iPod shuffle Bitrate Conversion

You know how the iPod shuffle doesn’t really have a lot of space in it? Well, Apple put in a nice feature that down-converts your high bitrate music to a shuffle friendly 128 kbps on the fly. This means that you can easily sync your high bitrate Apple Lossless music to your iPod shuffle, and fit more than 8 songs on the thing. From the iPod shuffle manual:

Converting Songs to Save Space on iPod shuffle

Songs encoded using formats other than AAC may take up more space. You can set iTunes to convert higher bitrate songs when they transfer, so they’ll take up less space on iPod shuffle.

Note: If this option is selected, songs encoded in AIFF or Apple Lossless format are converted to 128 kbps when transferred to iPod shuffle (the song files in iTunes aren’t affected). Otherwise, iPod shuffle doesn’t play songs encoded in those formats.