Another thing that would be nice would be native AAC encoding support.
When I set up an external encoder like QAAC, there are no tags in the converted files.
Bit-depth has to be set to 24-bit manually. "Automatic" bit-depth just matches the bit-depth of the source file when converting. It should be changing to 24-bit when applying a negative correction for volume leveling.
And manual conversion is still applying Volume Leveling on a per-track basis rather than applying album leveling. That's not limited to handheld sync.
So the process of getting tracks out of JRiver and onto my device is:
- Manually convert tracks to 24-bit ALAC
- Import ALAC files to iTunes
- Convert from ALAC to 320K VBR AAC in iTunes
- Delete the ALAC files
- Sync those converted AAC tracks across
The iTunes AAC encoder is not multi-threaded and iTunes only tries to convert a single track at a time which makes this a very slow process.
Being able to encode the files directly to AAC with tags intact would save a lot of time.