[South_Korean]

all my music files are crappy 128kbs mp3's. im sad. would converting to AAC be better than wat i have now?

 

[davidd]

no, it'd probably make it worse

you would have to re-rip the actual cd's to aac if you want better quality

 

[~Kaotic~]

like davidd says. or re ripped to 192kbps and above bitrates.

 

[mrarroyo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by South_Korean all my music files are crappy 128kbs mp3's. im sad. would converting to AAC be better than wat i have now?

I can understand your dilema, when I started and did not know any better I ripped the first 400 cd to 128 kbs

The last 300 or so I am doing at 192 variable bit rate set at highest quality, which means a lot of my songs are ripped at 320 kbs or 256 kbs. One day I will go back and start re-ripping those 400 cd's

 

[warpdriver]

Quote:

Originally Posted by South_Korean all my music files are crappy 128kbs mp3's. im sad. would converting to AAC be better than wat i have now?

Nope. Either rerip from scratch or leave your music files as is.

AAC cannot restore information that was lost in the first conversion to MP3.

 

[South_Korean]

boo, thumbs down. well, heres what ive done, ive made two copies, one set AAC, and the other my old files. i cant tell the difference lol.

 

[MrSlacker]

once the quality is lost, you cant just get it from the air..

 

[bigshot]

If you re-rip, I think you'll find that AAC 192 is about the same filesize, but sounds MUCH better.

See ya
Steve

 

[rauer]

I've preached this before: if you end up re-ripping your collection, I think you should do it lossless (FLAC, APE, whatever). HD space is cheap and converting your lossless files to the current fav lossy codec is much less of an effort that re-ripping them again. You may think that 192kbps or even 320 kbps MP3 is good enough. I'm sure it is - today. What if in six months there will be a new fabulous DAP everybody MUST get, but it only plays AAC or only plays AAC at the best technical quality. Are you willing to do the ripping then again? And possibly again after that.

And backup the collection! HDs fail.

 

[breez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot If you re-rip, I think you'll find that AAC 192 is about the same filesize, but sounds MUCH better. See ya Steve

Not quite sure what you mean, but 192kbps files are of course bigger than the 128kbps files he now has.

 

[bigshot]

AAC files are 20 - 30% smaller than MP3s at the same bitrate, so generally AACs at one notch above are the same file size as MP3.

See ya
Steve

 

[breez]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigshot AAC files are 20 - 30% smaller than MP3s at the same bitrate, so generally AACs at one notch above are the same file size as MP3. See ya Steve

That doesn't make any sense. Maybe you have mistaken bitrate for quality? Bitrate alone defines how big the files will be.

192kbps = 192 kilobits per second and hence every 192kbps file will be the same size for same lengths of music (give or take few Kb for tagging and possible album art).

 

[bigshot]

I don't know how they do it... perhaps there is on the fly compression or redundant data, like with zip or sit files going on. But 192 AAC files are significantly smaller than 192 MP3 files in addition to sounding better.

See ya
Steve

 

[K2Grey]

Of course, the other problem with ripping to 320kbps is if you find out you're running out of space on your PDAP, and need to lower the quality a bit

But yeah, if you have HD space then FLAC ripping is always optimal, so you can cycle between various qualities of LAME, OGG, AAC, blah blah depending on your mood or flavor of the month.

 

[myself, aka me]

If you use VBR, the mp3 file at a set bitrate on average is higher. For instance, the Offspring "the end of the line" came out as 4.87MB as an AAC 224Kbps. I used the 224Kbps mp3 setting with VBR and found myself with a 233Kbps VBR mp3, size was obviously bigger. 5.02MB. Turn off VBR and the AAC and MP3 were almost the same, the mp3 being a few KB smaller, at 4.82MB. I think AAC files are VBR, at least foobar2000 shows them as variable bitrate.