[iTunes] Re: MP3 vs AAC

[Brooks Graham]

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As one that hasn't been all that happy with the sound quality of MP3, 
I'm re-encoding my entire collection from the original CDs into AAC.  I 
figure that if I do a handful of CDs each day, it'll take a long time 
to complete.  I do have some MP3 files for which I don't have higher 
quality "master" media, they'll have to stay MP3.  Such are the wages 
of (pop music) sin.  ;-)

For all that effort, I'll get better sounding material that takes up 
less space.  Unfortunately I'll lose all that iTunes metadata.  Oh well.

I agree that while there will be some space savings in converting MP3 
files directly to AAC, the best one could hope for is sound quality 
that's almost-as-good as the source MP3 - most likely worse.

It seems that if you're happy with your existing MP3 collection and 
don't want to re-encode, leave them alone.  Encode new stuff with AAC.

Just some thoughts

- -bdg


On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, at 04:49 PM, MacMIDI at aol.com wrote:

> AAC is suppose to be a better compression format
> Better quality smaller file sizes
> Thats the report, I haven't tested it yet
>>>
>
> It doesn't matter how good it is; if you convert from MP3 with a lossy
> protocol (AAC), the result will sound worse than the MP3 source. To 
> get a
> better sound, you would have to go back to the original encoding 
> (AIFF) on
> the CD. Is it really worth it? Doesn't the new iPod continue to play 
> MP3's?
>
> This is an important issue; I think. Do you want to convert your whole 
> MP3
> collection to AAC, if it degrades the sound? Do you perhaps want to 
> keep all
> your MP3s intact while you also convert everything to AAC? That would 
> double
> your backup memory requirement.
>
> Professor Amaral
>
- -
Brooks Graham
brooksgraham at mac.com
http://www.brooksgraham.com/

"No trees were harmed in the transmission of this message.  However, a 
rather large number of electrons were temporarily inconvenienced."

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