AAC, AIFF, Lossless, MP3


Hey everyone... In anticipation of receiving an iPod for Christmas I burned all of my favorite songs from my CD collection using iTunes into Apple Lossless. I have about 10 gig worth of songs that need to fit into an 8 gig Nano and would like extra space for future songs, photos, etc.

What is the best option where I won't hear too much of a difference from Lossless format but takes up less space?

Thanks!
portugal11

Showing 2 responses by ckorody

Portugasl - just so you are clear, there is no iPod output that goes to a DAC. Both the headphone and the line out (USB/dock) provide an analog signal. As far as quality goes, my experience is like Jeffreybowmans - up the quality of the righ and you will hear it. I also agree with him that using the sync feature is the way to manage the content.

Let me leave you with another thought. Like a lot of people you are backing into hard drive based digital. My prediction is that this will replace your transport in the next 24 months. From that perspective spending your time ripping to anything less then lossless means that you will be going back to rerip your CD collection again - soon. Look at the big picture and manage what you carry around as opposed to limiting how you will manage your music in the future.
Yes - you definitely always want to have "error correction" checked!! This is critical especially when you are doing lossless for archival and hifidelity use.

While the EAC fans will argue that they still get a better rip, in my experience "error correction" gets you 98%+ of the way.

BTW do some searching here in the PC Audio Forum and in Audio Asylums PC Forum - you will find that a lot of people are maintaining dual file formats - not the easiest thing in the world but hardly impossible.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?icomp&1146119362&read&3&4&