I've been somewhat motivated recently to try and get the empeg back into my car, but it's not a huge priority since my commute to work is usually by foot these days. If I look longterm though, I see the appeal of having it back in there for roadtrips, and possible future work commutes.

The other side of my music is the Apple ecosystem I now live in fully. With iTunes Match coming up soon, I can easily access all of my music at home, work, and on the go off the iPhone without a big syncing mess.

The problem I find between these two plans though is AAC. I've gotten to the point that I just don't care enough to try and acquire new music via CD, then rip it to a good MP3 format and store the disc somewhere. The iTunes store offers a great way to grab new music quickly, and the genius suggestions are helping me broaden my collection a bit. I want new music, I don't want the hassle of being a librarian for my own collection.

So where does that leave me in regards to the empeg? With no native AAC playback, the empeg will either be stuck with my older collection, or I end up having it in the dash while my iPhone plays through the aux in. Without my entire collection on the empeg, the joys of down down down, then like/dislike just won't be there. And if the empeg is just going to be an aux-in device all the time, it's not much of an upgrade over my back to stock Mustang radio with aux-in.

I guess I'm throwing this out there to see what ideas others have. The idea of transcoding AAC to MP3 still bothers me enough, but maybe that is one route. I'm still thinking through how I plan to sync the empeg when it is returned to service, and may force myself to finally learn more Mac programming in the process. My ideal solution is one where my iTunes library sits in the center, syncing to the empeg somehow. mp3tofid may become part of the mix here somehow.

The other piece beyond syncing is the AAC part. I'd like to somehow retain the stock software, but maybe have hijack involved somehow into making the empeg think every AAC is just a WAV file, and it be fed a decoded WAV stream from the AAC files on disk. Not sure if there is enough CPU power to really do this though. I also doubt my programming skills are anywhere near good enough to pull this off myself.

A little googling found this:

http://pragmattica.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/convert-itunes-m4a-files-to-mp3-on-linux/

...it kinda seems that, given storage is so cheap, you should be able to hack some sort of script like that up to give you a totally up to date mp3 mirror of a mixed (or aac only) iTunes library.

Then you just need to get it onto the empeg with mp3tofid, I guess...

Still progressing slowly on this front. I need to find my second empeg and use it to experiment with to see what is going to work well. 64GB on the primary unit should work out well for a while, as it has more free space then I expected. For some reason, the second drive had a nearly complete backup of all the fids off the first drive, I believe due to a fid reshuffle I did at some point to the newer subdirectory structure. If AAC->FLAC doesn't push me over 64gb quickly, this may be the best route for now to retain quality. Very little of the music I currently have is AAC, I mostly just want the future ability to grow that without tossing out the empeg. Step one though will be to upgrade to the 3.0 alpha to gain FLAC support.

I'll keep using this thread as a journal of sorts, and if I crank out anything usable, will post it here.

Hey Tom, did you ever get anywhere with this? I'm looking to do the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons. The best solution I've found so far is mp3fs which supposedly supports AAC although most of their docs cover flac only and which still results in re-encoding, but could at least make the whole process pretty transparent (if it works as advertised). Just wondering if you'd found a better solution.

-Mike

I haven't yet. I wrote out a plan to tackle this, but have lacked the free time to start on it.

The overall plan I have is this:

The iTunes library on one of my machines remains the source of truth. All new music starts here, being a CD rip, or purchase.

The central library will sync to the iPhone as normal, and via iTunes Match, also give me access remotely at work or other locations.

MP3toFID will be used (Thanks dbrashear for fixing it to work on OS X) to sync from the iTunes library to the empeg. My plan is to tweak the layout to match my old empeg strategy of this:

For any AAC files encountered, I'm going to transcode them to FLAC (upgraded the empeg to 3.0). MP3s will just go across as normal. I may reconsider this if space becomes an issue, and transcode AAC to pretty high bit rate MP3.

I haven't worked out where I am going to store the mp3tofid links, this may be on the Mac directly, or on my ReadyNAS. The NAS also may make it possible to run the mp3tofid process and transcoding on it, instead of the Mac. For syncing to the emepg, I'm going to try and find my old Linux scripts that autodetected the empeg on the network. In the past, it used to auto update hijack, and adding a sync process here could work nicely.

Not sure when I will get started with any implementation, but I'll continue to post progress here, and consider hosting my work in progress on the empeg github setup. Just need to also sit down and wrap my head around git, since it's so radically different then other source control solutions I've worked with.

Does MP3toFID work with FLAC?

Yep, I believe so. A FLAC related bug fixed in 5.0.

http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/346681/Re_mp3tofid_5_00

Perhaps with some massaging this might help:

http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=convertandexport

I would think that you would at least want to remove the part that removes the track from your iTunes library.

Not much progress here on the empeg front, but I am getting the music library ready. Cleaned out the various free songs that didn't interest me in my iTunes library (Match exposed a lot of these, but they can be hidden/removed). Also going through my CD collection to ensure what I did own in the past is all properly in iTunes and accessible via Match.

To keep things empeg friendly, any CDs missing from iTunes still are brought in via the older MP3 format to the master library. AAC will only be used on match enabled platforms (my other Macs and iDevices).

Thanks Mike! MP3FS!? I have been looking for something exactly like this for a web based music collection server that I never finished. This is very useful. Thanks.

Yep, I've discovered by the way that there are actually (at least) three different projects going by that same mp3fs name and the link I posted above is to one that does not support AAC. The one that supposedly does is at:

https://bitbucket.org/stucchio/mp3fs

Unfortunately it doesn't compile on OS X and I don't have a linux box around these days so I haven't personally gotten very far with it.

I just had the same problem wanted to take all my music and refill my empeg , but remember that I had downloaded all from iTunes match and there for my music is mostly AAC.

I used this on my server and its working great.

http://gimpel.gi.funpic.de/wiki/index.php?title=Howto:convert_aac/mp4_to_wav/mp3/ogg_on_Linux

there is a scrip there that uses FFmpeg , and it just works.

I exported all the files into Dirs = Playlistnames and then just ran the script on the root of the dirs
then il just put my mp3 back and delete the AAC and trie to say on mp3 not arc :p

Wish theyd make an upgrade empeg id buy one, Gig Eth, prefer and AAC support.