Can I ditch Itunes, please?

April 4, 2006 4:37 AM

Is there a batch process that take a bunch of itunes-ripped stuff and convert it to mp3, and is there a reliable linux itunes replacement? And what are the gotchas I ought to be looking out for here?

I expect I might have to give up my work's laptop soon. So I need to be organised about my music. I'm going to get an external hard drive and use this as a backup and a transfer device, to whatever machine I end up using next - which I hope will be linux only.

Current state: about half my songs are itunes-ripped on one partition, stored wherever itunes puts things by default; about half purchased or gnu-ripped mp3s on another partition.

posted by handee to computers & internet (13 comments total)

What did iTunes rip it to if not MP3?
posted by neustile at 5:09 AM on April 4, 2006

I think the default iTunes rip format is AAC, is it not? Yup, just checked my iTunes install. AAC 128 kbit... Yuck. Converting from 128 kbit AAC to mp3 will result in music that sounds... not good. To put it mildly. If you still have the original cd's, you're better off ripping them to mp3 directly.
posted by antifuse at 5:28 AM on April 4, 2006

In iTunes, go to Preferences > Advanced and set Importing to use MP3s.

Select all the music you want to convert and select "Convert to MP3" from the Advanced menu.

You'll now have two copies of every song. Sort the Library by Date Added and delete all the originals.
posted by cillit bang at 5:32 AM on April 4, 2006

I use gtkpod as my iTunes replacement and Juice for subscribing to and downloading podcasts.

gtkpod is perfectly fine, although the interface may take some adjusting. Compared to iTunes it's a little clunky but it's not overly complicated and actually has a few cool options. You won't have access to the iTunes music store, obviously.

There may be other options but gtkpod seems to be the furthest along in development.
posted by melt away at 5:44 AM on April 4, 2006

amaroK is my favorite Linux music organizer/player/jukebox. It has a nice tree-based layout that can be organized by Genre/Artist/Album or Artist/Album, just like iTunes, supports automatic album cover retrieval from Amazon, has MusicBrainz built-in, gapless playback, intelligent shuffle that gets data from Last.fm's recommended tracks, etc. It rules. The 1.4 beta versions also work just fine with AAC, so you won't have to re-convert all of your music. The development is fast and furious so new features and refinements are coming all the time.
posted by zsazsa at 5:45 AM on April 4, 2006

If you have the time and energy to do it,and if your speakers are decent, you might prefer re-ripping. iTunes' AAC compression is pretty good, but as antifuse is saying, converting from one lossy format to another usually sounds like crap. And iTunes' native MP3 compression is downright bad; it does NOT sound good. So your whole library, from a Linux perspective, is at least somewhat suboptimal.

If the time involved isn't ruinous, you'd probably end up with a better collection if you re-ripped, and compressed using LAME. (there are plugins available to run it from iTunes). LAME doesn't run fast on the Mac, unfortunately... it's screaming quick on PCs, but on the G4, it's glacial. However, you'll get absolutely the best-quality compression in the MP3 format. The --preset-standard setting uses VBR (variable bitrate), averages about 160Kbits/second, and sounds fantastic. Some songs encode a little higher, some al little lower... with VBR, LAME uses as many bits as it needs to preserve a certain degree of audio fidelity. The files are a little bigger, but sound MUCH better.

If you run it on the Mac, it'll take at least an hour to compress each CD, although I think you can batch up a bunch of stuff and just leave it running. If you wait, and do it with Linux, it should take no more than five minutes compression time per CD. (it is A LOT faster on Intel.)

If you have the space, ripping losslessly might be a good idea. I'm pretty sure Linux has decoders for Apple Lossless, which seems to be a pretty good format.. and it's all handled natively by iTunes, so you don't have to do much work to get it going. FLAC is another good format.... more generally compatible, but you'll have to find an iTunes plugin to make it work.

If you rip losslessly, and get your tags right, you should never again need to rip... at most you'll go through a conversion process to downsample to the Format Du Jour, should you buy a portable music player. Or, you might move to another lossless format. (You can do that as many times as you like, because you're not throwing away any data, unlike AAC and MP3.)

Just some stuff to think about. If you have crummy speakers or bad ears, you may be just fine converting your AACs over to MP3.
posted by Malor at 5:53 AM on April 4, 2006

Hymn might help you out. As well as doing batch process conversion to MP3 etc, you can also strip out the DRM on music that you have brought.
posted by Hartster at 6:32 AM on April 4, 2006

Most current Linux music players should have no trouble with unprotected AAC files. If you're happy with the current level of quality, don't bother converting them. (And if you're not, you'll need to re-rip -- converting them to MP3 at a higher bitrate won't improve the quality.)
posted by Acetylene at 6:37 AM on April 4, 2006

I'm with zsazsa-- once you get yourself de-applefied, use amarok. It rocks the house.
posted by mcstayinskool at 6:39 AM on April 4, 2006

Does amarok sync with an ipod? I thought that was the point of the question regarding an iTunes replacement. If not - then let me unsuggest gtkpod as it wouldn't be my first choice in an audio player for Linux.
posted by melt away at 6:48 AM on April 4, 2006

amaroK does sync with an iPod; the new versions use libgpod, the library gtkpod is built on.
posted by zsazsa at 7:36 AM on April 4, 2006

Just wanted to add my vote for amarok. It's great and still under enthusiastic development, which is always reassuring.
posted by primer_dimer at 7:57 AM on April 4, 2006

Oh yeah, I somehow missed that when looking at the features page. Much nicer looking that gtkpod.
posted by melt away at 8:13 AM on April 4, 2006