dBpoweramp, Batch Convert, iTunes

Posted by: Bryce Curdy on 16 January 2018

i ended up in a position where i had a large iTunes library (15 odd years in the making) and a roughly equally large (but only 1 year old) library on my NAS drive.  There was probably about 60% of my music on both with perhaps 20% on iTunes but not my NAS and vive versa.  It's taken a while but I've now copied the missing 20% from iTunes to my NAS needing a fair bit of metadata editing as I went along.  So i now have a NAS library of roughly 21,500 tracks, mostly FLAC but a fair amount of MP3 and a small amount of Hi-Res.

So on Monday morning i used dBpweramp to Batch Convert the entire NAS library to MP3 with a view to creating a brand new iTunes library to put on my 512GB iPod for holiday, car and running use.  I was quite nervous how well it would work.  It took just over 24 hours at the highest quality setting to do the conversion, an hour or two to create the new iTunes library and overnight to sync with my iPod, but do you know what, it's made a bloody good job!  Most of any issues are my tagging errors.

Posted on: 17 January 2018 by ROOG

Good to hear of your experiences with dbpoweramp, BC. I use it to rip CDs to WAV and MP3 as i buy new CDs, but I have never let it loose on my older WAV collections on HDD.

This would open up my collection for use in my car in which I use MP3 rather than WAV.  

Posted on: 17 January 2018 by ChrisSU

I hope you remembered to tell the converter not to delete the originals!

Posted on: 17 January 2018 by Bryce Curdy
ChrisSU posted:

I hope you remembered to tell the converter not to delete the originals!

I was at work when I read this and I admit my heart did skip a bit when I read that!

But I was sure I had and then I remembered I was streaming Radiohead on my Atom when I was playing around with my new iTunes library.

Posted on: 18 January 2018 by Huge

I hope you have at least one backup of all the data on the NAS.

As you've shown you can recreate the iTunes library from the NAS, but as the iTunes data are in a lossy format, you can't do it the other way round.