iTunes duplicates

Albo · 13 Mar 2010 at 16:34

OK, bear with me on this one.

My mate has ripped his entire CD collection....in WMA format. As you know iTunes doesn't like WMA format.

iTunes converted MOST of his library, into the larger AAC format, before he realised what what happening to his HDD space (he only has a 70gig drive) and stopped the conversion...

On top of this his iTunes purchases where purchased in AAC.

So...

Now he has SOME of his music duplicated. SOME in just AAC, SOME in just WMA and SOME in both WMA AND AAC.

A mess I know.

I have changed iTunes to convert music into MP3 now so when it does convert, the files will at least be smaller, but what I want to know is what you think the best way of sorting this mess out so that we'd idealy be left just onw copy of everything, and it would be in MP3.

Phew

Albo · 13 Mar 2010 at 16:42

BTW, I have all the music backup up. My idea was to delete the entire music Lib, make sure iTunes is set to convert to mp3, then add the entire library from backup, let it convert and finally do a *.wma search al delete it all.

Obviously this will only work if he has enough HDD space

Azuse05 · 13 Mar 2010 at 17:31

Umm, aac has better sound quality than mp3 at the same bitrate, or the same as mp3 at a lower bitrate. Put simply it produces a better sound while being more efficient which is why apple and sony use it by default especially on hand-held devices where they want to save space.

If the mp3 files are bigger that's a problem with the settings not the files. Delte the lot and start again

Mattus · 13 Mar 2010 at 18:38

Indeed. AAC isn't 'bigger' or 'smaller' than MP3 - the size of the file depends on the bitrate you've set. AAC is more efficient than MP3 so 160kbps should be high enough for most users. That said, MP3's still more compatible.

As for arranging the files - yeah, just delete and import again from backup.