I'm on the market for an iPod, my first portable player since the walkman. I want to take my 10K library onto my boat this summer, and I'm installing a stereo in my boat with aux in for this purpose. My library is all .ape ripped from my CDs. (BTW I love MC and the whole secure rip - lossless compress - ASIO playback chain. To my ears the quality beats playing the original CD on my Home Theater rig. Thanks J River!)
With the whole Apple proprietary format thing it seems logical that iTunes will always be a bit ahead of MC in terms of file type support. Is that a fair statement? Assuming so, it seems that maybe the easiest thing is to use iTunes to sync the iPod. So here are my iTunes/iPod newbie questions:
1) I understand MC can sync to a virtual device, say a separate drive on my network, correct?
2) If I convert to .mp3 during the sync using alt extreme (MC uses LAME, right?) then will iTunes be able to import this .mp3 version of my library?
3) Will the tags make it all the way through this chain and into the iPod so that I can create playlists using genre, album, artist, etc.? I also have ratings stored in my .ape tags - will those make it?
Sorry for newbie questions, hopefully this will be easy for someone to answer.
Thanks.