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What bitrate/quality is your music library?

santaji

santaji

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 13, 2008
38
0
Mumbai, India
Most of my music is currently about 250kbps or a bit more then that, But some songs are 128kbps(I might be reimporting those CD's in a higher quality soon).
I was wondering what is the best bitrate for good quality and a decent file size?
 
I mainly have my library in ALAC. For archiving I would not use anything less than lossless. I have Rhapsody music service for my iOS devices, so when I am away from home, I would rather stream and have a smaller internal library. At home, I use Plex to stream my entire library to iOS.

I also have a 160 gb classic for ALAC. I am not saying that 256 Kbps would sound much different, but I don't find myself out of 3GS range very often, and when I do, 160gb of lossless files fills in the gaps.

As for SQ vs size..if it is an issue because you have a player with less space and no wifi (like a nano), you would probably need to do some testing to see what you are happy with. I believe most people are happy with 256kbps, but with the audio Codec improvements, it may fall lower than that now.
 
As I only had access to affordable headphones/speakers before we got a couple of airport expresses, I imported all of our music as 256 AACs... I've now got an airport connected up to my fathers 30 year old behemoth pre-amp and speakers and I still can't really tell whats wrong with it. Use the right equipment, good cables and it will make the best of what it's given!

Saying that, even though we have a good network in our house, I find that if I do play say a CD over it from a computer elsewhere in the house, it sometimes breaks up, so maybe 256 is the bit rate for the digital age?
 
The most efficient format for quality vs size is a V0 mp3 encoded with LAME. It has over 90% of the information in a 320kbs mp3 but for around 60% of the size.

Best way to convert on a mac is with XLD NOT itunes even with the itunes LAME extension XLD has much better error correction and logging (well itunes doesn't log at all)
 
My music files are all over the place.

Lowest bitrate: 34 kbps
Highest bitrate: 1180kbps

Both of those are Apple Lossless files.
 
Everything from 5 or so years back 250kbit/s mp3.

Everything from that date forwards (and a good number of re-ripped CDs) in ALAC and 250kbit/s lame vbr mp3.

It's annoying that Apple only supports 128kbit/s on the fly recompression for iDevices - otherwise I'd ditch the dual format and just keep ALAC.
 
Library of 9k songs used to be about 90% ALAC, 5% purchased iTunes music, and the rest 320 MP3. After extensive listening tests I couldn't tell any difference between ALAC and 256k AAC, so I converted all the ALAC to 256k AAC.
 
Most of my library was encoded from cd's using Apple's lossless system. Then I use iTunes option to rip 128 k versions to my iPhone. That way I'm saving perfect copies for the future and making reasonably good sounding versions available to carry around with me anywhere.

Its not perfect but its easy enough and I'm not losing any quality by means of the lossless system.
 
Some of my older stuff ranges from 128-192k MP3's. Some newer downloads are 256k AAC or 320k MP3. All CD's are ripped to 16-bit 44.1kHz ALAC. All hi-res downloads (24-bit 48-192kHz) are converted from FLAC to ALAC with Max.

I use iTunes as my music management program.
 
Several years ago, when I ripped my CD collection initially, I encoded its 5,000 songs or so at 192 kbps. To me, that's the lowest bitrate I can listen to and not hear any real artifacts. Most of the stuff I've ripped/purchased/downloaded since then (another 10,000 songs) has been at 256 or 320.
 
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