Have your say & ask the experts

So, my wife has asked Santa and he has provided her with a fourth generation ipod 8Gb nano in black, and very funky it is too.  Cue a download of the latest iTunes software from the apple website and a great deal of CD ripping, even as I type.

OK, so far, so good.  My problem is that I am CD man.  I have only ever ripped the odd CD to MP3 to put on my iPaq, which has a headphone socket, and sound quality is not really the issue.  What do all the settings mean?  At the moment, we are ripping at the default, which is "AAC encoder, 128kbps".  What does this mean?  Also, how can the CD ripping be "lossless", as I have read it can on Wikipedia, and yet the file size be smaller than on a CD?  It is all confusing to me.

Furthermore, how do we connect the ipod to the various stereo amplifiers we have around the house?  My immediate response is to buy a good quality 3.5mm to 2 RCA phono lead.  Is there a better way?  I can see that the ipod will become my wife's main source for music listening both at home through an amp and speakers, and out and about, so I am quite keen that we get the best from it.  Also, I guess that the apple headphones are rubbish, although we haven't tried them yet.  Any suggestions for replacements?

First things first, I would certainly rip the CD's at a higher quality than 128kbps. I would use Apple Lossless. Now the file size does not end up a lot less than CD but the quality is a lot better and this will show when you play it through the Amp. 128kbps files will sound pretty dire. As for how the technology works there are others who can explain that - I could not give an accurate answer to that.

You can use the lead you suggested to connect it to the Amp or use a dedicated dock - depends on budget restraints and how many amps do you need to connect it to.

As for headphones - what is your budget?? Personally I have both Shure SE110's and Sennheisser CX300's and prefer the CX300's but the Shures have a lot of admireres and have won awards - both will be a great upgrade! (Assuming you want this type of design)

.....Rip at 320 kbs for better (but still slightly lossy) quality, ...although obviously the bigger the file size the less songs you can fit on your ipod (although with 8GB that won't be a problem)

Ripping a CD and saving as a FLAC file gives the best lossless quality but I don't think itunes can deal with this type of file (?)

I reckon a good quality mini jack to 2 phono should do fine as a connector to your hifi

Niffleman, there is a trade-off to be made which you need to consider before you rush into ripping at lossless or even high bitrate. First a few numbers.

A standard CD will be in the region of 500MB in size. At that size you could get 16 CD's onto an 8GB Nano. If you were to rip these to Apple Lossless then you would reduce the size of each CD to around 300MB. So, you would now be up to around 25 CD's on your iPod. Neither of these numbers seem too appealing I expect.

The reason MP3 and AAC are so popular is that they compress music files to a far greater extent than lossless formats like Apple Lossless or FLAC. They do this by discarding much of the high & low frequency information that is considered to make little difference to the average listeners overall perception of the music.

So, if you use a bitrate (measure of compression, higher bitrate less stuff discarded) of 320 kbps MP3 for example you would compress your original 500MB down to around 80Mb so now you are up to around 100 CD's. If you were to use AAC at 128 kbps you'd get down a little further, say to 50MB so you'd be up  to 160 CD's.

The reason many people use MP3 rather than AAC is that it is considered to be a more 'universal' format. Whether that is true in real terms is another matter. On the other side there is a body of opinion that AAC files are better sounding than MP3 files at any given bitrate. I haven't checked that myself.

So, first off you would be far better going for a compressed (lossy) format given the fact you only have 8GB to play with unless you want to be changing the music on your iPod on a very regular basis. To decide what bitrate you should use I would suggest you try ripping, and I would probably stick with AAC in your case, to a variety of different bit rates to compare. Start with the highest (320), and keep notching it down until you can hear the difference. Once you've found that bitrate notch it back up one and you're done.

I would try this experiment through headphones and if you can through your hi-fi to ensure that you've got a good bitrate for both.

Good luck! 

 

I'm with Ianandyr here. I would suggest using something like 256Kbps AAC. The quality of that isn't that far behind Apple Lossless, and it would allow you to get around 100 albums on her Nano.

Whilst Lossless is always recommended where size isn't an issue (for the iPod Classics with up to 160Gb for instance) I would suggest that unless you don't have a great deal of CDs, 256Kbps AAC is the way to go.

To put it into context, the general public at large are happy with the 128Kbps AAC that iTunes sell.

And unless you are connecting it to a £1000+ hifi, I don't believe you will hear much of a difference anyway...

To answer your other questions, I would suggest a dock, such as the apple Dock. It allows the iPod to be connected to the hifi using the port at the bottom (which offers slightly better quality than the headphone socket), and also has the bonus of charging the 'pod at the same time.

Apple lossless...how does it do it? Well, that is one answer that could take quite a time. But basically it uses a mathmatical algorithm to work out recognised sequences of bits, and then stores the answers of those algorithms rather than storing all the bits "as is" a la CD...