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Are your songs AAC?
- Thread starter Joel95
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AAC 192. I mostly listen to music in my car and with the road noise I'll never hear the difference. That and I use Spotify at home and Pandora. I'd much rather have convenience than try to preserve every bit of the master. Most of it is psychological anyway.
I rip my CDs lossless and use iTunes' AAC option for transfering files to my iPhone.
And no, I can't hear the difference between lossless and a very high bitrate AAC or MP3 with my setup, but storage is cheap and it doesn't hurt to have the original audio data bit by bit.
Who knows what format will be used 15 years from now and reencoding from one lossy format to another will give you the worst of both worlds later.
And no, I can't hear the difference between lossless and a very high bitrate AAC or MP3 with my setup, but storage is cheap and it doesn't hurt to have the original audio data bit by bit.
Who knows what format will be used 15 years from now and reencoding from one lossy format to another will give you the worst of both worlds later.
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Apple Lossless. Once you go lossless you can convert to anything you like. With 1GB drives selling for way under $100 there is no reason to compress a CD rip. What do you save 20 cents?
FLAC is just as good but iTunes and my iPod don't handle it.
High nitrate AAC sounds as good a lossless most of the time. MP3 is problems with sound. For the most part the sound quality issues are not over the entire track but show up in say one drum hit or in a few electronic keyboard chords. When it's bad is really bad but just those notes. So if you want to do a listening test to have to play different tracks and keep an ear tuned for artifacts, not for over all quality.
As you turn down the bit rate then yes, over all quality suffers
Our ears adjust to poor quality then we don't notice. So saying "sounds good to me" is not enough. Try some good headphones (not earbuds) on a good headphone amp. Then listen to a 24-bit/96K vinyl rip done by an expert and it really will blow away a CD.
Storage is so cheap that it's worth it to record lossless. Some day you might buy better equipment, or your ears might become more educated.
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Spotify free?
Correct me if I am wrong but Spotify 'Free' seems to be only a computer streaming (with ads) library.
For an iDevice one must have the paid service to listen to music from their library.
Correct me if I am wrong but Spotify 'Free' seems to be only a computer streaming (with ads) library.
For an iDevice one must have the paid service to listen to music from their library.
AAC isn't generally smaller in size. If you rip a song from a CD at 256kbps at both AAC and MP3, they're both the same size.
I use AAC, simply put because I can squeeze that little extra quality out of a song compared to MP3, even if it's subtle enough to be blown off as a placebo-- it is the more advanced codec.
All of my rips are 320kbps aac.
I use AAC, simply put because I can squeeze that little extra quality out of a song compared to MP3, even if it's subtle enough to be blown off as a placebo-- it is the more advanced codec.
All of my rips are 320kbps aac.
Mine are all in ALAC. I initially had them in WMA Lossless thanks to a 200 CD batch ripping setup I had. I would load a changer with 200 CDs and it would rip them to a PC and find the album covers.
I then converted all of the WMA Lossless to FLAC to use in my car. I had something called a Phatbox in the car back then and it could not support WMA lossless.
The FLAC was then converted to ALAC thanks to a new car setup that utilized the 160GB iPod Classic. I used Foobar2000 in batch convert mode to get them all into ALAC. Now I mainly rip to ALAC. (I should mention that I still have the WMA lossless for Windows Media Center and FLAC for a Sanza Fuze)
The main reason I chose lossless is that I don't think it makes sense to archive in lossy formats. While I don't think there would be much difference between 320kbps and ALAC, I really don't have time to blind test every song in my library to be sure, and since hard drives are cheap, there isn't much reason to worry about it. Also, if a new CODEC comes to market that significantly beats mp3, you have the lossless file for transcoding to it without losing data. You do not have that option with lossy files.
Even on my 32GB iPhone I have lossless files. I know it is easy to convert on the fly, but I don't have any reason to. I have a subscription to MOG that uses 320kbps and I can just download their files to my iPhone if I want more than the few albums in my own collection.
I then converted all of the WMA Lossless to FLAC to use in my car. I had something called a Phatbox in the car back then and it could not support WMA lossless.
The FLAC was then converted to ALAC thanks to a new car setup that utilized the 160GB iPod Classic. I used Foobar2000 in batch convert mode to get them all into ALAC. Now I mainly rip to ALAC. (I should mention that I still have the WMA lossless for Windows Media Center and FLAC for a Sanza Fuze)
The main reason I chose lossless is that I don't think it makes sense to archive in lossy formats. While I don't think there would be much difference between 320kbps and ALAC, I really don't have time to blind test every song in my library to be sure, and since hard drives are cheap, there isn't much reason to worry about it. Also, if a new CODEC comes to market that significantly beats mp3, you have the lossless file for transcoding to it without losing data. You do not have that option with lossy files.
Even on my 32GB iPhone I have lossless files. I know it is easy to convert on the fly, but I don't have any reason to. I have a subscription to MOG that uses 320kbps and I can just download their files to my iPhone if I want more than the few albums in my own collection.