iPod How many cd's can I fit on a 120g Classic using lossless?

[duellist]

Hey everyone, I'm kind of getting tired of lugging around my cd's all the time so I decided to dump them all on a Ipod. I currently have 710 cd's and counting so it is going to be a real chore ripping these all to the Ipod. I am kind of new to the whole Ipod thing(I'm old school) and don't really know what bit rate to rip them in. I was thinking 256 but after a little reading it sounds like Apple Lossless would be the best bet for true cd sound. I will be using the Ipod with headphones(sennheiser) and also plugged into my Onkyo 606 receiver. I know that lossless takes alot of space but can I fit all of my music on the 120g? If not what do you recommend?

I will be using a external hard drive for my music because my computer won't hold it all. Is it easy to do? and what size external HD will do the trick?

Also, my Onkyo Receiver came with a Ipod Dock that says it is compatable with 5th,4th,2nd and 1rst generation Ipods and also Ipod Photo so will a 120 work with it? It is a brand new receiver so I'm thinking it should but I don't really know. If not is there a Apple dock that I can buy that will work with the ipod and my receiver?

Thanks for all the help

 

[Blue Velvet]

Probably about 220-250 or so, looking and adding up the lossless albums in my collection. Stick with 320AAC, sounds pretty good, is smaller and doesn't drain your iPod batteries as much.

If you can hear an obvious difference between 320AAC and Lossless, you're probably in about 0.2% of the population.

 

[JonHimself]

Probably about 220-250 or so, looking and adding up the lossless albums in my collection. Stick with 320AAC, sounds pretty good, is smaller and doesn't drain your iPod batteries as much.

If you can hear an obvious difference between 320AAC and Lossless, you're probably in about 0.2% of the population.

And if you're skeptical about going down to 320 (or even 256) AAC, just encode a small 10 second clip from a few songs you're really familiar with and see if you can pick out the lossless vs. the aac file. I keep a back-up of my lossless rips on my external drive and have the 256kbps aac's in my itunes library.

 

[duellist]

So is it a good Idea to rip them to a external HD in Lossless then put them on the Ipod in 320 AAC?

 

[dukebound85]

or even a lower bitrate, esp if you are using apples headphones as you couldnt tell a difference

 

[duellist]

or even a lower bitrate, esp if you are using apples headphones as you couldnt tell a difference

No I'm using Sennheiser PX-100's

 

[duellist]

Can someone answer this for me?

Also, my Onkyo Receiver came with a Ipod Dock that says it is compatable with 5th,4th,2nd and 1rst generation Ipods and also Ipod Photo so will a 120 work with it? It is a brand new receiver so I'm thinking it should but I don't really know. If not is there a Apple dock that I can buy that will work with the ipod and my receiver?

 

[ChrisA]

Probably about 220-250 or so, looking and adding up the lossless albums in my collection. Stick with 320AAC, sounds pretty good, is smaller and doesn't drain your iPod batteries as much.

If you can hear an obvious difference between 320AAC and Lossless, you're probably in about 0.2% of the population.

As for space. Figure each CD has about 600MB of data on it. then figure lossless compression cuts this in half. So a rough estimate is 300Mb per CD or about 3 CDs per gigabyte of storage. But I may be slightly opimistic. Much of my collection is older music back when 8 to 9 tracks per album was common.

About being able to hear lossless vs. 320K AAC. Even if your ears are very good. 90% of the time 320 AAC is just as good but I find that at least 1% of of the time AAC/MP3 leave very noticeable artefacts. a three second drum passage is clobbered or some electronic instruments on a couple tracks sounds bad. The problems are not evenly distributed over my collection but occur only in some passages. Also I need good equipment to notice. If you invest about $3K in stereo equipment you will notice more problems with AAC/MP3. but 90% of the time it sounds OK even on high end equipment. It's those "problem passages" that drove me to going lossless.

Yes you would need very good ears indeed to notice and overall different between 230AAC and lossless but many people will notice the 320AAC will "get confused" a few seconds out of every hour of material.

Well that and the face the 1TB drives sell for $100 now. Disk space is nearly free.
So I keep lossless as my "master" and I can always down sample to 128 AAC for use with my iPod Shuffle at the gym. You can always convert lossless to anything you want later.