Originally Posted by Teacher49
I have been using the"proprietary "Apple lossless" for the music I want to reproduce to best quality. That process does in fact compress. They claim there is no or little loss of quality.
the term 'lossless' means exactly that - no loss. the only difference is that the file is approximately 50% as big as the original. after decompression, it is bit for bit identical to the original.
while lossless might be nice for a high end home sound system, i wonder if anyone can really hear a difference listening to music from an ipod on portable headphones in a noisy aircraft...
It's a bit like comparing Apples to oranges (
) 'cause I still haven't recorded the same disk at different ratios to compare quality or size. Just been transfering music to hard dirve for a week and bit . There's a bunch of options: MPEGs at 128, 160 or 192, Apples ACC and Apple's Lossless.
go to preferences, click on importing, pick custom... and you can go as high as 320 bps for mp3 and aac. at the same bit rate, aac sounds better than mp3, but the higher the bit rate the less noticable this becomes.