunes to manage
my overall music library, just the music that's my iPod at any given time.)
SBB
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