Music formats & iTunes

Slice

Hi, can anyone help me out with this...

What format should I rip my music from CDs onto iTunes for best sound quality?

Also, what format is music downloaded from the Music Store saved as?

Bard

Slice wrote:

Hi, can anyone help me out with this...

What format should I rip my music from CDs onto iTunes for best sound quality?

Whatever format you like, just make sure the bitrate is high enough.

Also, what format is music downloaded from the Music Store saved as?

AAC usually but you can save them as MP3 also.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60920#faq16

TommyGun

Slice,
As far as know Apple recommend the .aac format. That is the format that they sell there tunes in.

"All music on the iTunes Music Store is encoded in the industry-standard AAC audio format at 128 kilobits per second which enables smaller files and faster download times while rivaling CD-quality sound superior to the quality of MP3 files at the same size. The AAC audio format, developed by Dolby, was also adopted to provide the audio encoding for the industry-standard MPEG-4 video format. "

Slice

Oh okay/ Thanks, that's enlighten a things a bit.

I dunno but I was under the impression that AAC format is a compromise on CD quality.

TommyGun

Slice,
Nearly very encoding is a compromise on CD quality.
Example a CD contains on average 13 songs on 700MB. Most encoded music reduces this to approx. 4MB per song. It can only do this by eliminating extra information on the CD e.g. wavelengths that can not be heard by humans.

What you are looking for is the best encoding format that gives the best quality per MB used. AAC is as good as any. It is generally considered better than .MP3. There are lossless formats for audio but would use up alot of space( like the CD).

The article below might help your understanding -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_file_format

Slice

Thanks TommyGuy, that's great.

All the files in my itunes music folder at the moment appear to be saved as MP4 - so should I convert to AAC and would that save more space? It wouldn't be a reduction in quality would it?

TommyGun

Slice,
I would leave it alone. When you convert from format to format you lose quality.

Chose the format you want to use. And use that going forward.

Also as Bard has said the bit rate is importent you can set this when you are downloading you CD's. Chose the highest you can get away with and never below 128 Kbps. I use 160. As normal the higer the rate the larger the file size per song will be.

Tommy

Bard

Well, I use MP3 @ 192Kbps for pretty much everything. If you can afford the slight extra bit of disk space required, it's a decent quality setting for music.

If what you're encoding is voice only, however, there's no harm in saving on file size by using bitrates as low as 96Kbps.

Blisterman

I'd recommend Mp3, as if you change MP3 Player, you can still play them no matter what.