[l008com]

I've got this iTunes library I'm working with, it has ~26,000 songs. About half of them are lossless, and about half of them are aac/mp3. So I'm trying to compress the 13,000 lossless songs to aac. Problem is, iTunes freaks out every time I try to drag 13000 songs. I can select them ok but that's it. Anyone know any tricks for working with large libraries like this? Ultimately, I need to get all these songs into a folder in the finders, so I can drop it into Max and let it compress all night. 26,000 doesn't seem like it's a hell of a lot of music, and it seems to bring iTunes to it's knees. Thats wicked retarded.

[Spheric Harlot]

Why not let iTunes convert?

[steve626]

If each mp3 is 5 MB in size, you're asking iTunes to work with ~ 130 GB worth of songs at once. I doubt your machine has that much memory, and so your computer will be looking for a lot of disk paging space to handle this.

Why don't you try 100 songs at first. If that works, then try 500. Then try 1000. If it can handle 1000 songs at once, then just do that 26 times and you'd be done. Working with 1000 songs is like ~ 5 GB, which is a lot but probably manageable. I don't know how iTunes manages its tasks and memory internally, but giving it 130 GB of stuff to handle at once might be a mistake.

[l008com]

iTunes doesn't load songs into RAM unless you are playing them. The 13,000 songs i'm trying to drag to a folder, are about 400 GB, much more than 130 GB. But like I said, it doesn' thave to load them into memory, it just has to initiate a finder copy of the files, from the music folder, to the folder I'm dragging them into.

Also I wanted to use Max to to the converting because it will use all 4 processors in my Mac Pro at once, so it should do the job much quicker. And it can high quality encodes than iTunes does. That said, iTunes conversions should suffice, and if I can't find a way to get these songs into Max, that will have to do.

[ghporter]

Why are you manipulating this huge number of songs from within iTunes instead of using Finder? Your songs are already in folders, you just need to get at them more effectively. I agree with Spheric Harlot that having iTunes convert your songs would be more effective and easier than using a third-party app.

And I think manipulating 13,000 files at a time, even if it's just creating aliases and messing with them, is way too much work to expect your Mac to do all at once. Handling them on an artist-by-artist basis would be easier on the machine, and would allow you to convert copies of the songs, verify that they're correct, and then delete the lossless versions. I consider this a safer method anyway.

[Spheric Harlot]

The other question is, of course, why not leave them as lossless?

Disk space is cheap.

[cgc]

I've converted all my songs using iTunes, then sort them by Kind and delete the unneeded version. Simple and built into iTunes.

[l008com]

As far as "doing it in the finder", how would I navigate through the hundreds of folders, selecting 13000 songs out of 26000?

But that said, my itunes seems to have completely lost the ability to do any dragging and dropping from the library at this point, so I gave up and just let iTunes do it. And big suprise, it's doing one song at a time instead of 4 like Max does.