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iTunes import settings
- Thread starter wrxguy
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wrxguy said:
You are going to get answers of everything from 128kbps mp3 to Apple Lossless... iTMS sells songs at 128kbps AAC, which is = to ~160kbps mp3, and most people agree is "pretty good".
Apple Lossless is, as the name suggests, identical to the source and about half the space usage.
If you are looking for advice as to how you should import your music I would have to say that this is an entirely user dependant excersize. Each persons ears are different at hearing different distortions and changes in different compressions. Each person also has a different set of listening environments and equipment, which greatly effect what you end up hearing. Listening to music in a car on the highway for example it is going to be almost impossible to tell the difference between 128kbps mp3 and the original CD (for MOST people) as the amount of background noise is so high.
Listening to something on really nice headphones with a good headphone amp will be a different story all together. You should rip the same track at 128kbps AAC, 160kbps AAC, 192kbps AAC, 256kbps AAC, and lastly in Apple Lossless. Pick a song that ahs a wide range of sound types in it (or use a couple songs in your test). Load them all into your iPod and listen to them in the different places you are likely to listen to your music. Shuffle them automatically so you don't know which one you are hearing and then rate it with the 5 star built in rating system based on quality. After you listen to them all check the results and see at what point you were giving them the same quality rating.
That would be the best place for you to encode at, as it's using the least space for the best sound quality you personally can hear.
On the other hand if you were just curious and wanted to know what other people encode at for the sake of knowing, I have just wasted 5 minutes of my life when I could have said: 128kbps AAC (I have really poor hearing from years of abuse at shooting ranges and military explosives training
).
Currently 192 kbps (normal stereo) MP3, but that may go up.
It really depends on what the music is being pumped through. For instance, my computer's speakers (an oldish 2.1 Altec Lansing setup), car speakers, and iPod earbuds sound fine on 192 MP3, even most of the time on 128 MP3/AAC. After receiving a pair of ER-6i earphones, however, anything below 192 MP3 has noticeable quality issues. In my observation, the degradation in lower quality MP3 sounds more like added static or clipping whereas the degradation in AAC sounds more like a muffled sound.
It really depends on what the music is being pumped through. For instance, my computer's speakers (an oldish 2.1 Altec Lansing setup), car speakers, and iPod earbuds sound fine on 192 MP3, even most of the time on 128 MP3/AAC. After receiving a pair of ER-6i earphones, however, anything below 192 MP3 has noticeable quality issues. In my observation, the degradation in lower quality MP3 sounds more like added static or clipping whereas the degradation in AAC sounds more like a muffled sound.