[Antman27]

So Itunes has many ways to inport your music
Can anyone explain them to me and what is the best way to save my music
They have the
aac encoder
128 HQ
bit rate up to 320 kps
sample 44.1Kh 48.1kh

AIFF
custom is
8KH to 48Kh

Apple losless



MP3 & WAV


I now have a 40G Ipod with about 5000 songs BUT may get an 80

Thanks ~

[arthur]

it depends on what you want to do with the music. if you only want to listen to it on your ipod while riding a train or a bus and sound quality is not very important, than you can just go for 128 on most music and 160 on music that has more subtle elements to it.

but if you want to listen to the best possible quality on your main system than go with apple lossless and then maybe downsample some of the music that will go into the ipod and keep this in a separate playlist that's just for the ipod.

[Ferdi]

HI, maybe to amplify this:

When you want to have the highest possible quality (at somewhat reduced space requirements), the obvious choice in iTunes is Apple Lossless.

When downloading music to your iPod, such high quality is maybe not required and space is at more of a premium. iTunes provides the option of downconverting to 128-AAC before transferring to iPod.

There are lots of other considerations for example the use of FLAC v. ALAC when you also have a Squeezebox and the possible quality difference between MP3/LAME v. AAC at various bitrates.

Maybe one final comment (not sure what your level of technical competence/experience is): AIFF and WAV files  are full-space copies of the CD. They do not give you a quality advantage to the lossless alternatives of FLAC and Apple Lossless (ALAC). MP3 and AAC provide lossy encoding at still smaller file sizes.

Ferdi