Yes

 

And it's kindly butchering audio quality in the process.
Transcoding sounds terrible at any bitrate.

 

Thanks for this info. I guess I will check that option off from now on.

 

25 *GIGABYTES* of transcoding?? Yes, that would take quite a long time.

 

If you had an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPod Nano, it might make sense to make the most of your limited room. Otherwise I wouldn't do it.

 

A better bet is to selective sync with playlists and smart playlists, rather than trying to squeeze as many songs on as you can on to it.

For instance, my "Best of Grunge" playlist only chooses songs rated over 3 stars, but picks 350 randomly. It's only 2.45 GB, but has a DAY worth of continuous music. I'd absolutely need to recharge/sync before it was done.

 

VBR and CBR, are they an option in the iTunes preference?

 

Yes under "General" and "Import Settings."

 

Thanks! Great tip!

 

I had over 50 gigs of 256 bit music that filled up my iPad so I decided to go the 128bit route and it took my iMac something over 12 hours to do it.

 

The import settings don't affect the transcode when syncing option, that said it only says 128k, nothing about if it's CBR or VBR. VBR would be better quality, but generally takes a little longer to encode (ideally it needs 2+ passes), so I would STRONGLY suspect that the transcode for sync is using CBR. While I agree you do lose *some* quality, personally I really don't generally hear the difference in most iphone/ipad usage scenarios (the built in speakers are not good enough quality, and neither are the headphones most people use... ie apple's earbuds), if you are an audiophile who has bothered to purchase a good pair of earphones then I can see why you might not want to transcode, for practically everyone else I think it's a great option to have. And yes I already selectively sync only certain playlists and smart playlists, but the reality is my iphone only hase enough storage capacity to get around 10% of my itunes library onto it without transcoding, with that nearly doubles... which is a big improvement in my books...

To the original post, yes it's a pain in the ass how long it takes to transcode, but I'm hoping for an upgrading iMac sometime soon that might make this a little less time consuming, speaking of which, does anyone know if iTunes is multithreaded, transcoding multiple songs for syncing would be an ideal use for say a quad-core i7, though from my limited use, it doesn't really seem like it is to me... (hard to tell what it might be doing in the background, but in terms of what it reports it's doing it seems to go one song at a time on my core2duo imac...

 

yes . I also did about 25gigs

too a long time but i freed up about half of the room on my 32gb ipod touch

sooo worth the slightly inferior audio quality

 

Converting to 128kbps is absolutely destroying the quality. 192kbps is the proven lowest you should go before you hear noticeable differences.

Though everyones ear is different. But I'd stick with above 192 kbps. I convert to lossless whenever possible.

 

Converting to 128kbps is absolutely destroying the quality. 192kbps is the proven lowest you should go before you hear noticeable differences.

Depends on where and how you listen to them. In a car or on a bus it likely doesn't matter. For mobile music, 128Kbps is good enough. For home listening, I use 256Kbps. At home though, I have cheap storage.