One for the music downloading experts. Quality of sound. Different Formats. MP3, Apple Lossless etc?

Question

Hi,

I would like to put all my CD's onto my laptop. Then I want to make my own CD's with my own selection of songs.

However I have a good in car system and you can notice the quality of itunes is not as good as an original CD.

I know that there are various formats for downloading under preferences in Itunes.

My question is what is the best? Is it Apple Lossless.

The next question is what is the best format that is not just restricted to Itunes/ Apple? This is so I can use other PC's as my music will be on an external hard drive. And what program other than Itunes can I use to get my CD's on to my laptop. Incidentally I have a Mac (it was a mistake to buy it, but I have it now).

Finally is there a site which has high quality downloads, better than Itunes? This would save me having to buy new CD's to get single tracks, that is I could just download high quality single tracks.

Thanks you very much!

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to get the "Ares" programme: http://sourceforge.net/projects/aresgalaxy/ It's free BTW.

After searching for a selection, you can hover your mouse pointer over the name and various stats will appear for that item. The "quality" stat will give you an idea of what to expect for that particular song. 128 Kbit is most common, but only average sound quality...fine for portable devices, but lacking with a high quality sound system. I would say that 192 Kbit or higher would bring decent audio quality which would probably satisfy you.

If you can find OGG encoded files, they seem to have higher audio quality than MP3.

As to getting your CDs to your computer. I would suggest using "Nero" to dump the tracks onto your computer (these are WAV files at this point). And using "Razorlame" to encode to MP3. In 'Razorlame" you can select various audio quality settings and achieve results indistinguishable from the CD.

Here is a link for "Razorlame": http://www.dors.de/razorlame/download.php