Ripping cd questions: 160kps vs 256kps vs apple lossless

Factual Questions
1

When ripping music cd’s to mp3’s, is there a noticeable difference in sound quality between 160kps and 256kps? I ripped my mp3’s in 160kps, mostly play them through my ipod, and am fairly happy with the sound. But I’m considering re-ripping them if it would give me better sound quality. What about the “apple lossless encoding” that itunes uses? I know I wouldn’t be able to use the resulting files with any other player, but that’s ok.

There have been some advances in music file technology since I ripped most of my music (early 2000’s) and I was wondering if it would be worth it to go back and redo them.

2

My guess is that you would not notice any improvement. You would only be able to hear it if you were listening with very good speakers or headphones in a quiet environment. 160 kbps is already enough to remove a lot of the artifacts that are audible at 128 kbps. Lossless is overkill.

IME, 128 kbps mp3s sound much worse than high quality variable bit rates MP3s (around 200 kbps) if I’m listening at home with good bookshelf speakers, but I can’t tell the difference through my car speakers.

3

The nice thing about Apple Lossless files is that you can always transcode them into any other format in the future without a loss in quality. Obviously, this is much easier than swapping several hundred CDs into your computer. However, the files do take up more space than lossy compression - somewhere between 2 and 5 times as large as an MP3/AAC file, depending on the bitrate.

When I digitized my CD collection, I converted everything into Apple Lossless, and put those files on my external drive (with backups, of course).

Then, I made 256 kbps AAC versions of all the Apple Lossless files, and put those into my iTunes library. This way, these do not take up excessive space on my hard drive / iPhone, but I still have the original versions in case I want to switch to another format in the future (or in case I buy some high-end stereo hardware and want to listen to the lossless files directly).

Ripping all my CDs into Apple Lossless took about a week. Once they were on my computer, the AAC versions were generated overnight. Again, the nice thing is that if you ever decide to switch to another format in the future (including other lossless formats), you don’t have to re-rip all your CDs.

4

To expand on Absolute.

Lossless formats are just that. You get an a copy of what you hear on the CD. There are several different lossless formats

FLAC, WavPack, APE are the big ones on the Internet. You see them mostly for P2P groups.

WMA and Apple also make lossless formats. The trick is the extension. You can tell this song

Physical.flac, Physical.ape, Physical.wv are lossless files just by their extensions.

Apple and Microsoft make lossless formats as well. They are WMA-Lossless and ALAC or Apple Lossless Audio Codec. However WMA-Lossless uses .wma as it’s extension and Apple used .mp4 (or .m4a) as their file extension.

So if you saw Physical.wma or Physical.a4a you can’t tell if you’re getting lossy or lossless formats.

If you want to rip the best ripper is EAC (Exact Audio Copy), it’s a bit hard to set up but you can go to Hydrogen Audio (dot) Com and this is the set up Wiki

There are two type of files lossless which means without loss of quality and lossy which always entails some loss.

First of all you have to decide if you want to use MP3 or m4a or WMA. MP3 is the most popular format and you won’t find a player that can’t play it. m4a and wma come in second and third.

All are roughly equal.

The first thing you will have to think about is bit rate. For an mp3 about the lowest decent quality rip you can do is 128. A spoken disc like a book on tape can be ripped at 16kbs so you can see the difference.

A rate of 192kbs is the “average” standard bit rate for a pop song, that compromises between quality and file size. BUT here’s the most important thing, two factors come into play.

If you only listen to your mp3s via headphones, 192kbs is probably too much since head phones are that sensitive anyway. You probably can go lower and still have it sound good. 320kbs is the highest speed you should rip at. It’s called “near CD quality.” You can rip at higher points, but listening tests reveal after 320 there’s no difference in quality.

Next you have to decide what KIND of bit rate. There is constant bit rate (CBR), average bit rate (ABR) and variable bit rate (VBR).

A constant bit rate is just that, it encodes the song at the same rate for the entire song. This can be bad because not all song need to have high bit rates for the whole song. For instance, maybe the song has a spoken part. This can cause size and even quality issues.

If you chose ABR, you choose a bit rate, say 192kbs. The program encoding makes sure you will get this 192 when the songs encoded. This again, maybe give you to big a file or chop some qauality off.

This is why VBR was developed and popularly used. Variable bit rate means, the program WILL TRY to encode at the rate given, but unlike ABR isn’t bound to produce those results.

For instance I love Jo Stafford. She’s a singer from the WWII era and a lot of her records are just her voice and a piano. So if I run 192VBR to encode her song the result might be 100kbs. Why the difference? Because most of the record is just a voice and a piano and the encoder knows it doesn’t NEED to go up that high to get quality encodes.

So what bit rate should you use? It gets worse. Not all music is equal. If you like heavy metal or classical music, you’re gonna almost have to use 320kbs to encode those songs. You can tell if you use less. Because those types of music are sensitive to bit rates and need as high a bit rate as possible. But if you like Jo Stafford (and a lot of her stuff is mono) you can get by on 100kbs.

So you have to choose which codec (coder/decoder) to use? Mp3, m4a, wma, etc. Then you have to choose your type of bit rate (vbr, cbr, abr), then you have to choose your bit rate itself (128kbs - 320kbs)

That’s all right? No, you have to choose your encoder. You see not all encoders are equal. MP3’s made with LAME to encode are rated the best. There are a lot of mp3 encoders out there and lame consistently comes in first.

If you go with m4a (apple) you also have a choice. The mp4 encoder used in iTunes is ranked second best after the mp4 encoder made by Nero. So you probably want to use Nero’s mp4 encoder to do it if you want to go mp4.

What I did is I put all my music in lossless (Wavepack) and I use a program called dbPoweramp to convert them.

I would not recommend using Apple Lossless - ALAC to store lossless. The reason for this is apple doesn’t use a checksum in it’s encoded files. Thus while it’s not likely it IS possible for you to have perfect lossless files and over the years they can be corrupted.

And you can’t tell because there is no checksum. WavePack and FLAC use checksums so you can tell when you back up your files if there has been any corruption to the file.

If EAC is a bit much for you, I recommend dbPoweramp. It’s not a free program but it’s the next best thing to EAC and it’s so easy to use and setup. It’s a powerful program and it works great. But unlike EAC it ain’t free

5

That sounds like the right answer to me.

6

If you use Windows, you can use the “ABX Comparator” component for the foobar2000 media player to test for yourself if you can really hear a difference between 2 files:

7

My son is a professional musician and works with state of the art recording and editing equipment. I rip all my CD’s at whatever the highest rate the program I happen to be using allows. He continually tells me that I literally will not be able to tell any difference above 256K – and possibly not even that.

8

I personally use FLAC and can hear a difference even on my shitty desktop speakers over 256kbps MP3. If I were you, I would rip each CD twice- once in FLAC for archival and home listening purposes, and once in 256 kbps for iPod or other small-space usage. I have no experience with Apple lossless so I can’t speak on that, but I definitely can hear a difference with FLAC.

Also, a great program to use is FreeRip.

9

If you’re on a Mac and want to do lossless, I strongly recommend Apple Lossless over FLAC. I ripped about 50 CDs to FLAC before messing around with converting them to other formats, and I discovered that the FLAC transcoding support on the Mac is pretty poor. iTunes doesn’t do it, and all of the third-party apps I tried were either totally broken or at least awful. It’s not that it’s impossible to work with FLAC on Mac, but it’s swimming against the stream and I don’t think there’s a lot of benefit to it. The reason I originally picked FLAC instead of Apple Lossless was that I thought it would be more future proof. But if I can’t use it today, I don’t give a F what I can do with it 10 years from now.

10

The question of what you can hear continues to rage. There are a few things to appreciate when people claim that you either can or can’t hear the difference.

The sort of music matters a lot. Modern popular music’s production, and especially mastering values have led to a decade or more of recordings with very poor dynamic range. Very radio friendly, easy to listen to with mediocre headphones, and something that most professional recording engineers hate, but produce because that is what the artists, their producers, and it seems, a lot of the market, expects. It is quite hard to hear a difference in bit rates on this stuff.

More complex sounds need a higher bit rate to code. A very interesting thing is to look at the size of lossless files for say chamber music versus a full orchestra versus a rock band. There can be a two to one variation. The chamber music compresses easily. In general music with more random noise compresses less. Percussion doesn’t compress well.

Finally, there are artefacts you can learn to look for that reveal the nature of the compression. This is where the subject of audibility can be hard to justify. You can be taught what to listen for, and once you know how to recognise it, it becomes reasonably easy to identify the compressed stream. Things like the length of time you can hear the decay of the sound after they stop playing. Also aspects of percussive sounds that can sound splashy, or otherwise not quite right. Things that if you had never had pointed out to you, you might never pick.

Personally I rip everything lossless with the Apple codec. Disk is cheap. I fit over 500 CD’s of music on an iPod classic. Critical listening is done with over $2000 worth of DAC, heaphone amp and headphones, off my laptop. So I get picky.

11

I’d recommend using the LAME encoder with a VBR setting. The highest VBR setting will get you a the best sound quality with a file size that’s usually less than a 256 kbps CBR file.

There’s a good guide here: LAME - Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase

12

I agree with ovalseven. V0 encoded with LAME is IMO the best compromise between quality and file size.

13

Wow, lots of very helpful and informative posts here. Thanks guys!
<Petitions for some headbanger smileys>

14

iTunes Match is something you might want to consider, particularly if you have a very large collection and want the higher bit rate, but don’t want to take the time loading and ejecting all those CDs.

For $25/year, Match will scan your music library and immediately give you access to unprotected 256 Kbps aac versions of your songs (if those songs are available for sale in the iTunes store) no matter what bit rate they were originally encoded. So, if you made the mistake of encoding a CD at 96 Kbps back in 1999 and then lost the CD, you will now have a brand new, higher quality version available in your iCloud music library. You can download the new 256 Kbps versions and keep them forever.

Not too bad a deal if you have a large collection but not the time/patience to encode them yourself. The Match service won’t be out until the Fall, however.

15

Well lossless is lossless and it doesn’t matter, again, with Apple Lossless, there isn’t the checksum imbeded so you have to use some sort of work around to make sure you files won’t corrupt over time.

I have wavpack, and can simply run a wavpack check on all my files. It will tell me if over time any of my lossless files are corrupted. FLAC also has FLAC checker which will tell you if your FLAC becomes corrupted.

As for speeds, as I said, there’s a ton of variable. The type of music you like, the encoder, the way you listen (speaker vs headphones) and so forth. In the end, pic the one you like.

With storage being so cheap, a GB can be had for like $50.00 it just makes sense to rip everything to lossless then convert to mp4 or or mp3 as you need to fill up your individual players.

16

Personally, I can’t tell a difference once I get past 192k on all but the most controlled of audio situations. That is, if I’m listening through my iPod, my computer speakers, or car stereo, it doesn’t make a difference. 128k is obvious (especially in the high frequencies), and 160k is still somewhat bothersome. But do some tests, use your own ears, and see what works for you.