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Mexbearpig

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 26, 2008
1,138
1
Here
Title says it all. I just noticed the option in itunes and have no idea what it means. Can anyone shed some light on the situation?
 

jzuena

macrumors 65816
Feb 21, 2007
1,125
149
Title says it all. I just noticed the option in itunes and have no idea what it means. Can anyone shed some light on the situation?

Since the shuffle is fairly low on memory (compared to the other iPods) iTunes offers to re-transcode songs to a lower bitrate when syncing them to your shuffle. This causes each song to take up roughly 1/2 the space on the shuffle that it takes up on your Mac/PC. If you have good ears you might be able to tell that the song doesn't sound as good, so iTunes doesn't do it unless you tell it to. It only offers if you have the newer iTunes+ songs or songs you ripped from CD yourself using Apple's AAC encoding at 256 kilobits per second, and will make sure they only take up 128 kilobits per second while on your shuffle.
 

jcstuart1

macrumors newbie
Sep 24, 2010
1
0
Since the shuffle is fairly low on memory (compared to the other iPods) iTunes offers to re-transcode songs to a lower bitrate when syncing them to your shuffle. This causes each song to take up roughly 1/2 the space on the shuffle that it takes up on your Mac/PC. If you have good ears you might be able to tell that the song doesn't sound as good, so iTunes doesn't do it unless you tell it to. It only offers if you have the newer iTunes+ songs or songs you ripped from CD yourself using Apple's AAC encoding at 256 kilobits per second, and will make sure they only take up 128 kilobits per second while on your shuffle.

man, i want your apple collection! you must be broke, iphone 4, ipod touch, ipod shuffle, ipad, macbook mini, macbook pro! i am so jealous, what do you do to get sooo much money?
 

tkermit

macrumors 68040
Feb 20, 2004
3,582
2,909
man, i want your apple collection! you must be broke, iphone 4, ipod touch, ipod shuffle, ipad, macbook mini, macbook pro! i am so jealous, what do you do to get sooo much money?

I'm kind of surprised to see, that you don't advertise any services in your signature... ;)
 

GreatDrok

macrumors 6502a
May 1, 2006
561
22
New Zealand
Old thread is old.

But anyway, it is a shame that anyone would do this to tracks for the shuffle, especially for the original white one I have because it has about the best sound quality of any iPod out there. I tried converting the tracks once since mine is only a 512MB example but the sound had a very disturbing wooshy effect all the time. These days I just stuck with the 256Kbps VBR encodes I use for everything and put whatever I can on the shuffle since I mainly use it for working out so the short playing time isn't really an issue.

Anyway, converting already compressed recordings to 128Kbps sounds bad.
 

UpDownAeroplane

macrumors member
May 21, 2010
76
0
yeah, i still don't get this option. converting lossy files to lossy again? it will sound terrible. though if you have ALAC i guess it's not that big of a deal...but still, you should be able to convert to 256 or 320 AAC if you want to. :/
 

Razeus

macrumors 603
Jul 11, 2008
5,348
2,030
yeah, i still don't get this option. converting lossy files to lossy again? it will sound terrible. though if you have ALAC i guess it's not that big of a deal...but still, you should be able to convert to 256 or 320 AAC if you want to. :/

To save space. Rather simple. Sometimes having the music is better than the sound quality of the music. Especially when excersing or at work.
 

tkermit

macrumors 68040
Feb 20, 2004
3,582
2,909
To save space. Rather simple. Sometimes having the music is better than the sound quality of the music. Especially when excersing or at work.

UpDownAeroplane's partly right though - we should be given the option to choose a quality level. It would also make sense if you could tell iTunes to only compress files whose bitrate exceeds a certain value, or possibly only lossless files.
 
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