DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Improving sound quality of Itunes library?

When I listen to songs on my ipod, some songs just sound better than others. Better bass, mid ranges etc. I know this has to do with the file type/quality of the file itself.

I thought I read somewhere that you can convert your current I tunes library to better sound quality, only it takes up more space? Lossless or something like that? I just want to make sure im getting the most out of my Itunes/Ipod experience. I figured Id ask before I do irreparable damage to my itunes library.

I rip everything at 320kbps variable bit rate. I could rip at lossless but the tradeoff of file size vs sound quality isn't worth it to me, considering that I don't listen to music from my iTunes library in places or situations where quality is key. Still, I find anything under 192kbps is mostly unlistenable, in my opinion.

The thing is, though, that you can't encode an mp3 at a higher bitrate than its currently at and improve the quality. You'd have to go back and re-rip the CD. Assuming all of the CDDB (database that stores track listens, titles, artists, album names, etc) info is the same, if you insert a CD that you've ripped before it should ask you if you want to re-rip the CD, so you won't lose play counts, inclusion of the songs in play lists, etc.

If you want the best sound quality you can get, rip your CDs as wav files. Wavs are uncompressed digital audio. It'll take up about 1Mb per minute of audio.

If you want the best quality you can get and still get between 40-60% file reduction from WAV, use FLAC I dont use itunes but i bet apple lossless has some compression too, its just they dont remove portions of the sound wave to make the file smaller, when uncompressed its exactly like a .WAV file. thats what FLAC does.

So you cannot improve your current iTunes spread, only future downloads?

How can you improve the p2p download sound quality, or can you?

Does iTunes not let you re-download something you already bought? You could just download them again at a higher bitrate, couldn't you?

I don't buy much music at all on iTunes, but I don't think you're given options of encoding bitrates for downloaded music.

It's been years since I used that miserable program but if I recall it only played mp3's and your wma's had to be converted to mp3. No FLAC.

It had an option to encode all songs at the same bitrate so they played at the same volume but it put them all at 128 kbps. Lame.

iTunes can play mp3, wav, aiff, aac and Apple Lossless, among others. It won't play .wma because its a proprietary Microsoft format.

I personally don't see the need for a lossless format for 99% of the listening that people do. 320kbps variable bit rate mp3 is more than adequate for noncritical listening environments...iPods, car stereo, consumer-grade home stereos, etc. The limitations of the reproduction system will have as much of an effect on the sound as the encoding in those situations. The diminishing return of sound quality versus file size isn't worth it in my opinion.

Also, I misspoke in an earlier post. An uncompressed .wav file is approximately 10MB per minute of audio for your standard 44.1kHz 16-bit stereo audio file.