Hello.
I got my iPod touch with the standard headphones.
Should i really waste disk space and encode songs i download off the internet to AAC iTunes Plus quality? or should i stick with 128 high quality?
Thanks
1. I can tell a difference between 128 and 256, maybe it's just me, but there's a huge difference
2. Where are you downloading these songs from and what format are they in?
3. Unless you're downloading lossless music, do not convert them to anything. If you encode an already compressed file (AAC or MP3) to another compressed format, or even the same format but different bitrate,
you will lose sound quality. Each time you compress a file, data is lost and the more times it's compressed, the worse it will sound. Do not do it, ever. Leave them in whatever format and bitrate you downloaded them in. Music files should only be encoded from their original source, such as a CD, or a lossless format like FLAC.
4. Even if you ignore my 3rd point and still re-encode, if you have a 128kbps file and re-encode it to 256kbps, it's not going to magically increase in sound quality. When the file was originally encoded to 128, a certain amount of data was removed from the file for compression. A 256kbps file has more data, hence, better quality, but if you encode a 128kbps file to 256kbps, the encoder can't just put data in the file that wasn't there to begin with. So if you take a 128kbps file and re-encode it to 256kbps, it won't sound like a 256kbps file encoded from the lossless source, in fact, it will sound worse than the 128kbps file due to my point above.