360 + iPod + AAC == No Smoking

My so-called “friend” bestest-buddy Boondoggler noticed the other day that the iPod didn’t play back AAC/m4a files through the Xbox 360. I had thought that mine did, but on further thought, I realized that some of the electronica playlists I was using were largely-filled with MP3 encoded audio files. Sure enough, AAC files showed up with a red circle with a bar through them in the standard no-smoking configuration. This is annoying as a lot of my music is encoded in AAC format. Even more annoying, the Xbox is fully-capable of reading the tags on the m4a files.

The solution? Selecting all the AAC files I’d loaded onto that iPod and re-encode them in iTunes as MP3. I replaced the files on the iPod with the newly transcoded MP3s then removed the MP3s from my iTunes library to a folder on my external drive in case I need them again. This has added an extra layer of complexity to my iTunes library.

Which brings me to another topic: iTunes starts to break when your music collection exceeds the capacity of your iPod. It still works fine, but the task of managing your music collection on one or more iPods starts to become fairly onerous. It’s annoying, and iTunes should be able to handle the burden of keeping track of these different libraries (collections? Sub-libraries? Shelves?) for you.

Now it’s the weekend and I must go…

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