ACC vs MP3 for IPOD encoding

[cheap]

Hey guys, finally got myself an ipod video cus I couldn't stand driving long haul without music any more. I'm not one of those trend bandwaggon people but there seriously is nothing out there that will compete with iPod right now. I would've loved to have bought a creative mp3 player with better sound, similar size and similar storage, but the only other mp3 player which is 60gigs that I found was the size of the brick (literally, only half as thick as brick maybe). Apple seems to have wiped out almost all the competition. I remember couple years back there were a whole lot more mp3 players.

Anyway, my question is, what encoding do I use when ripping cds? Itunes does ACC and MP3, I've never heard about ACC. And which bit rate do you suggest I use? I'm not audiophile and I don't want to use 320 obviously because of crazy file size, but if there's a nice medium noticable quality/size trade off above 128 I would go for it.

Thanx.

 

[Schadenfroh]

I would suggest ripping using CDex or EAC with the LAME encoder instead of iTunes for ripping. MP3 is your best bet for portability and compatibility. It is a shame that the iPod does not support FLAC

You can try 192K and see if you like the way it sounds, if not head up to 256K.

 

[CKent]

If you ever decide you want a non-Apple player, it won't play aac. Not one out there does, afaik. For that matter, many PC software players won't play it either, at least without a plugin.

 

[cheap]

Well, I think compatibility is a moot point since there's no easy way to get your music back from ipod. I can see the drive in windows, but it's got tons of folders for music and it would be time consuming to go through all of them and copy them back. Not to mention the file names are cryptic and they store song/album info somwhere else in the database. If I change players, I'll have to rerip all CDs over again, unless there's a 3rd party program which I don't know about.

 

[BDawg]

Wouldn't you store copies of your music on your PC?

I encode mp3s for my iPod with EAC + LAME using around a 192kbps VBR.

I do use iTunes to manage my mp3s though. Nothing beats it for interfacing with your iPod.

 

[cheap]

I guess I could leave them on pc, but I would never listen to them, since I got better things to do. But I drive a rig coast to coast, that's when I have plenty of time

 

[BDawg]

If nothing else, it's a backup.

 

[HN]

Originally posted by: cheap
Well, I think compatibility is a moot point since there's no easy way to get your music back from ipod. I can see the drive in windows, but it's got tons of folders for music and it would be time consuming to go through all of them and copy them back. Not to mention the file names are cryptic and they store song/album info somwhere else in the database. If I change players, I'll have to rerip all CDs over again, unless there's a 3rd party program which I don't know about.

SharePod
I just save the .exe in the ipod and run it off of there so i always have it

 

[torpid]

There's lots of ways to get music back from your pod. Just had to do this two days ago when some songs inexplicably were corrupted on my hard drive, which passed all error checks. Just fired up anapod and dragged from the ipod to my hard drive.

I prefer AAC for the sound quality. If I ever switch to a non-AAC player I'm going to be hosed anyway since I've purchased some songs on iTunes. Although I suppose I could burn to CD then losslessly encode.

 

[ForumMaster]

just for you information, AAC, unlike many people think, has nothing to do with apple. it's an acronym for Advanced Audio Codec. it is the next generation music file from the mpeg group. it is Mpeg-4 music instead of Mpeg 2 music. And iPods have the best sound quailty so i don't know what you are crying about. Look here on Wiki.. AAC is better then Mp3 so you can rip at lower bitrates and it will have equal sound quality to higer bitrate mp3 files. 128k in AAC should be equal to about double in mp3.

 

[cheap]

Thanx for clearing that up ForumMaster. I'll take higher quality sound at the same file size any day over compatibility. Plus, if it's really next gen format, more and more players will start supporting it.

One more question. I have a bunch of international mp3 disks. Russian to be specific. I have all the Cyrillic fonts installed and stuff but for some reason when I add them to library in iTunes, titles and albums come out gibberish. Same thing when I dump them on my ipod. Seems like tags are made with some other god knows what font. Is there any way to figure out the font and run some kind of conversion to the font that iPod and Itunes understand? I did some searching on the net but didn't find anything usefull.

Thanx.