[nickknutson]

I'm going to be honest with you, I'm a little confused when it comes to the whole encoding thing. When I started here I had everything encoded to 128k ACC. Then I switched over to Apple Lossless...which brought me to a whole other world of music enjoyment. But my question now is, I'm thinking of venturing out of the iPod world and getting another player, just different brand. I was wondering what I should encode my music to so I can use it on my iPod as well as my new player. I don't want two copies of the same song with different formats. I hope someone is understanding what I'm saying.

I was thinking MP3 or WAV, and I don't care about the size of the file, just the sound. Lastly, do I have to re-rip everything or can I just convert my Apple Lossless file to the new format?

Thanks in advance!

 

[RickB]

I'm going to be conventional here and say that what I would do is rip from your lossless to MP3 LAME vbr Alt Preset Standard (192). (Alternately, you could up the quality a couple of notches and go for -V0 --vbr-new (230)). Using MP3 guarantees that any modern player will be able to use it.

As for ripping from Apple lossless, hey, lossless is lossless. I imagine iTunes could do it, but if you want to use LAME than you might need to convert first. I'm sure someone will have the answer shortly.

Rick

Edit: I forgot that Apple lossless is a proprietary format! I think it might be required that you convert using iTunes...

 

[nickknutson]

What's LAME? A program?

 

[jmmtn4aj]

LAME is an encoder. By itself it's a command line program, but you can download many frontends for it, such as EAC and WinLAME.

 

[RickB]

LAME is an encoder considered by many to be the best for MP3. Many software ripping programs will work with it (but not iTunes? Don't know.) A free one that does is EAC: http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/.

I can tell that this is going to get beyond my depth, so I will recommend the following site to learn more about digital formats and encoding- Hydrogen Audio: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php

Rick

 

[chowk]

I echo the comments above. If you're going to re-rip, use EAC and rip to FLAC. Rip the FLAC to VBR mp3 with LAME using whatever preset is adequate to your ears.