hi all,

two questions this time,

which format should i use in transfering onot my ipod classic. i want to get the most CD like quality i can.

also, a follow up to an ealier thread i wrote, is the hard disk in the classic (160gb) up to the shocks of jogging, or is it going to give out on me after a month?

cheers

Apple Lossless and bin the crappy headphones you get with it and buy some decent ones or you're wasting your time with high quality encodes.

For CD like quality use WAV or AIFF format but the overhead is large file sizes - link

Kinda pointless though if you can use the Apple Lossless format I already mentioned?

They will all sound identical to the original CD as they are all lossless formats. But, WAV and AIFF are uncompressed, thus taking up more space.

TBH if you want to go jogging I would buy something with flash memory. The Classic will probably be fine as it will have anti-skip on it and all that marlarky - it loads songs into RAM so it is not spinning all the time but exposing it to lots of bouncing around won't do it any good.

I use 256kbs AAC when ripping my CD's. With anything but the best speakers its indistinguishable to me vs lossless, and you benefit greatly from reduced file sizes.

thanks for this, a very useful article.

Although I use lossless for my PC, I'm not sure of the wisdom of using it on a portable. Not only does it use a lot of extra space but it will sap the battery due to the extra hard-drive activity. If you want high quality, then encode at a high bit rate in AAC.

Ideally, encode at different bit-rates and decide for yourself what is best.

MP3 VBR, 224kbps minimum or AAC, at least 192kbps should do you. Of course, the higher the better if you are using decent audio equipment and hard drive space is really cheap these days, but bear in mind that higher bitrates will use battery faster. Apple Lossless is a reasonable bet too but you lose some portabliity.

I personally use 160kbps aac since it's a reasonable compromise to me between quality and sound and to a lesser extent - battery life. Most of my music is listened to on my iPod in environments with some background noise so I'm not overly concerned with them being of perfect quality.