Recently I’ve been re-ripping my audio discs into Apple Lossless, ever since I discovered I can stream 16bit PCM through the airport express all the way through to my Sony receiver. The cost of doing this is the increased track file size, larger by a factor of 4. That means the amount of music I can sync to a portable device decreases by a factor of four.
So it seems I need to somehow maintain two iTunes libraries, one in a “portable friendly” compressed format, and one for home where the audio and storage resources are much greater. My initial thought is to keep the lossy data on my desktop, since that is where I sync my phone from. I can rip the lossless data to a separate folder and keep it on my home Linux server, which then serves it via an iTunes share by way of mt-daapd Firefly.
I would love to just have the two song encodings in a single library, but maybe keeping them separate makes sense. It means I need to rip all new content twice. Might be time to buy more disk for the server.