Quote:   Actually FLAC is the smaller option at level 5 or 6 that most frontends default to, but the difference is minimal.  Both use variable bitrate in the same way that lossless audio can be variable bitrate, they maintain whatever amount of information is required to reproduce the...

The chances you'll be able to tell a difference are slim to none.  I'd go with either 256 AAC or LAME MP3 V0, but I would also recommend that you take some time and perform an ABX test, you'd be surprised how low you can go before you start being able to discern the files from their lossless...

Quote: Out of curiosity I just took a gander at his previous posts, and while a lot of them mention Apple products (since he owns iPods and a Sandisk), none of them are pro-Apple spamming and he's not even overly negative about other players (nor does he mention Apple in every one)...

Quote: Music doesn't play from the HDD, it plays from the buffer.  There's no perceptible HDD activity when music is being played.  

With the same source material, I couldn't tell any real audible difference in SQ between my 5.5G iPod Video and a new iPod Classic (either with Brainwavz M4's or Grado 225i's + PA2V2 amp).  I think people are getting a bit too caught up in that $1-5 piece of silicon when it comes to the Classic...

Quote: Actually I'm pretty sure he was being facetious, haha.

I can't really imagine that SSD vs HDD would actually have an audible difference.  And since there's no ABX anywhere that I know of to prove it, I don't see a reason to even entertain the possibility.  There are plenty of other quantifiable benefits to SSD, though.

Indeed, foobar2000 is great for this.  My archive is FLAC images with cuesheets, I use foobar2000 to encode single lossy tracks from those images.

Google Music is 320kbps MP3.

Hey all,   I've been interested in trying out qaac lately, and reading the documentation at the website http://sites.google.com/site/qaacpage/home, I've come up with the following settings:   -V127 --silent - -o %d That creates TVBR files with ~320kbps.  For ~256kbps files, you'd want...

Quote: It's not a matter of being ripped off, it's a matter of two different calculations being used.  Hard drive and storage manufacturers use a power of ten decimal measure where 1000 bytes is a kilobyte, whereas operating systems use the power of two binary calculation of 1024 bytes...

I rip using EAC secure mode test/copy with AccurateRip, single tracks compressed to FLAC, and generate CUE sheets in case I want to reproduce the master later.  Everything else is done in foobar2000 and mp3tag from there on out (tagging, conversion, etc).

I've been considering grabbing a pair of V6 or 7506's for portable use since I don't really like IEM's.  I absolutely adore my Grado 225i's, but they leak so much I can't use them anywhere except at home. 

dbPoweramp would work for what you want.  The only reason I don't use it is that I rip my archives to FLAC image + CUE, and EAC is still more elegant for that.

Quote:   Absolutely.  I just recently got the Clip+, I use it with Vorbis -q8.0 files and a PA2V2 with SR 225i's and it sounds fantastic.