Ugh, made a mistake, need some help

[logo908]

So I had a whole bunch of CD's I wanted to rip to get them all on my iPod. Not really thinking too much about it I put the first one in and rip it to my hard disk using windows media player. After i'm done with this I try and transfer everything to itunes... and I realize my big mistake. Using WMP to rip put them all in WMA format... dumb mistake I know. Decided to just let itunes convert all the WMA's to AAC in order to be able to play on the iPod.

My question is does going from CD ---> WMA ---> AAC degrade quality? I didn't feel like it at the time, but if it will make the music better I will re rip everything using ITUNES this time to just go from CD right to AAC. I mean, it might just be me but I think I can hear a large increase in quality between the WMA's direct from the CD vs AAC's that came from the WMAs (which came from the CD). It seems as if there is an even bigger quality improvement when listening to AACs that came right from the CD vs AACs that came from the WMAs. (which came from the CDs)

Anyway.. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining the difference, it seems pretty noticeable, and not too surprising since the files went through 2 conversions, but is there anyone who can confirm that the quality is indeed worse from a technical perspective? Thanks for the help.

 

[FarFromCentre]

Generally going from a lossy format to another lossy format will degrade the sound quality. I'd rerip those CD's with a better program as well, such as Exact Audio Copy, then you convert the .wav files it rips to Apple lossless, which is the format I would recommend you use.

 

[brainsalad]

Never go from a lousy format to another lousy format. You'll compress compressed music and it will sound baaaadddd.

 

[logo908]

Ugh, thats what I thought. Thanks for the replies, I will look into Exact Copy. Got a little of ripping ahead of me, small laptop HD won't help =(.

 

[brainsalad]

I have over 1000 CD's ripped to FLAC and I used Easy CD-DA extractor. Check them out Music Converter All-In-One: Easy CD-DA Extractor. II use it to rip to flac on an external HD and then use their format converter to converting all kinds of things but mostly MP3 for my IPUD.