Help: Managing Apple Music Files


What is the best practices for the following scenario:

I have backed up my lossless Apple music files from a dedicated external 1GB Hard Drive (dedicated HD) to another 1GB HD (backup HD).

I now want to import music to my laptop PC from the back up HD but want to compress the files (to 256 or 320kbps AAC??).

What compression do you think I should use? These files will be used to import music to my Iphone and other Ipods since I use my laptop to manage my Iphone syncs. I have around 600 GB of losslees music on my HD's but only want to use 100 gigs or less on my laptop and will filter out about one fourth of these files in the transfer (600GB minus 150GB= 450GB to compress and transfer). I will also listen to these files on my laptop while traveling etc...

What is the best way to do this? I was told that I would need to compress these files while still on the the back up HD and then import the compressed files to my laptop. Then erase the compressed files and go back and back up the loss less files from the dedicated HD.

By the way, I am using Carbon Copy Cloner to manage back ups and Mac Drive 8 to enable the PC laptop to manage the MAC formatting of my hard drives… are these the best software for these tasks?

Thanks, Doug
128x128lokie
Loki - OK 450GB of uncompressed music. All I'm saying is to compress it on the MAC pointing ITunes output to Laptop's directory. You need to make laptop visible to MAC allowing particular directory to be shared - so that MAC can write to it. If you connect them with Ethernet cable be sure that it is the right one (not a patch cable) since receive and transmit lines have to be crossed.

Hard Disks, as I understand it, unless both have FAT32 (a really bad format) MAC's external disk has MAC Extended format while your PC laptop has NTFS. Both are nice (since journaled) but AFAIK PC cannot read MAC drive directly (but there are applications for that like MACDrive8)
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To manage your Apple Music files, you can consider using Apple Music Converter, which is an audio converter specially designed for Apple Music. It can help you save Apple Music in lossless format and you can transfer the converted Apple Music songs to iTunes Match or iTunes Library.
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