iTunes in Apple Lossless->iPod in AAC?

Now that hard drives are cheap enough, I've started ripping my CD's in
Apple Lossless format. Aside from a possible audio improvement over
AAC, this way I can convert to another format in the future if AAC
becomes obsolete -- without suffering further audio quality
degradation. BUT ... when I put my music on my 4 GB iPod Nano, I want
the songs in 128 kbps AAC format. I did a search and found a thread
from Dec 2004 that has a way to do this, and that is copied below.
But, I would hope that by now Apple would have a simple iTunes
preference to handle this. Did I miss it? Is there a simpler way?
Ideally, I'd like to just drag my Apple Lossless music to the iPod and
have the Mac recognize that it needs to convert.

Thanks for any help.

Martin

=== begin December 2004 threat ===
> My music collection, some 400 CDs, is stored in iTunes as Apple
> Lossless. I'd like to export the entire collection as MP3s to put on
> my iPod. Is there a script somewhere that will do this?

It's simple enough to do without a script:
- Change the iTunes import preferences to MP3.
- Click on the Library.
- Select All.
- Advanced -> Convert Selection to MP3.
All the songs in your library will be converted to MP3. The original
Apple
Lossless files will still be in the Library too, so next you'll want a
way
to grab just the MP3 songs. You can either:
(1) Change the View Options for your iTunes Library to show the Kind
column. You can then sort by that column, so all the MP3's will be
grouped
together.
Or:
(2) Create a Smart Playlist that has "Kind contains 'MPEG'" as its
condition, and leave the "Limit" option unchecked. That playlist will
then
show all of the MP3's in your Library. If desired, you could add
more
conditions and select "match all" to narrow it down to a particular
subset
of MP3's.
From there you should be able to get the MP3's onto your iPod.