ITunes, MP3's VS Lossless Audio

There are millions of Apple iTunes customers and even more folks that are using file sharing software, to purchase, create and share digital music. When you listen to this music it sounds good especially when played on small digital music playing devices like an iPod or Rio digital music players. Have you ever played this music on a larger stereo and compared it to the original recording on a CD?

The difference is noticeable to even the general audio listener, and confirmed by the audio testing experts for example, Sam C. Lin, "Mp3 vs CD Audio Quality", Associated Content. URL:(http://www.lincomatic.com/mp3/mp3quality.html). The MP3 or the AAC (iTunes format) sounds different than the CD, not as clear or full, just 'near' CD quality. Audio MP3's can be recorded or ripped from the CD is various bit rates, 128kbps, 192kbps, 256kbps and the higher the bit rate the better the quality. Apple's iTunes offers their music on-line for sale in AAC format at 128kbps for almost all their music having recently announced a higher 256kbps for some music at a higher price. There are several ripping methods, taking the audio from the CD and converting it to a computer file. In fact Apple offers CD importing (Apple for Ripping) in their iTunes software and if you adjust the settings to 'import' via the Apple Lossless format the result is of better quality. These lossless formats, Apple's ALAC and flac.soundforge.net's FLAC codecs to name a few, preserve and exact copy of the audio file and doesn't that sound better than not an exact copy?

The goal is to backup our CD's from being scratched and ruined which becomes a very strong possibility if you are like me, one have 3 kids and two not so careful. Also, you may want to possibly buy direct on-line or would like the convenience of sitting on a couch with your media streaming device, aka AppleTV, and quickly finding a specific song you like, click and play in seconds. This discussion here of different CD ripping quality becomes more critical to many consumers. Consumers that are not concerned with the size of the music file more specifically and want the highest quality money can buy or time can produce. Along with the lossless format comes a significantly larger file size, unfortunately. However these days files' size is not making much difference with bigger PC hard drives and larger portable digital music players coming out.

Just last night I started to import my CD collection to my PC's hard drive and got to the last song on the Steely Dan Aja CD to find it wasn't playing correctly. I tried to import with correction but that was worse than just importing the slight CD skip that was apparently now on this CD. For this CD it is just to late, I tried to clean with gentle soap and water to no avail, the CD is permanently ruined. Well I could buy the song on-line but it is not in a lossless format so I would be getting near CD quality, get my point.

There is some rumors that Apple will start to sell in their Lossless format but for them they are already making a lot of money in the 128kbps format, maybe they will never do this. I read however that Apple is now requiring that the uploads from the Artist's themselves have to be in the Apple Lossless format, I don't blame them as I would want and exact copy too.

There is one on-line music reseller selling in a full format lossless WMA and even HD format with the 5.1 surround sound, MusicGiants.com. I just checked and can for $1.29 buy just the song I lost, Josie, I think I'll do that. However, I have found in the past that not every song is on this site and I will have to convert the file if I want it my iTunes collection or play on certain digital music players.

After losing many CD's I thought through this whole thing and thought you might like to know, happy Ripping.

Florida Fred