iPod Looking for a good AAC encoder

[yourdream]

I am looking for a good AAC encoder. One that will not lower the quality of a music file.

If I use the create aac version in iTunes with a .mp3 file, will I lose quality of the new file after iTunes convert the original mp3 file to aac? And this is known as encoding right? One last question, the original mp3 file will still have the original quality, right?

 

[Will_reed]

When you encode a file you are essentially creating a new file out of the old one, you will not lose the old Mp3 it will be just as you left it.
As for the resulting AAC file, It will NEVER be the exact same quality as the original MP3 it can only ever sound close too or worse then the MP3 file since it is not made from the original uncompressed file like the MP3 was.
This is the simple nature of encoding, if you want an AAC file that sounds better then the MP3 then you are just going to have to go back to the source which in most cases is a CD.

as for the app, just use itunes.

 

[hotcheese]

AAC and MP3 are formats that are designed to reduce the size of your (music) files. How this is done is by using complex algorithms, but the end result is that the more your file size decreases, the more the quality of your music also reduces.

If you are attempting to convert from MP3 to AAC because you have heard AAC is better quality than MP3 and so you want to increase the quality of the MP3 then that is not going to happen.

If you take a file in its original format (i.e. AIFF or WAV) and convert it to an MP3 and also to an AAC at the same bitrate then the AAC version will give you better quality than the MP3, but both will be less quality than the original.

If you convert from MP3 to AAC you can't increase quality, you can't put back something which has already been taken away.


If you want the best quality files you need to keep them in AIFF or WAV format, if you have lots of files and the total size is too big to fit on an iPod, then that is what the purpose of MP3 and AAC etc. encodings is for - to reduce the file size so you can fit more onto your iPod.

 

[Michael CM1]

I would venture that more than 99 percent of the people who use music will NEVER tell the difference between even a 128k MP3, let alone the 256k AAC format that iTunes plus uses. Don't forget that CDs just use 2-channel audio, the same technology they have used for a couple of decades. You can find MUCH better sound quality on DVD, which I believe uses a compressed audio format. If you want to go psycho, find something on Blu-ray, which is uncompressed.

If you use speakers that didn't cost hundreds of dollars, you aren't going to notice the difference in audio between uncompressed and AAC. Even if you can find some slight difference, it's not worth the extra storage space needed to use lossless formats.