Hello ,
It only depends where you listen to your music.
If you use your computer mainly to hear your CD's then encode them in full size in the
preference menu or if you use iTunes just to fill your iPod (or any other) then you need some
space and you can let iTunes encode it in mp4 which it does by default .

nice we

michel, July 13, 2008; 9:35 AM

by full size do you mean 256?

gcowhey, July 13, 2008; 10:49 AM

I personally go for Apple's AAC encoder. It's cleaner than an MP3, but still compresses the file pretty nicely. I think what Michel meant by full size was wav or aiff file. Both of those file types are relatively uncompressed - meaning they're HUGE. But if you've got the ear for it...they'll sound a lot better too.

Yeah, I did forget to mention that I up the sample rate for AAC too!

shehan23, July 14, 2008; 9:55 AM

Regarding the soundquality of iPods, I am not that happy with the standard AAC 128 kbps
encoding. Huge orchestral scores and deep bass sounds often sound distorted. So I switched
to 192 kbps stereo. MP3 is much poorer in sound, and Apple Lossless, AIFF or WAV should
give you CD quality but takes up a lot of your disc-space. So the compromise for me is AAC
192 kbps and I can't hear the difference with the original CD, even with expensive high-end
headphones. The soundfiles are about 4 times smaller than the original CD. Speaking of
headphones, these are also very important for the soundquality and are usually the
bottleneck. It's no use encoding your music into big files while using cheap earphones. I don't
use the iPod earphones because I don't think they are comfortable to wear and the quality is
not very good. I have a Sennheiser HD555. It's bulky on your head but the sound is very
good.

chris, July 13, 2008; 6:45 PM

I am archiving my complete collection so I used Apple Lossless but I plan to convert a copy of it to a lesser quality to use on a portable system

itsthenikita, July 14, 2008; 12:06 PM

Thanks guys.

btw a friend gave me some soundtracks in various formats - mp3, etc [his CD collection is
massive but not so oraganised in the import department] from his iTunes and if I convert them
to aac files should I just match the bit rate of original files - ie an mp3 at 128 and convert it to
an aac at 128 [ is there any point in making it 256 for example]
thanks

gcowhey, July 14, 2008; 8:55 PM

No, there's no point in converting a compressed file into a less compressed file. It's the same
thing as saving a low quality JPEG-image as a high quality JPEG. At best you get almost the
same quality, but probably it will be worse than the original.

chris, July 15, 2008; 6:19 AM