{"id":21,"date":"2011-11-16T09:03:39","date_gmt":"2011-11-15T23:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/?p=21"},"modified":"2013-03-14T15:29:10","modified_gmt":"2013-03-14T05:29:10","slug":"dude-what-mp3-quality-should-i-rip-my-tunes-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/2011\/blog\/music\/dude-what-mp3-quality-should-i-rip-my-tunes-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Dude, what MP3 quality should I rip my tunes in?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently a friend asked me (and I&#8217;ve got this question a lot since I started compressing my own and friends collections since the late 90&#8217;s) &#8211; what kbps should I choose when ripping my music to mp3s?<\/p>\n<p>Well, not <strong>mp3<\/strong> format firstly &#8211; that&#8217;s so 90&#8217;s! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>Sure, there&#8217;s the withering away argument that it is still the most universal format and not hindered by any licensing issues per se (keep reading). \u00a0But over the years more and more devices and software have come to support it&#8217;s replacement: MP4 (MPEG layer 4) with AAC &#8211; you might know it as the file type <strong>m4a<\/strong>. \u00a0If you&#8217;re an iTunes user or have an iPod or iOS device you&#8217;ll know this format all too well. \u00a0But there are other choices, let&#8217;s look at the options:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>mp3<\/strong>: Okay, it&#8217;s still worth considering if you absolutely must ensure that any possible antiquated device or software you try to play it on will work, and at the highest 320kbps (LAME encoder preferrably), it&#8217;s essentially indiscernible to uncompressed CD quality.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0<strong>m4a<\/strong>: highest quality mp4 (essentially the AAC (advanced Audio Codec) wrapped in the m4a container. This is the default iTunes Store settings these days is 256 plus which ON MOST speaker systems and ears is indiscernible from the CD quality &#8211; which by today&#8217;s standards itself is not considered hi-fidelity. \u00a0That would be DTS digital surround and the likes but limits what you can play it on.)<\/li>\n<li><strong>ALAC: <\/strong>Apple Lossless Audio Codec\u00a0(also in m4a container but is file compressed to half the size with <strong>no lossy audio!<\/strong>). \u00a0For example: a typical hour long CD will be reduced to ~350MB file size. You might be surprised to know this has been an option in iTunes for many years now, but often overlooked if you don&#8217;t dig into the Preferences. \u00a0A couple weeks ago, <a title=\"ARSTechnica : after seven years Apple open-sources ALAC\" href=\"http:\/\/arstechnica.com\/apple\/news\/2011\/10\/after-seven-years-apple-open-sources-its-apple-lossless-audio-codec.ars\" target=\"_blank\">Apple announced<\/a> that they were finally open-sourcing this format, essentially equating it to FLAC in my mind but far more accessible: it will play in iTunes obviously, as well as any of your iOS or iPod devices!*<\/li>\n<li><strong>FLAC<\/strong>: The Free Lossless Audio Codec was developed by the Vorbis group as a file compressed non-lossy file type unhindered by patent restrictions. \u00a0It sounds great, can be quite commonly seen trading around the interwebs, but has limited playback ability. \u00a0With system plugins (such as Perian on Mac OS) you can get it to play in Quicktime-supported apps, but good luck taking it on your portable devices. \u00a0Until the recent open-sourcing of ALAC, this was a very attractive option to me but, alas it has never been supported by Apple on their players.*<\/li>\n<li><strong>PCM<\/strong> (the raw original CD tracks): sure just drag the original files right from the cd into iTunes (no conversion), but there are better options here, and you&#8217;ll limit yourself to playing only off your computer generally. Ok, you could re-burn another CD but&#8230;wait, what&#8217;s a CD player!?<\/li>\n<li><strong>AIFF\/WAV:<\/strong> common uncompressed audio file types used by professional audio apps mostly. \u00a0Both are universally supported by most software\/devices. \u00a0This is a good choice if you absolutely have no concern for storage capacity.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>* non-lossy audio: before any audiophiles out there get on their mantle with me on how there are slight deviations from the original audio, remember where&#8217; talking real-world usage here, not audio-spectral analysis that only a computer could care about! \u00a0It&#8217;s generally agreed that these non-lossy audio compressions can not be told apart from the original \u2014 even by most professional audio engineers on top-end amplifiers!<\/div>\n<div><strong>So my suggestion?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div>If you have an iOS device or just use iTunes \u2014 go with Apple Lossless. \u00a0It&#8217;s the last time you&#8217;ll ever need to rip those old cd&#8217;s, it sounds equal to the original quality, and it&#8217;s <em>now<\/em> an open-source free alternative! \u00a0Plus with the ever-constantly dropping prices of storage media, it&#8217;s an excellent compromise between quality, accessiblity and space.<\/div>\n<div id=\"themify_builder_content-21\" data-postid=\"21\" class=\"themify_builder_content themify_builder_content-21 themify_builder\">\n\n    <\/div>\n<!-- \/themify_builder_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently a friend asked me (and I&#8217;ve got this question a lot since I started compressing my own and friends collections since the late 90&#8217;s) &#8211; what kbps should I choose when ripping my music to mp3s? Well, not mp3 format firstly &#8211; that&#8217;s so 90&#8217;s! \ud83d\ude09 Sure, there&#8217;s the withering away argument that it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[7],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonshanks.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}