iPod settings

[legless]

I changed some setting in Audacity and I'm able to export into iTunes but when I try to sync my iPod it doesn't sync because the "sample format" is not correct. I'm new w/ Audacity and I just need to find out how to solve this problem, Thanks.

[kozikowski]

iPods will play WAV, MP3, and AAC music formats. What did you produce and how old is your iPod?

Koz

[legless]

I was exporting WAV files onto my desktop and then into iTunes leaving a WAV file in iTunes and converting it into MP3 also to use on my iPod. I assumed that recording from my vinyls using Stereo Tracks in Audacity would be ok, I'm not sure if that's where my problem came or if it's in the "Quality" or "File Format" Preferences in Audacity. I tried to make sure they lined up with iTunes preferences. My iPod is a 5th Gen. 60G Video. thanks again

[kozikowski]

My personal preference on this would be to import your music into iTunes as AAC with the quality high, or all the way up.

iTunes > Preferences > Advanced > Importing > AAC > High (128) or Higher (256)

Apple AAC format is roughly twice as good as MP3 at any one bit rate. Thus, AAC 265 is roughly the same quality as MP3 at 512 which even the golden ears of audio would have a very hard time telling apart from your original work. Further, if you pick AAC 128 (like I use), you can get many multiple times the number of songs to fit on your iPod than you can by playing the original wav files.

Most of the time, the difference in quality is only perceptible by trained people listening on top flight headphones in a dead quiet room. If you're listening on EarBuds in the same room with a refrigerator running, any of those quality levels will work.

If you listen out in traffic, any quality level is OK and you can get millions of songs on there.

One of the animators at work told me that if she started playing now, her iPod would run out in roughly three weeks.

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Apple AAC format is roughly twice as good as MP3 at any one bit rate.

Koz

Koz,

is it really that much better? I did know that bitrate for bitrate AAC is better than MP3 - but 100% better? If that's really the case then youv'e given me some work to do .......

WC

[kozikowski]

<<<If that's really the case then youv'e given me some work to do .......>>>

Absolutely. You should be trying it yourself. Pick a musical segment that you know and love and try it encoded at a bunch of different bitrates. Play the trials back to back with the original WAV in a quiet room and take notes. When I'm doing this, I build the bitrate into the filename so there's no confusion about what I'm listening to.

ScissorSisters32k.mp3 ScissorSisters.wav

Of course to really get away with this, you have to tell your Mac to show you the file extensions.

Finder > Preferences > Advanced

In the early days, a bunch of us tried variations on the MP3 scheme and we all came up with the same numbers. For a mono performance, you can barely hear 32 kbps working but lower than that, everybody including several hearing impaired grandmas and two guys we got off the street could tell there was something wrong. It drops as a rock.

So 64 kbps works for stereo and anything above that--like the 128 widely considered "good" and 256 considered excellent is the baseline. In AAC, all those numbers go down by one jump (as a fuzzy rule).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding

Koz

[waxcylinder]

Hi Koz,

when I first got my iPod I did extensive listening tests, but only with differnt AAC bitrates - I didn't think at the time to compare AAC/MP3 (silly me!). I ended up choosing 192 AAC as a compromise between quality and disk occupancy. My wife and I could both hear the difference on good speakers and good headphones between 128/192/256 - but decided that 192 was good enough - now that iPod discs have gotten signigficantly larger, I may just go back and re-rip all the CDs at 256.

However when I came to my vinyl with Audacity, for my iPod I exported MP3 at 192 - fortunately I also exported WAVs at the same time - and burned the music CD-R's.

I assume that I can take these CD-Rs from Audacity WAVs and just import them as AAC/256 into my iTunes library - is this a correct assumption?

Do I need to go as high as 256AAC - or do you think 192AAC is good enough?

WC