Tricking iTunes into thinking an external hard drive is an iPod? Possible?

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Hi

There is a lot of info out there about using your iPod as a hard drive, but I am wanting to the opposite, namely use my external portable hard drive as an iPod (this says something of my contrary nature).

The reason being that my iTunes library is made up of Apple Lossless files, and I would like to take advantage of the "convert higher bit rate songs to 128kbps" feature in iTunes, but by syncing to a portable external hard drive rather than an iPod.

I am aware that there are various methods of converting all my Apple Lossless files for use on an external hard drive, but none of these (as far as I am aware) synchronize with iTunes (i.e. update tags/ratings in the converted files if changes are made in iTunes). Because I would need this feature, I am wondering if there is a way of tricking iTunes into thinking that my external hard drive is an iPod (here my devious nature comes to the fore), or some other method of achieving what I am looking for?

Thanks for reading

Nick
 
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Just so I'm clear, are you asking if it is possible to get your external hard drive to appear as an iPod in iTunes?

If that is the case the answer is not without an extreme amount of hackery. A while ago Palm tried it with their Palm Pre, what they did was to give the Pre a similar USB Vendor Id to an iPod, alongside some cunning XML files. You can read about it here.

My advice would be to look into the program Double Twist which will do media syncing between portable media players, or hard drives! Sync Android, PSP, BlackBerry, Pre: doubleTwist with Amazon MP3
 
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Well what I am trying to do is to create a 128kbps version of my Apple Lossless library which would update when any changes are made in the main Apples Lossless library, such as tag changes, rating changes, tracks being deleted, added etc. This updating would happen automatically with syncing to an iPod, hence the thought about tricking iTunes.

I wouldn't need to sync in the other direction though, from 128kbps files back to iTunes
 

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