[jlgrandam]

I have a substantial iTunes library (100gigs) that I want to backup to an external HD. I can't seem to find any good, FREE file compression utilities to help me save some space by compressing the library first. Any advice?

[chabig]

Music won't compress very much. I think trying to compress 100GB is a waste of time. Just buy a larger hard drive.

However, you don't need compression software. It's already built in to the Finder. Apple calls it "archive" and it zips files right up.

[jlgrandam]

cool, thanks for the advice.

[peeb]

What format are they in? Chabig is right that things like AAC and MP3 are already highly compressed - trying to compress them further is a waste of time.

[mduell]

I'll agree with what the others have said about compressing music, and add that storage is cheap; a 160GB external drive is less than $60 and 200GB is less than $70.

[rehoot]

I searched for audio compression tools last month because I have some 24 bit files that are very big.

Here is a good overview:

Lossless comparison - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

You probably want lossless format unless you aren't too picky about the sound quality, in which case you could convert everything to MP3 files one by one and select the appropriate quality setting to change the file size. Be careful when you do this. I tested some conversions of complex sounds (nature sounds) and after a couple conversions the files were basically useless.

If you used Apple Lossless when you imported into iTunes, you shouldn't need to do anything else to compress your files. If you copied .mp3 files, leave them alone because recoding causes problems.

[peeb]

Oh. If you can possibly avoid transcoding, don't do it. Re-ripping from CD is a better approach.