Apple Finally Implements a Years Old Feature Request

I don’t particularly like itunes but I use it because I don’t have any practical alternative. Getting things onto my iphone requires it and I haven’t used anything music management that I’ve liked better. Over the years, I’ve learned to limit my expectations and this has kept me from getting too annoyed. My biggest gripe with itunes is metadata management and codec support. Neither of those has changed but one itunes feature previously limited to the ipod shuffle has finally been added to other ipods including the iphone and presumably the ipad. That is the ability to downconvert high resolution music on the fly during sync to 128k bps aac.

This means I can finally stop keeping two itunes libraries, one with apple lossless for the home theater system and another at 128k bps for the iphone. I’m willing to trade the increase in sync time (because of the need to convert the files prior to sending them to the phone) for simpler file management. It only took three years of submitting this through itunes feedback for it to happen. Perhaps there is hope for my requests for flac support and for being able to have better support for multiple artists, composers and genres on a track.