I spent a bit of time researching how to do this - there just had to be a way. It turns out that TiVo Desktop plays nicely with LAME and will transcode on the fly. This is, of course, a bit more lossy than it could be, but I'm ripping discs into 190kbps AAC files and they sound fine to me.

First I found this hint that taught me about LAME, but all I heard was static. So I dug and then I found a posting here outlining a fix. I tried it and it absolutely worked. So you don't have to sift through the postings, I will copy the post here for you.

gerickson posted:
Thanks to everyone here who helped me figure out my AAC -> static issue running on a Mac Pro w/ Mac OS X 10.4.8 and TiVo Desktop 1.9.3 (008).

I tweaked the recipe slightly and installed the following script in "/Library/Application Support/TiVo/lame" since SoundConvert checks there first:

#!/bin/sh
exec /usr/local/bin/lame -x $*

However, in the process of doing this, I noticed that TiVo Desktop leaves around zombie processes when you skip AAC tracks. I did a 'ps -jx' and noticed tens to hundreds of sleeping 'SoundConvert' and 'lame' processes.

Has anyone modified the above script/wrapper to reap any such zombies before exec'ing the next iteration of 'lame' on the "current" track?

I have not tried to solve the zombie process problem. I left it in for full disclosure and all.

This post is mostly for me to find later when I inevitably screw around, break this, and wonder how I got it working in the first place.