iPod 128 ou 256?

Personally the higher the better. Obviously the higher, the less space available on your iPod

You will get all kinds of responses for and against higher bit rates. Me I just decided to compromise and import everything at 192. Honestly I personally can not hear a difference between stuff I imported myself at 192 and downloaded from the itunes store at 128. What I would suggest you do is find a song you know by heart and love import it twice one at 128 and the other at 256 listen to them both and then decide if one indeed sounds better to you.

I can hear a different between 128 an 192 only if I'm wearing my good expensive headphones, with a good song, and only if I'm listening for it. 192 to 256 I can't tell the difference. As such, I encode my good music (Pink Floyd, etc) at 192, and the easy listening stuff at 128. Always AAC, always VBR.

guklein said:

Whats the difference between AAc and VBR?

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There's several settings concerning bitrate.

CBR is constant bitrate.
This means every second is represented by 192 (if you encode at 192kbps) kilobits of data.

VBR is variable bitrate.
This means that if there's a few seconds of dead silence at the start of a song, they will be represented by just enough data to tell your music player to play silence; barely any. A part of the song with lots of variation in frequency, volume, pitch, will be encoded at a higher bitrate; even higher than the set bitrate. Overall, the encoder will try to keep the average bitrate of the whole song at whatever you chose.

VBR is especially good for audiobooks and podcasts, because there is alot of space saved in silence between words.

I also encode at 192. It seems like a happy medium

I do 192 for normal music, maybe 256 if there are really intricate or well-recorded instrumental parts to the album. If you have the space and the original CDs, you might as well go for quality now; you can always re-rip if you run out of space.

james77 said:

What I would suggest you do is find a song you know by heart and love import it twice one at 128 and the other at 256 listen to them both and then decide if one indeed sounds better to you.

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Totally agreed. You might want to randomize them first (like type in random stuff for the file name) so you're not biased.

For me, although I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between 128 and anything higher, I still import at 192, just for headroom.