So, I’ve finally gotten tired of listening to all my music at 128kbps. I’m just missing immense amounts of fidelity in the low and high ends, and some dynamic differences. Most of my orchestral recordings just sound flat, as do a lot of other things.
My question is, what are you all using and at what resolution are you ripping your music at? I’ve got an Ipod, and about 26 gigs of music at 128kb/s. I’d like to still be able to fit it all on my Ipod, but want something more listenable.
Back when I first started ripping music, I noticed a big difference between 128k and 160k. If you have even halfway decent audio equipment, 128k sounds really bad. I deleted all the 128k stuff and re-ripped it at 160k. Much better.
The problem is, you’re going to have to re-rip all of your mp3’s. Given that you have 26gb, that’s going to take a long time. I noticed that if I ran other apps on my comp while I was ripping a cd, it would sometimes skip or get odd audio glitches on it. The 160k mp3’s also take up slightly more room. I’d guess your 26gb will go to at least 30gb, maybe as high as 35. ipod classic holds 80 or 160gb, depending on which version you have, so if you have a classic you’re still good.
Also, maybe it’s just me, but the stuff I ripped using itunes doesn’t seem to sound quite as good as the stuff I ripped before I got an ipod. You might want to experiment with ripping the same song using itunes and a different ripper to see how it sounds.
honestly 192 is the lowest I will go and I have some hearing loss, I prefer a hi bit rate vbr rip (Variable Bit Rate, it lowers and raises the bit rate based on the sound levels as the song rips, so it saves some space over a full 320br rip with no loss of quality)
that or Flacc which I have no idea if ipod supports or not.
and I dont have a ripper atm something wrong with my disc drive
I tend to use Audiograbber and LAME at 192 kbps, or for really critical listening, 256. I haven’t had any problems with that combination, although one CD had some crackling and popping on the MP3, which went away with a re-rip.
If i had a really good audio system, and wanted digital music that could take best advantage of it, i’d rip all of my CDs to FLAC, which doesn’t compress them as much as mp3, but which also is a lossless compression, meaning that you basically don;t lose any of the quality.
Now that hard drive space has gotten so cheap, FLAC is a real option. Someone with, say, 26Gigs of music at 128kbps should, in theory, be able to rip his or her whole collection to FLAC and fit it onto a 160-200 Gig hard drive. You can get such a drive now for under $100.
Of course, this doesn’t solve the problem of music quality on your iPod, because i don’t think they can play FLAC. In your case, i’d go with 256-320kbps mp3s, encoded using LAME.
I found the exact same thing, actually. I don’t have great speakers, but the last CD I ripped at 128 sounded horrible. Increasing it to 160 pretty well took care of that. Depending on your equipment and how much of an audiophile you are, I would imagine that 160 would take care of your needs in general. You may wish to rip the more sensitive stuff (like maybe the orchestral things you mentioned) a little higher, though.
I don’t do a ton of ripping, but I’ve always been partial to Winamp. I like LAME, as well.
I am by no means an audiophile, but I was under the impression that “cd quality” was 160kps. In other words, if you rip an audio cd at 320kps, you’re not going to get a better sound than you would if you ripped it at 160kps. Please feel free to enlighten me if I’m wrong though.
Variable bitrates would probably serve you well. I use Exact Audio Copy with the LAME encoder, ripping even at the highest variable bit-rate (V0, approx 320 - 256kb/s) produces less than 100MB per album. You could drop that down even further to a lower bitrate like V2 (approx 192 - 256kb/s) and not hear any difference, especially on an ipod.
