Manually changing dates or play counts?

Question

Situation: I have iTunes automatically compress my songs to 128kbps when copying them to my Shuffle. I've also been manually compressing podcasts to 32kbps mono, effectively tripling the number of 'casts I can carry.
Problem: My manually re-ripped 'casts don't keep the same metadata (dates, play counts) as the originals, which tends to screw up my so-called "smart" playlists.
Question 1: How can I configure iTunes to automatically degrade podcasts to a lower bitrate than songs upon transfer to an iPod?
Question 2: Assuming the answer to Q1 is "you can't", then how can I sync the original metadata with the new rips (increase the play count, change the date added, date last played, etc.)?

Answer 1

I ended up having to write an AppleScript to get the play count and last played date to increment manually. I'm using it from the script menu until I can get a keyboard shortcut to work.
I'll probably also have to resort to scripting to get full metadata duplicates. That one won't be so easy. Any ideas?
Here's the source code for incrementing play count and last played date, if anyone's interested...
Increment Play Count
Tells iTunes a selection of songs was played on an iPod by incrementing the play count and setting the last played to the current date.
Intended to be run from a keyboard shortcut, no other UI.
tell application "iTunes"
if selection is not {} then
set s to selection
set d to (get current date)
repeat with t in s
set t to contents of t
if class of t is file track then
tell t
set played date to d
set played count to (get played count) + 1
end tell
end if
end repeat
end if
end tell
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