Question about MP3 and iPods

It's also illegal to rip CDs and then sell them!

 

Just like burning CDs for friends! Just like downloading out-of-print music!

We've done those topics.

 

Philly? Uh oh, need to watch out for you in Goodwill and garage sales. I'm near Trenton NJ.

MP3 is not as good as the original CD, that's correct (although it may be hard to distinguish). If you want a true "backup" of your audio CD that preserves the audio data bit for bit, you'd want to rip to a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC. The benefit here is that this lossless file becomes your "master" - transcode it to MP3 now, AAC later, FLAC, ALAC, it doesn't matter because that lossless source is essentially bit for bit the same as the CD it came from.

One other thing I'd recommend that wasn't mentioned yet is a tool that does error correction, when ripping. In Windows, EAC is the tool to use for that. I use Ubuntu and use either EAC in Wine, or Rubyripper - this becomes important with scratched discs.

 

Wrong. What do you mean by iTunes not having true VBR?

 

After reading about the possibility in this forum I installed Rockbox on an old iriver MP3 player to make it able to play FLAC. It's so nice to listen to CD quality on such a portable device with good headphones!

 

Most people are willing to sacrifice some quality for convenience of having the ability to carry hundreds of albums in your pocket is still cool. Vinyl is generally my preferred way to listen, but it's obviously very stationary and limiting. iPods weren't the first (nor last) music player on the block... I like the interface and design and obviously I'm not alone.

I don't feel that iTunes is the greatest thing ever, but "good enough" (I also us Foobar).

I rip my CDs to FLAC with EAC and encode from those to 192kbps Constrained VBR aac files using XLD; for those aac files I add album artwork and correct any tagging errors using iTunes. I keep the CDs stored in boxes.

To answer your quality question, I found I could not distinguish between aac and FLAC @ 192kbps Constrained VBR. I did blind listening tests using headphones, computers, etc.

I rarely burn music CD-R's anymore. When I do (usually for a compilation) I use FLAC for source files. I don't even use iTunes's burning capabilities.

I still buy vinyl (I dropped over $200 of hard earned cash on Record Store day alone).

My dad used to buy records, playing them once and recording them to cassette, then putting the records away. Some here will raise an eyebrow at that preference, but his point was having a copy you could essentially wear out and still having a backup.

So I know I'm not like everybody else.

 

In the Summary page in iTunes for my iPod Touch under Options there is a checkbox that will
"Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 AAC"

Assuming you can live with the low bit rate when listening on your iPod, your library at home would need only to have Apple Lossless files.

 

You can find me in Center City searching through the used bins and often finding the new releases with incorrect, cheaper price tags on them.

I'm perfectly happy with my collection of vinyl, cd and tape and will not be changing to hand held technology (outside of my portable disc player) anytime soon. It seems like a lot of work to get "lossless" files into a device. Perhaps I can pick up all of the cds my friends are unloading since the dics are too cumbersome for them!

 

While I've cut down on my CD purchases the past two weeks since discovering Spotify, ripping those discs to FLAC or Apple Lossless via dbpoweramp or EAC is definitely the way to go, and something I wish I had done a few years ago.

One thing I'm not sure of though: If I rip my FLAC files to a CD-R, is there any quality loss at all?

 

I still buy CD’s (many used) and some vinyl, some downloads, and I rip my faves to lossless and/or 256kbps mp3 and put the files on hard drives and/or the cloud. Great for traveling, driving, etc. (or playing through home stereo) and having backups in different locations. I'm done with tape, but I wouldn’t want to be limited to one or two formats. Got to have my tunes.

 

How dare you make sense here?!

 

iTunes tops out at 256k in High Efficiency mode. The Nero codec does not have this limitation.

iTunes cannot natively encode VBR. The Quicktime API can however.

 

don't even think of uploading that much data to the cloud. Even if a service offered unlimited storage, it would take forever to upload it all.

Instead, serve all the music from your computer using programs like Audiogalaxy or Subsonic. They both have iOS clients although there is no free client for Subsonic although you can stream to a web browser for free.

Tim

 

I don't get it...what does the VBR encode option on iTunes do then?

 

That's exactly what I did with my CD collection. Best thing I ever did - I backed everything up, and still have it all on my hard drive lossless.

I've started getting back into vinyl, and that is most of my listening at home. But I'd never give up the ability to carry around chunks of my collection (including needledrops) anywhere, including the car - it was well worth the time and effort it took.

 

I'm going to try and answer your specific questions with specific answers(which is difficult on an audiophile forum lol):

-The albums that sound off to you might suffer from dynamic range compression like you suspect.

-The particular album on Itunes might be from a different CD pressing than what you have.

-When it comes to MP3s, I highly recommend you use 320kbps or V0 variable bitrate MP3's. The amount of space they take up compared to any bitrate below is neglible considering how much memory and space we have on players today. This will result with files that are transparent to the original CD source(most people can't tell the difference, and I'm willing the ones who think they can are afraid to perform a blind listening test. There might be that odd exception with fantastic hearing though).

 

Weird, huh? Sound quality (and liner notes and album art) ad nauseam debates aside, I don’t see where backups are ever a bad idea. I can buy used (and some new) CD’s cheaper than legit downloads, so I’m still buying them. But if I could wave a magic wand and put all my music on multiple hard drives, it would save a lot of physical space, so I understand the appeal. I just got to have my tunes.

 

This is 100% incorrect. One does not need iTunes to put MP3s/AAC/ALAC files on an Apple iPod. All you really need iTunes for, is the initial set up. Once that's done you may delete/uninstall it, if it bothers you so much.

 

iPods are portable devices and there's bound to be some differences upon close inspection... however, the sound from my iphone 4 (also an ipod) is decent when paired with a decent pair of earbuds (I'm currently using a budget M Audio UE10 with customized interconnects). My MP3 files are all LAME encoded, sounds pretty decent when on the go... I'm happy!

PS - Think I'm using the word "decent" too often...

Anyway, it's also possible to have your music in Apple lossless so that your music would be of a higher resolution at the expense of hard disk space. I would rather have more music with me versus the differences in sound quality.

 

Yeah, you've missed about a hundred screaming debates on this subject over the last 5 or 6 years here.

I will add to a few of the comments above by saying that it's a wise idea to do a direct comparison and decide for yourself whether you can hear the difference between an MP3 and the original WAV file. Use one of these two programs:

ABXer for Mac OSX

Foobar2000 for Windows

Each will let you compare one file with another, which is very helpful for determining real differences in an A/B test. To me, hard drives are so cheap, you may as well go for the maximum sound quality (and the least compression) possible with 320K AAC or MP3, which is only about 5:1. This is very, very little compression in the grand scheme of things.

 

yes you are - there is special section at the Forums called Hardware

 

That's funny, because when I copied MP3 files to my wife's iPod Shuffle using Explorer, the files were all visible on the drive and the corresponding amount of space was taken up, but when I went to play it, there was no music found on it. I then deleted what I copied and re-copied the very same MP3 files using iTunes and it worked fine. But maybe I was merely 100% imagining it.

 

No.

 

In the UK it is? Can you point us to the law?

 

My experience with iTunes' VBR is that if I set it to 256 AAC with VBR, the files may be a bit bigger than if I had the VBR button unchecked... but then if I encode a track that is near silence but with VBR enabled, it won't go down to as low of a bitrate as LAME's MP3 Encoder can (say at -V0 or something similar). So yes, a VBR setting of some sort is clearly in iTunes' menu, but it doesn't do a whole heckuva lot.