itunes aac vs mp3 loudness

[dirty]

i have itunes and an ipod and i used to use musicmatch which defaulted to mp3 encoding and now with itunes it defaults to aac.

i have noticed that since i switched over to using itunes everything that i rip and transfer to my ipod is quiter than what was previously ripped with musicmatch.

is aac quieter than mp3? i thought the sound quality was supposed to be better with aac.

please help.

[robotrenegade]

What were the settings on music match?

[idkew]

i am not an audio engineer, but i could see mp3s almost normalizing the sound, and making it sound louder, but it would be less descriptive. following that logic, the m4a would do it better, and you would hear truer sound.

[johnnowak]

Originally posted by idkew
i am not an audio engineer, but i could see mp3s almost normalizing the sound, and making it sound louder, but it would be less descriptive. following that logic, the m4a would do it better, and you would hear truer sound.

There's no reason converting to mp3 would normalize teh sound. Also, normalizing causes no loss of detail.

[Nermal]

Where do you live? I heard that in Europe, iPods are quieter. The limitation might be in iTunes, rather than in the iPod itself, which would explain why it was louder with Musicmatch.

But I'm really just grasping at straws here.

[theipodgod16]

just select all your songs in itunes, click "get info", and boost the volume as desired. just know that you will have to re-send all the music to your ipod again, but thatll only take 10 mins or so.

[idkew]

Originally posted by johnnowak
There's no reason converting to mp3 would normalize teh sound. Also, normalizing causes no loss of detail.

that not exactly what i mean. let me try to explain this way.

mp3 is a lossy compression scheme. it gets rid of info to save bitrate and filesize. i am proposing that mp3s get rid of sounds and make a song sound louder (as in the loud button) in the process.

i also am thinking that m4a's have better compression, so they don't drop all that information at the same bitrate.

[68k_575]

You can also use SoundCheck to normalize your AAC files.