Hello,
my wife has a mac (G4 cube) and a rio MP3 player (small 32MB model can't remember the model number but it doesn't matter). For convenience sake she has ripped our collection of CDs since it is faster and easier to play via iTunes off the hard drive than to use the physical CD each time. She has set up a few playlists of tunes she downloads to the Rio for use while working out at the gym. Here's the problem: Tunes ripped at high quality generate MP3 files of about 4MB each so she can't fit all 11 tracks off most CDs into the RIO. So she rips for the Rio at a lower sample rate to get smaller files. The problem is that these files don't sound as good when played through the Cube so she rips a second time at higher quality to play at home. This has lead to us having two copies of some albums with different sample rates. When we look at this on iTunes we can't tell which is which in the library listing of itunes browser.
Is there a way to seperate the catalog so we have two copies of each song, one for the Rio and one for the Cube? At the moment everything is sorted artist->album->track with two copies of each track in the listing. We could make two playlists per album, one for the Rio and one for the Cube but this seems cumbersome and needs quite a bit of messing about each time a CD is ripped.
How do you handle this problem?