I have made the mistake of saving all my music as WAV files. Or was that a
mistake? My intention was that I did not want to loose any quality from the
original CD (So I could burn my own mix-CDs) I installed a 250GB harddrive
just for my CDs

I now have a iRiver device and the WAV files sync to it fine... but I want
the files to be smaller so I put my entire collection on the device. To do
this I need to convert the files to WMA.

I would like to have both the original WAV full-CD files AND the new WMA
files both stored on my PC so I dont have to re-convert when I want to make a
CD.

How can this be done?
Files will have to be duplicated to have the different format.. Maybe even
have 2-3 different sets of bitrates too. incase I decide I want to sync my
device based on the filesizes that would best fit and use up the 20GB on the
iRiver.

I was thinking about having a parent directory like MyMusic for the WAV
files, with a directory structure inside it with Artist\Album\trk#-song.wav
Then another folder with MyMusicWMA1\Artist\Album\song.WMA
Is there a way to make WMP understand what is going on and then filter the
list to point at only one of the formats? perhaps with a High-bit rate
playlist, then a low-bitrate playlist? (I could live with the Standard WMP
folders at the top having duplicates and only utilizing playlists for
playback/sync'ing)

Can I have 2 WMPs where one references the WAV files and a 2nd that
references the WMA files?

Any ideas or thoughts on how to best accomplish this?


--
Regards,
John

John Keith wrote:
> I have made the mistake of saving all my music as WAV files. Or was that a
> mistake? My intention was that I did not want to loose any quality from the
> original CD (So I could burn my own mix-CDs) I installed a 250GB harddrive
> just for my CDs
>
> I now have a iRiver device and the WAV files sync to it fine... but I want
> the files to be smaller so I put my entire collection on the device. To do
> this I need to convert the files to WMA.
>
> I would like to have both the original WAV full-CD files AND the new WMA
> files both stored on my PC so I dont have to re-convert when I want to make a
> CD.

I rip my CDs to Lossless WMA (which is like a zipped up WAV, no quality
lost) and store those on my library drive; and re-rip to WMA/MP3 in
128-192kps range for day to day use on my computer or iRiver. The iRiver
will not play Lossless WMA because the bitrate is too high. I keep the
re-ripped files on a completely separate drive.

> Can I have 2 WMPs where one references the WAV files and a 2nd that
> references the WMA files?

You could do this by having separate XP accounts for each library. aving
separate WMP libraries under one account would mean having to swap
different WMDB database files. You could do this with a batch file or
script, but it's a far from ideal situation.