Creating an alternate library with smaller files

I have an old 120GB iPod Classic. Much of the music on it is in the form of my ripped CD collection in Apple Lossless format. The rest of the music is music that i've purchased from iTunes Store and then there's some MP3 songs.

This all syncs up nicely with my iPod Classic and takes up around 112GB - so quite a lot of space!

Now, what I would REALLY like to do is create a library from my original library that only has non-lossless tracks on it (so the Apple Lossless ones would have to have an MP3 or similar version).

I would then want to sync that library to a new iPod/iPhone with, say, 32GB of memory. In essence i'm trying to maintain another library with smaller file sizes. I want to keep the main library for my iPod Classic.

There are probably other ways but this would work.

Hold down the alt key when you open iTunes and you can make a new library wherever you want, on your boot drive, USB drive or memory stick. You can then put what ever you like on it and sync an iPod/Pad/iPhone to it.

After making the new library your computer defaults to whatever library was opened last but you can select which library by holding alt again when opening.

With your new library open go to add to library and navigate to your old library to select the tracks you want in the new one.

There is an option on the Settings tab for your device to dynamically convert any sync'ed file to (IIRC) 128kb quality as part of the sync process. This means you keep the original files on you computer and have smaller files on your device.

Have you tried that?