iPod what have I been ripping at?

ajo said:

Im looking at some of my older stuff on iTunes and each track from the same album has a different kbps.

What have I been ripping these at, I cant work it out?

Thanks

ajo

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Probably used a variable bit rate?

ajo said:

thats what I thought, but there is no VBR next to it like on others that I have done.

When I look at the info, it says ive used AAC, but why is it different for each track?

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That is apparently what AAC + VBR does. Lets say you choose 192 Kbit AAC + VBR. What VBR _should_ do is analyse the complete song, then encode hard parts with more than 192 KBit, easy parts with less than 192 KBit, aiming at an average of exactly 192 KBit (this would make it sound slightly better than 192 KBit fixed and use exactly the same space, using a bit more encoding time). Apparently it just encodes to _at least_ 192 KBit. That way, all songs will come out in exactly the same quality, no matter whether they were hard or easy to encode, but the hard ones take more space. The number displayed could be the average bitrate for that song, so each will have a different number.

ajo said:

I have been re ripping to find out and I cant find anything that matches what I already have, the sizes and kbps are all different.

Could it be that the newer iTunes does it sligtly different, for better or worse?

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There was a bug in a previous version of iTunes (7.5, I believe) that displayed these different bitrates.

Any tracks that were imported that version of iTunes will continue to display the varied bitrates. The only solution is to re-import them with a newer version of iTunes.