iTea

[mishalak]

Bit of a weak pun there, but it was the best thing I came up with when my iPod asked to be named. I now own one, obviously. Early birthday present from my parents. So for some reason instead of my usual very utilitarian names for things I came up with this silly one (thanks Cat for inspiration).

Now I'm replacing a decade worth of .mp3s I ripped using winamp. I suspect the .aac format to be of a bit better quality. I know that it is proprietary and all, but I don't care, I expect by the time I replace the iTea they won't be that proprietary anymore. After all just the other day Apple announced it would be offering DRM-free music on the iTunes Store from EMI.

So I'm listening to the music from Waking Ned Devine as I figure things out.

Comments

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Actually they're low quality and I did not rip that many. I'm happy re-ripping. What sounded like work was using some other program and then compressing them and all. For me it is a lot simpler just to use the program I already have.

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Apple uses the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder, the market leader for commercial encoders (because Fraunhofer owns most of the patents on MP3). While it's integrated (and as such, simple), Apple has configured it for speed at the expense of sound quality and compression efficiency. I wouldn't be surprised if they chose this configuration to encourage people to use the AAC encoder.

LAME is an open-source project and by many peoples' tests is superior to the version of Fraunhofer that is part of iTunes.

EAC and LAME are two different programs, but EAC is designed to work with LAME (and a number of other compression tools). Once EAC and LAME are set up, it's just a matter of adding the location of lame.exe to the EAC configuration, and it's all magic. Looks and works like one program. Click on the "rip to MP3" button and it asks you where to save the files. When it's done, drag the files on to iTunes.

I haven't noticed a difference in frequency range between iTunes MP3 and LAME MP3 (the biggest "complaint" made about lossy audio compression formats), but I have noticed that the dynamic range and general levels of tracks ripped through iTunes is pretty crunched compared to LAME or the original CD.