Sound quality newbie here, so bear with me...

[Christian Otte]

I recently didn't know much about audio quality and stuff like that, but then I read some things about people complaining about the quality of AAC tracks and how you should choose a higher bit rate and so on. That got me thinking... I can see in my Preferences in iTunes that all of my music has been imported as AAC and the bitrate is 128. Would I get a better sound quality if I re-ripped my music as MP3s with a higher bitrate or would you suggest just changing the AAC bitrate when re-ripping?

Thanks in advance .

[Will F]

If you are a newbie and have headphones that cost less than $60 approx you wont really be able to tell the difference between the standard 128 kbs AAC from itunes and a better bitrate, as the phones wont do the sound quality justice.

However if you have good audiophile phones or plan to get some soon or in the future, the I would suggest that you go for slightly higher rate.

Now there is going to have to be a trade off as the higher the bitrate the larger the file size and the less you can fit on your ipod

I have got ER6i's and I am planning to get the Shure E4's or the new ultimate ears canalphones. These are pretty good and detailed phones. I am happy with 192 AAC, it is a preference though, If you are starting from scratch then this is the level I would go for it is detailed enough but wont sap up the gig space on your ipods Hard Drive

You might want to go for a lossy format that does not lose any quality from the CD's though the encoding but this will eat into the space on your ipod very quickly, and is for when you have golden ears and very expensive earphones.

It is up to you why dont you rip 1 song in to different formats and test it, see if you can hear the difference and make your decision.

Good luck

[Christian Otte]

Yeah, I'm actually thinking of getting some new headphones. I will be setting up my Logitech THX speakers soon, too, so then it might be a good idea to go for a better quality...

How many songs at approximately (sp?) three minutes each, but with a bitrate of 192 kbs, would an iPod with 20 GB be able to hold?

[Will F]

Oh and AAC is better than mp3 but AAC is specific to Apple stuff only

[Christian Otte]

Originally posted by Will F
Oh and AAC is better than mp3 but AAC is specific to Apple stuff only

Righty-o. So, if I want the AAC 192 kbs quality, but want to use the .mp3 format, which bitrate should I choose when ripping my songs as mp3s? Also, how many songs would a 20 GB iPod of said quality be able to hold?

[dragfree]

Unless you're deaf or listen to sounds made on a mixing board instead of music made by instruments, you will hear the difference between AAC@128 and better quality formats with even the standard iPod earbuds. There's a lot of misinformation about AAC, mostly promoted by those profiting from sale of AAC downloads. AAC was developed in the '90s to sound less screechy than MP3s at low bitrates suitable for streaming transmission of audio files over the internet. It's amazing that 128kbps AAC files sound as good as they do, but they're far from CD quality--not surprising, since they've sacrificed almost 80% of the audio information from CD in order to make such tiny files.

Even more amazing is how good AAC and LAME MP3s sound at higher bitrates. At 256kbps the files are still only one-fifth as big as the CD files, but the sound is very good indeed, and at 320kbps I find it very difficult to distinguish between them and Lossless or WAV files on the pod. If sound quality alone were at issue, I would probably be content with AAC@256--but the other issue is compatibility, and AAC is virtually proprietary to Apple, whereas MP3 has nearly universal support. So I use the LAME MP3 encoder, which gives me the best of both worlds--high sound quality in a lossy compression format with the widespread compatibility of MP3.

To learn more about this stuff, browse the threads here, and try ripping samples of the music you prefer (that does make a difference--techno won't be nearly as revealing of quality differences as orchestral music, for instance) in different codecs and bitrates, and then listening critically to make the best choice for you before ripping your entire collection.

[Christian Otte]

What is the LAME MP3 encoder?

[schmintan]

LAME is one algorithm to encode mp3s. there are a few, the other well known one is Fraunhofer. from a bit of research on the web, LAME is heild as the superior method of encoding mp3s, but the latter is supposedly good also. i only use LAME. i have media monkey and cdExtractor which both use lame to encode mp3s

[Christian Otte]

Ah, okay. What is wrong with encoding in iTunes?

[porieux]

AAC proprietary to Apple? That's silly.

[Teqnilogik]

Originally posted by Christian Otte
Ah, okay. What is wrong with encoding in iTunes?

iTunes uses the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder which is considered inferior to the quality of the LAME encoder. LAME will provide you with the highest quality MP3 encodes possible. LAME has presets that you can use. These presets will provide different quality. Preset Medium will get you almost CD quality sound at bit rates of around 160 kbps, Preset Standard will get you equivalent to CD quality sound at bit rates around 192 kbps, Preset Extreme provides a little higher quality than Preset Standard at bit rates of around 250 kbps, and Preset Insane will get you 320 kbps MP3 which is the highest quality possible with MP3.

The other downside to using iTunes to rip is the possibility of getting screwed up rips. iTunes doesn't have great error correction or any way to verify that your rip was good. For this reason, many people use Exact Audio Copy to rip their CDs. You can get EAC up to encoder MP3s and virtually any other format. Check out my Exact Audio Copy guide for more info.

[dragfree]

Originally posted by porieux
AAC proprietary to Apple? That's silly.

Especially if you take it out of context. There was a qualifier, virtually, and the comment was made in relation to audio formats for playback on iPod specifically and DAPs in general. To the best of my knowledge, none of the iPod's established competitors--Creative, iRiver, Rio--support AAC playback. If there are other DAPs that support AAC at this time I will be happy to learn about them.

Of course AAC is not literally proprietary to Apple. They didn't develop it. (Fraunhofer, Sony, Dolby, & ATT/Lucent did.) Apple only licensed it recently to attach their DRM protection to when they went into the digital download business with the iTunes Music Store.

[Christian Otte]

Originally posted by Teqnilogik
iTunes uses the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder which is considered inferior to the quality of the LAME encoder. LAME will provide you with the highest quality MP3 encodes possible. LAME has presets that you can use. These presets will provide different quality. Preset Medium will get you almost CD quality sound at bit rates of around 160 kbps, Preset Standard will get you equivalent to CD quality sound at bit rates around 192 kbps, Preset Extreme provides a little higher quality than Preset Standard at bit rates of around 250 kbps, and Preset Insane will get you 320 kbps MP3 which is the highest quality possible with MP3.

Ah, excellent! Well, if I use Preset Standard, how many MB would a song at around 3 minutes fill?

[Christian Otte]

Originally posted by Christian Otte
Ah, excellent! Well, if I use Preset Standard, how many MB would a song at around 3 minutes fill?

Ah, never mind, I saw the sticky.

Otherwise, thanks a lot for the help, guys - I appreciate it !

[kornchild2002]

Using EAC and the current Lame mp3 encoder (3.96.1) will provide results that are the same, if not very similar, to AAC. With recent tests the current Lame mp3 encoder was statistically the same as the iTunes AAC encoder at the 128kbps bitrate. At the 192kbps bitrate the differences are slim to none. The --alt-preset standard setting with Lame will provide better quality than a 192kbps CBR mp3 yet take up the same amount of space. Just looking at the average song, a 3 minute song should take up between 4-5 mb depending on complexity.

Just follow Teqnilogik's signature for the steps to setting up EAC with Lame.