the best music format?

i just got a new imac (my first apple if i may add) and i wanna rip my entire cd collection to my computer. any opinions on what file type is the best and bitrate. i have about 60 gigs from my pc that im transferring, not including my cds. i have 200 gigs to spare on this so im not really worried about the space.

i want to finally organize my music collection the right way.

ps. this thing is a godsend. it came today and the hour i went out with my friends i just kept thinking about it. thank you apple. i dont know what im gonna do for 12 hours tomorrow while im at work without it.

I would seriously consider taking one or several cd's and ripping them at various formats and bitrates and determine where YOUR sweet spot is because you're going to get a hundred different opinions.

Yes, it all depends on how much disk space you want to use, how sensitive your ears are to little imperfections (inevitable in any lossy compression like AAC or MP3) or whatever.

I use 320Kb VBR MP3, which uses between 40 and 80MB for an album and sounds very good to my ears. Some people say 192Kb VBR sounds as good but, like Dmitri said, it's personal preference.

Hundreds of opinions is right! I would suggest a middle road. The 128 KB/s rate is the lowest choice, so I would nix that. The 300+ rates are quite high, hence increase file size. I would recommend (and this is what I use myself) the 256 KB/s MP3 format. I can't hear a difference between this and the higher rates, but I can hear the difference between this and 128 KB/s rate, although only occassionally.

This is just opinion - the way *I* sized up and solved this problem. As this post started, it is really a very subjective call.

your questions makes me think of this " what tastes better an apple or an orange?"

bottom line, play around with different formats and pick what you think is best and what best suits your needs.

kodorsean said:

your questions makes me think of this " what tastes better an apple or an orange?"

Click to expand...

I think the fact that it's posted on this forum means that the answer is 'an Apple'

I agree with taking the time to mess around and figure out what you like... if you have the time to do it.

Personally, I stick with .mp3 files because I feel less inhibited by possible DRM issues that could come up with AAC and especially the dreaded WMA.

Apple claims that AAC has the same sound quality at a lower file size as mp3s of the same bitrate, but it's not a huge difference per song (a huge library could be different, though).

I've heard it said that 128 is 'CD quality', but I've also heard something about how 128 chops the frequencies at the listenable range of the human ear, but it's still detectable. If that makes any sense... Anyway, I stick with 192 for my personal stuff, and I usually recommend that people use 192 or higher.

I reckon 192 is definitely the lower limit if you are using anything other than the stock headphones. Most of my music is in either 192 or 256 (generally acoustic stuff as that tends to take a bigger hit from compression) and it all sounds good to me (and I use pretty decent shure earphones aswell).

I reckon you can get away with lower bitrates with portables as there will always be some outside sound finding its way it (no matter how good noise cancelling or sound isolating headphones you have). Just my thoughts anyway!

xwonderboy85x, .WAV is the only true CD Quality as it is exactly the CD track, hence the files being 50mb or so. Anything else has at least some sort of compression in it.

When I was trying out a record deck in a Hifi store a few months ago, the demo guy said something about a new format based on DVD that is an exact bit-by-bit reproduction of the original recording, basically Vinyl on DVD...so you get all the sound quality of Vinyl and all the robustness of CD/DVD...sound like a great format to me!

Since music files straight from a CD are in .aiff, I always thought that was the best quality. Maybe it isn't the case, then?

Nope, it's not. CD's are compressed quite a bit from studio recordings, which can be stored at 24bit 512KHz audio. I think this is why no matter what you do, some tracks ripped straight from CD to 128AAC don't sound quite as good as the iTunes Store rip at the same encoding.

There is DVD-Audio and SACD which have both flopped because no players support them

I try to keep all of my music in FLAC, but since that doesn't work in iTunes the stuff that I want to keep in my library I use LAME encoding at V0

http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/

Dimitri said:

Nope, it's not. CD's are compressed quite a bit from studio recordings, which can be stored at 24bit 512KHz audio. I think this is why no matter what you do, some tracks ripped straight from CD to 128AAC don't sound quite as good as the iTunes Store rip at the same encoding.

Click to expand...

Wow! Ok so if I should ever connect my turntable and make CDs from my old vinyls, I'll have to be extra careful before burning the tunes and make tests, right?

We wanted to buy a Tascam and connect it to our hifi and burn straight from there (guess that solution would be less tedious than connecting to the Mac, but more expensive?) but now it looks like a tossup between a FireWave and another CD burner... Can't remember the name right now, will have to go back to our hifi store anyway to re-investigate all this.

thanks for all the replies everybody ive been at work all day so i havent tried anything yet. but at least i have a better idea of what to do now than i did before.

http://alpharuin.blogspot.com/2006/01/guide-itunes-lame-correct-way.html

http://lame.sourceforge.net/about.php - There is some more info on LAME

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=LAME

One additional wiki that can be very educational