Digital Music: Size or Quality?

[Mynd Hed]

Those of you who rip your music collections to your hard drive; which do you go for, file size or quality?

Me, I compress the hell out of my music. Saves hard drive space, and makes it easier to fit oodles and oodles of songs onto one data disc which I can play in my car (my car's CD player can decode MP3s and WMAs). When ripping CDs I tend to just use Windows Media Player and rip into variable-bit-rate WMA format. Lossy as hell? So they say, but darned if I can hear the difference.

[RD!]

Ripping in APS quality mp3s is the best of both worlds really.

[Roman Legion]

I hate low-quality rips. Hate, hate, hate. :p

Listening to 128 kbps mp3's for too long actually gives me a headache. I'm not sure what's worse... the general distortion, or the cut-off high frequencies. Ugh. If I have to deal with mp3's, I consider 160 kbps a minimum. I'd say 192 kbps is generally sufficient for most songs.

Since I don't have any sort of portable audio device to worry about, I usually compress with Ogg Vorbis... at Quality 8. Hey, hard drive space is cheap. The way Ogg containers handle metadata is rather useful, too. The combination of quality and tagging works out well for classical music. In a few years, when multi-terrabyte hard drives are common, I'll probably switch over to FLAC.

--Romey

[sdp]

Music is my love.

only the highest quality, I can tell the difference as 'little' as it may be,
I like my Music the best quality I can get it.

[Stewie]

I try to strike a balance. I usually just have music on in the background, so 128 kbps mp3s work fine for me. If I try, I can hear the difference in some things, but I rarely need to try.

OT: While we're talking about music files, how do I convert from wav to mp3? I've got files on my hard drive that I ripped as wavs I want to compress into mp3s. But I don't want to burn them onto CDs then re-rip them (almost out of CDs).

[Mynd Hed]

OT: While we're talking about music files, how do I convert from wav to mp3? I've got files on my hard drive that I ripped as wavs I want to compress into mp3s. But I don't want to burn them onto CDs then re-rip them (almost out of CDs).

My app of choice for audio file conversion is dBpowerAmp Music Converter, which can be found here:

http://www.download.com/dBpowerAmp-Music-Converter/3000-2140_4-10440846.html?tag=lst-0-2

It largely eschews any sort of centralized interface in favor of Windows Explorer right-click context menus, which I think is kinda nice-- after a while, you forget you're even using it.

[Tay the Cat]

When dealing with mp3s, it needs to be VBR between 96 and 320 kbps.

They're better in the long run, and saves space over constant bitrate 320.

Oh, and I HATE HATE HATE wma files.

[Mynd Hed]

Oh, and I HATE HATE HATE wma files.

Care to elaborate on that?

[Tay the Cat]

Care to elaborate on that?
They're not compatible with iTunes, so they have to be converted to either mp3 or AAC, further compressing the file and lowering it's quality. I could theoretically turn it into a wav, but my hard drive isn't large enough to handle files like that.

[Paul_Cousins]

Ripping in APS quality mp3s is the best of both worlds really.Yes for storeage, but it is a pain to edit and combine videos that use average bitrate on the audio because the simple rate is different between videos.

[Roman Legion]

Care to elaborate on that?Aside from stupid DRM issues and reducing the battery life of portable players that are actually compatible?

I suppose if you...
A) Have no portable music devices (like myself)
B) Only have one computer
C) Never intend to reformat
D) And have no problem re-ripping things down the road
...then WMA would suffice, but still, it's WMA. :p

--Romey

[Kagetsu]

:sweat: So many letters,,, is that SOP?:sad:

Almost all of my music is around 128 and I really can't hear a difference. Even the 94 sound ok :sad: while I tend to use 160

VBR? So that's why some move around in the bitrate box :o

[Anthonynotes]

Almost all of my music on my computer is in FLAC format, an open-source, lossless format---thus keeping the original CD's fidelity intact, plus "future-proofing" it (so I can convert it to mp3, ogg, whatever-comes-out-in-the-future, etc.).

For my mp3 player, I convert the FLAC files into .mp3 format (VBR, 192 kbps)...

[Mynd Hed]

Aside from stupid DRM issues and reducing the battery life of portable players that are actually compatible?

I suppose if you...
A) Have no portable music devices (like myself)
B) Only have one computer
C) Never intend to reformat
D) And have no problem re-ripping things down the road
...then WMA would suffice, but still, it's WMA. :p

--Romey

Well, I suppose that pretty much does describe my situation. Just curious, never heard of any problems with WMA before (besides not being compatible with the iPod, of course, but considering that WMA came first, you could argue that it's really the iPod that's incompatible with WMA).
But that's why I wanted to start this thread; I'd never really thought about it much before just recently, when I lost my music collection due to a hard drive failure and had to re-rip all my CDs, so I thought a little discussion might be illuminating. (-: