SkippyMcHaggis
New member
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2003
- Messages
- 65
- Points
- 0
i seem to recall having read somewhere that iTunes goes back to the original masters to make their 128kbps aac files. is this true? if it is it might explain something i noticed today.
i've been playing around with comparing mp3 and aac files to see which one i like best, and to finally determine for myself if there is a difference. i'll spare the details of my comparison, they might not be the best, but they work fine for me.
i've always ripped my files as 320kbps mp3's because quality has always been more important than overall size. a 9 meg file that is nearly indistingushable from cd audio beats the pants off a distorted 128kpbs file that i can cram a million of onto a cd.
i'm probably the perfect HD audio player customer.
so i sat around comparing various songs in 320 and 256 mp3, just to hear the difference between them. there is a noticable difference. i've never understood how people think 192 is cd quality...
i then took the songs and ripped them (from cd sources) to 256 aac. i then compared the 320 mp3 file and the 256 aac file. there are differences but for the sake of sanity i'd say they are "equivalent" in quality, not identical. i decided i'd re-rip everything i have to 256aac and save about 10% HD space. (at 500+ albums, that's a chore, but it's also a fair chunk of space).
then a friend of mine shared an iTunes song with me. (128aac). i then compared it to a 320kbps mp3 i had of the same song. while not identical, the aac file was really quite similar, in some ways it was better. (if you get a chance to try it with a song, do it and let me know if you agree.)
this puzzled me. so i sat and thought about it a bit and remembered the comments about the original master sourcing.
if it's true, i can see why an itunes 128aac file is really very high quality compared to a cd-sourced rip. studio masters are huge, raw, uncompressed data files. (if you've got John Mayer's Heavier Things album, look at the album art and there's a chart that shows the song file sizes from the studio masters.)
a compression of that is gonna be fairly close to a lossy compression rip of an aiff or wav file, due to the simple fact that it's a compression of a compressed file.
i may be wrong. my methodology may be flawed. but that's what i've noticed today. feel free to comment.
Skip
i've been playing around with comparing mp3 and aac files to see which one i like best, and to finally determine for myself if there is a difference. i'll spare the details of my comparison, they might not be the best, but they work fine for me.
i've always ripped my files as 320kbps mp3's because quality has always been more important than overall size. a 9 meg file that is nearly indistingushable from cd audio beats the pants off a distorted 128kpbs file that i can cram a million of onto a cd.
i'm probably the perfect HD audio player customer.
so i sat around comparing various songs in 320 and 256 mp3, just to hear the difference between them. there is a noticable difference. i've never understood how people think 192 is cd quality...
i then took the songs and ripped them (from cd sources) to 256 aac. i then compared the 320 mp3 file and the 256 aac file. there are differences but for the sake of sanity i'd say they are "equivalent" in quality, not identical. i decided i'd re-rip everything i have to 256aac and save about 10% HD space. (at 500+ albums, that's a chore, but it's also a fair chunk of space).
then a friend of mine shared an iTunes song with me. (128aac). i then compared it to a 320kbps mp3 i had of the same song. while not identical, the aac file was really quite similar, in some ways it was better. (if you get a chance to try it with a song, do it and let me know if you agree.)
this puzzled me. so i sat and thought about it a bit and remembered the comments about the original master sourcing.
if it's true, i can see why an itunes 128aac file is really very high quality compared to a cd-sourced rip. studio masters are huge, raw, uncompressed data files. (if you've got John Mayer's Heavier Things album, look at the album art and there's a chart that shows the song file sizes from the studio masters.)
a compression of that is gonna be fairly close to a lossy compression rip of an aiff or wav file, due to the simple fact that it's a compression of a compressed file.
i may be wrong. my methodology may be flawed. but that's what i've noticed today. feel free to comment.
Skip