Thanks for the explanation. Interestingly, opinions seem to vary depending on where you look. On the Ilounge forum, they still seem to be fans of using VBR as they feel it gives better sound than CBR. My whole library is 128 kbs and I'm probably going to re-rip to 256 kbs (its only about 300 CD's), so I did some searching on the topic. Ilounge folks seem to think that 128 kbs is plenty, 192 is a little overkill, and 256 is way overkill. Some claim that if you do a true blind test, you can't tell the difference between 128 and 256. In my unscientific listening, I feel like I can tell the difference, but I guess it could be my imagination.
Jon
Well, I'm not about to start a die-hard debate but it's all relative. There are questions you need to ask yourself in order to find the best bitrate (or even using MP3s to begin with).
Some points and questions are:
1)Yes, if you plan to only use your $2 iPod standard headphones, then you will NOT hear a difference between a 128K and a 256k and even a WAV on your tiny little headphones. You can even quote me on that if you buy a $70 pair of headphones.
2)Continuing on #1, if you plan to use your Headphone Out jack to hook it up to a home stereo, I believe you will notice a difference IF YOUR STEREO is a high quality stereo...meaning, you've invested in more than $3000 in a quality receiver and speakers. You also will need to have a pretty nice room acoustically speaking. In this case, I would recommend encoding at 192k. I doubt very much you will hear any difference over 192k but I am confident that (from my own experience) 128k files just sound fair/poor on a nice home system. More importantly, a Headphone Out jack is NOT the same as a Line Out jack....nor are the 2 of equal quality. Line Out is far better.
3)If you plan to use your iPod, in ANY shape or form (fm tuner, headphone jack, 3rd party direct connect, etc), in an automobile (and mostly use the iPod only in an automobile), you might as well rip at 128k. Automobiles are so acoustically poor and the road noise is typically loud that there is not much of a point going above 128k. However, considering where you may also play your iPod, I would rip at 192k...there's not much of a file size difference.
4)If you plan to use iTunes (not the iPod) to play your music directly over a quality stereo via the Line Out jack of a high quality soundcard, then LOSSLESS is the best way. WAV or APE (iTunes doesn't support APE but I love it) or other lossless format. These file formats will be much larger than a 128k mp3 but again, it's all relative in 2009 where 1TB hard drives are $109 at your local store. My entire 192k CBR mp3 collection of 21,000+ songs eats up about 120gigs on my hard drive (I have a LOT of songs that are club mixes clocking in over 7 minutes so technically a lot of my MP3s count as 2 MP3s because they are so long). 120gigs--Big deal. Cheap computers have been shipping with 100gig+ hard drives for the past 5 years. My collection of APEs (I don't have a count yet) is somewhere around 500gigs because I haven't finished re-ripping everything yet.
I agree with other people that 90% of the human population fail at blind music listening tests. It's just that 90% of the people on this planet can only hear so much. The other 10% (I feel I am in this category) can tell the difference IF THE EXPERIMENT IS DONE FAIRLY.
So, think about where you want to listen to your tunes. Think about if you have enough disk space to hold a lot of music. Think about the FUTURE. Do you want to re-rip everything 5 years from now at WAV or lossless quality because you felt 256k was good enough? 128k is soooo 1996. It's pathetic to put it frankly. I would choose 2 options: encode at 192k CBR or simply rip at full quality WAV or whatever Lossless format you like. There is no point in nickel and diming to try 256k or 320k.
It's always best to rip the full quality...then you have them on your hard drive. Then you can down-convert them to your hearts content without spending months physically inserting cds and staring at a computer monitor. You have 300 cds. At most that would be: 300 cds X 700MB per cd = 210gigs at full quality WAV....and likely around 170gig in a Lossless format. That math is pretty close depending on how long each audio cd is. 700MB is the max size of a cd. I find that ripping an entire cd at 192k produces files totalling just a hair over 100MB...so...300 cds x 100MB per cd @ 192k = 30gigs roughly. So in your case it's 30gig vs. 170gig vs 210gig. 256k rips are probably going to make that 30gig more like 40gigs.
