I ripped my CD collection into iTunes years ago at 128kbps as I didn’t know any better, but its now clear that the quality is not great. I’m going to go through and re-rip them all at a higher bitrate, so two questions:

1) The default choice is iTunes as I have an iPod, iPhone and soon probably an iPad. Is there anything that is significantly better than iTunes and if so for what reason. I pretty much only use iTues for ripping and syncing as everything will get played either from my iPod in the car or at home via Sonos from my NAS device. I have Spotify premium but don’t know if I will have it forever.

2) Will I notice any difference ripping at 320kbps vs 256kbps? I tend not to just sit and listen to music – it’s either background or its in the car, so in either case I want decent quality but not exceptional quality, so definitely not going lossless

Given the cost of storage these days, learn your lesson and do it at the highest practical quality – 320kbps 🙂

Personally, I’d simply Windows Media Player to do the ripping.

Good point. Hadn’t thought about using Windows Media Player. Will it still do all the categorisation type stuff and also import the album sleeve art?

The easy way would be to use itunes match service, read up on how it works, and you should be able to replace your whole collection with professionally produced apple lossless format.

http://www.apple.com/uk/itunes/itunes-match/

(unless you have lots of rare stuff)

The easy way would be to use itunes match service

Oooh, clever, avoid the hard work.

I’m a fan of MediaMonkey, as it’s smaller than iTunes, doesn’t install so much garbage, and just works. Ripping is possible to all sorts of formats, too.
On which basis, you might want to consider ripping to FLAC or another lossless format. Not to listen to, but to have as a master set that you can transcode in future should your listening needs change.

The easy way would be to use itunes match service, read up on how it works, and you should be able to replace your whole collection with professionally produced apple lossless format.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not going down that route as I want to be able to play any album that comes into my head or comes up randomly. If I’m in the car with no 3G signal the iTunes match service isnt going to work so I want everything actually on the iPod

I’m surprised there haven’t been more responses considering the number of iTunes haters on here I’ve seen from previous thread comments

I thought paid iTunes Match downloaded high quality versions to your local store?

Personally I find nothing wrong with iTunes to rip (switch on the ‘safe’ mode). My stuff is at 256 or 320k – >10k+ tunes is about 70Gb. If I was doing it now/again (slightly tempted) I’d rip in Apple Lossless.

Any lossless format should be able be transcoded to another without loss of quality. iTunes will transcode stuff to lower quality when it syncs if you want it to (so you can have reference copy on your computer and still have a lot of music on your devices) though it must take ages to sync if you do that.

there’s a lifehacker article about ripping & bitrates.

As you’ve found, 128kbps is poor on some things. 256kbps is fine for most folks. Most of mine were done with LAME way back when and then iTunes at 320kbps VBR.

Since HDDs are not that expensive, why not rip as lossless? You won’t fit much on you iPod that way, but you’ll have the lossless files to go back to.

iTunes match allows you to download any of your matched or purchased songs to a bunch of compatible devices. The files are 256kbps.

CDEx is a fantastic tool for ripping CDs.

It’s got great error-correction tools built in.

http://cdexos.sourceforge.net/

On the other hand – how about searching ‘online’ for the same CDs you own… but someone else has ripped in high quality?

Seems a legal use of bit torrent to me…

First time I ripped my CD’s I used CDex and LAME on a PC. Masses of errors and crap metadata. Second time I used iTunes on a Mac without any problems.

good software goes bad, bad gets good etc etc YMMV

Since HDDs are not that expensive, why not rip as lossless? You won’t fit much on you iPod that way, but you’ll have the lossless files to go back to.

For me it wouldn’t be worth doing lossless. I don’t reckon my hearing is good enough to need anything better than 320kbps, and I do want to get everything on my iPod so I have all my albums in the car

On the other hand – how about searching ‘online’ for the same CDs you own… but someone else has ripped in high quality?

Not sure that would save any time compared to re-ripping. I only get about 2mbps streaming speed on my broadband so would take a long time

Anybody any good reasons not to use iTunes which is the default choice?

Nowt wrong with iTunes that I’ve ever found, I stuff a cd in the tray, it shows the tracks, I rip it. Having said that, I’ve tried to rip two discs recently that it just wouldn’t touch; showed the track info, then just ran own the whole list in a few seconds and wouldn’t touch the music! Odd, one disc was by Dirty Projectors, can’t remember the other, but currently I have 112Gb, 14,300 tracks, and only two discs with an issue. I rip at 320Kb, and I’ve had tracks converted to lossless from FLACK downloads and done a direct comparison through high-end earphones, (Shure SE215 and UE TripleFi10 Studio), and TBH, any improvement in quality with lossless over 320Kb is marginal for someone with regular hearing, and I’m bloody fussy about music sound quality!
Stick with iTunes, 320Kb VBR, and the music will sound as good as you could possibly want it.

Right, with the itunes match what you do is join the service, it matches all you library to the itunes store, then (after backing up obviously) you remove your library and let itunes download it all again in the new higher lossless format.

You don’t need a constant internet connection, it will just take a while to do in one hit depending on the size of your music connection.

Thanks for all of the advice guys. I don’t need lossless as from what I can understand, 320kbps is as near CD quality as will make no difference to my old ears, so will re-rip at 320kbps using iTunes and be able to sync everything easily with my iPod.

Question: on the iTunes import settings, it gives the option of setting the sample rate to either auto or 44.1khz. Which option should I select for best quality?

join the service, it matches all you library to the itunes store, then (after backing up obviously) you remove your library and let itunes download it all again in the new higher lossless format.

From Apples site:

All the music iTunes matches plays back from iCloud at 256-Kbps AAC DRM-free quality

AAC is a ‘better’ codec than MP3: 256k AAC>256k mp3 but not all (non-Apple) devices will play it. Definitely NOT lossless based on my reading.

So before I start ripping, what sample rate setting should I use in iTunes? It gives me a choice of auto or 44.1khz

Since HDDs are not that expensive, why not rip as lossless? You won’t fit much on you iPod that way, but you’ll have the lossless files to go back to.

It won’t even take up much space on your iPod, as iTunes lets you specify a lower bit-rate that it converts to just for the files in the iPod, leaving your lossless lossless on the PC/Mac

EDIT: Oh, and 44.1 kHz is the standard

iTunes lets you specify a lower bit-rate that it converts to just for the files in the iPod, leaving your lossless lossless on the PC/Mac

Has anyone tried this? Does it mean it takes forever to sync?

It didn’t seem to take too long for me. I guess it depends on the speed of your PC / Mac. Most modern ones will probably resample the MP3 quicker than the USB can transfer it

Works fine (ripped as ALAC -> iPhone at 256k)

If you’re re-ripping everything it’s madness to do so to anything other than a lossless format IMHO…

A bit late to this thread sorry,and am hoping someone can explain the applelossless thing. I have tried reading the articles on itunes support and i am pretty confused. My question is if I rip my cd’s on applelossless will itunes compress the songs to fit on my ipod touch 32gb I have around 400 cd’s.
Thanks

Lossless take up a lot more space than your pod can cope with. What you’d need to do is convert them to 256Kb, keeping the original lossless files, then set up a Smart Playlist to include only tracks of 256Kb and name it iPod. Set your iPod to sync with that playlist.

You can get iTunes to down-sample large files (such as apple lossless) to a lower bitrate if you need to fit lots on your ipod. TBH if it’s just being used in the car / headphones you won’t notice much of a difference