The Apple tech gave you good information. It isn't quite true that you don't have room for any lossless files on your Nano but you won't be able to put many CDs on a drive that size.
Apple Lossless files take up about half as much space as the standard AIFF files on a CD but even at that you would have room for no more than 10 or 12 CDs, possibly fewer depending on the album lengths.
Yes, you do need to re-rip from the CD to get CD-quality sound. When you ripped the files at 128 kbps you threw away a lot of information and it's not possible to recover that by reprocessing those files to a different format. You'd get bigger files but they wouldn't sound any better.
If you are set on using the Nano and you want a large music collection on it a compromise might be to re-rip at a higher mp3 bit rate, like 320 kbps. It won't be CD quality but will let you put a lot more tunes on the Nano and they'll sound somewhat better than the low resolution files you now have on there.
If you want maximum quality playback and you want a lot of music accessible you'll definitely want an iPod with a much, much larger drive.
Apple Lossless files take up about half as much space as the standard AIFF files on a CD but even at that you would have room for no more than 10 or 12 CDs, possibly fewer depending on the album lengths.
Yes, you do need to re-rip from the CD to get CD-quality sound. When you ripped the files at 128 kbps you threw away a lot of information and it's not possible to recover that by reprocessing those files to a different format. You'd get bigger files but they wouldn't sound any better.
If you are set on using the Nano and you want a large music collection on it a compromise might be to re-rip at a higher mp3 bit rate, like 320 kbps. It won't be CD quality but will let you put a lot more tunes on the Nano and they'll sound somewhat better than the low resolution files you now have on there.
If you want maximum quality playback and you want a lot of music accessible you'll definitely want an iPod with a much, much larger drive.

