Bitrate questions...

It depends on many things like:

• How big is your CD collection?
• Do you want your entire music collection on your iPod?
• What kind of headphones do you have?
• What sounds OK to you?

Personally, just for my iPod, it was all 256AAC for a while, then to 228AAC to fit everything onto my new MacBookPro and now with an 80gb iPod, all new CDs are ripped to 320AAC.

However, every CD I own is also ripped to Apple Lossless and stored on an external drive at the mo. I would suggest trying 192 or 256 AAC, see what works for you. Rip the same song 3 or 4 times under different bitrates, listen to them carefully and choose the one that offers the size/quality you need.

 

That's the best way, as it's all down to personal preference and your circumstances.

I personally rip everything to 320-MP3 Constant Bit Rate. It never hurts to go higher quality, because at the rate hard drive/flash memory capacities are increasing, I'm sure it won't be too too long before you can encode with Apple Lossless and be able to store your entire CD collection on an iPod shuffle. Hehe, well, you get my my gist!

 

Don't forget that the iPod storage rating (in songs) and battery life are based on 128kbps AAC. If you go higher your iPod will hold fewer songs naturally, and may not last as long on a charge. With hard drive based iPods the battery life was strongly affected by the bit rate. I'm not sure if the flash based ones are affected as much.

Greg

 

i'm pretty much a stickler for audio quality (i make a ton of videos/films and work as a freelance video editor) and 160kbps MP3 is more than enough for comfortable listening... on the computer & on my iPod

 

If you care about keeping the highest quality possible I suggest Apple Lossless encoding which creates bit-for-bit identical copies of the audio tracks from the CD, with absolutely no loss in quality. The only problem is that it creates very large file sizes - about 4 MB per minute of audio (iirc).

To make smaller file sizes you need to use lossy encoding like mp3 or aac that intelligently throws away some information from the audio track in order to make the file size smaller. The highest quality audio file compression you can use is generally agreed to be the LAME encoder. Use LAME with the settings -b 320 and you'll have super high quality MP3s.

 

I went with MP3 at 256Kbps, 44,100Hz, True Stereo, at constant bit rate. It was important to me, to be able to play my songs on iPods, computer and other portable listening devices. Basically, the MP3 format works on everything out there. So for me, this encoding works great.

I would suggest that you take a couple of songs that you really like that have subtle nuances and test encode them at different rates using different encoders. For example:

MP3 at 128, 192, 256, 320

ACC at 128, 192, 256, 320

After listening to them, you can choose the encoding that you like.

Remember that the higher the rate, the fewer songs will fit on your iPod. Also at higher rates, there is more info to transfer when you listen to the songs so it will decrease your battery life on HD base iPods. And it will also take longer to sync your music.

Some folks will swear by other encoding methods. The key is to find one that you really like, then use it.

 

I personally use AAC at 160 kbps VBR. For a while I was using mp3 at 192 kbps VBR but AAC is a better encoder and thus I can save some storage space using 160 kbps with it.