[jnno]

How high a quality can I expect from iTunes? Or is it just better to get the cd itself? And if so what software do u use to burn the file onto your computer?

 

[Brooko]

Personally - although I don't buy much from iTunes - when I've had to (because I haven't found the music anywhere else) - iTunes @ aac256 is perfectly good quality for my needs.
 
Most of the time I simply buy the CDs though (current library is about 300-350 CDs) and rip them.  Then at least I have the physical media as a back-up in case anything happens to the digital.
 
At the risk of repeating myself - the link I gave shows the software I use for ripping, tagging and transcoding (http://www.head-fi.org/t/655879/setting-up-an-abx-test-simple-guide-to-ripping-tagging-transcoding)

 

[zamorin]

Quote:

Whoever is recommending to rip streams off of YouTube is completely wrong. Ripping music off YouTube is awful, and here's why:

Unless you ripped the audio directly off Blu-Ray or something, or used a lossless track from a CD, chances are your source audio will be in some lossy format, like .mp3 or .aac, which it will be in 99.99% of cases.
So you already have one transcode, then when you upload the audio, YouTube transcodes the audio again in formats from 128kbps to 192kbps .mp3.
So, you've got two transcodes now, so you record this already mangled audio and save it as an .mp3 again.
So, now you've got three transcodes and your audio sounds about as bad as it could possibly naturally be.
 
If you listen to electronic music, Beatport, Bandcamp, The Hype Machine, Juno Download, and Boomkat all offer high-resolution files. Sites like HDTracks are silly because anything above CD quality either has no effect (bit depth) or makes the audio scientifically worse (bit rate).

That would be me. You are right That would explain why when I play off from youtube the sound quality is better than when I record it with freecoder in the highest quality and then play it back on Foobar2000

 

[autoteleology]

Yeah, and even off of YouTube directly is still usually pretty awful. Just vanilla .mp3 is bad enough; applying the compression algorithm three times in a row at best results in just shamefully bad quality.

 

[brunk]

Here's a great site for those that like EDM. There's probably 1,000+ albums all lossless here and free/legal to download.
 
http://www.ektoplazm.com/