Sick of iTunes low quality music

[Bremen]

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I use Exact Audio Copy and FLAC to rip in lossless format. I don't know if the iPod will play FLAC though.

I wouldn't say that lossless is *much* better than a good MP3 rip, but it is better and I have enough disk space that I don't care that the files take up 5 times as much space.

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Using a good ripping program is more important than the file format that is ultimately used. Something like EAC or cdparanoia (I use grip for the frontend) will ensure you don't have audio distortions in the finished file. I also encode in flac since I have a large classical collection however I probably wouldn't recognize the difference between a flac file and a high quality ogg.

[Danastasio1]

As larger hard drives get cheaper and cheaper, I have no problem using FLACs as my audio file of choice. And these days they're certainly a viable option with more and more FLAC torrents being seeded as time goes by, especially Jazz albums. However, it doesn't help that I'm a longtime Phishhead, and audio quality/integrity is held in the highest regard among concert traders.

[LonesomeFugitive]

Forgive my ignorance, I just got a car that has a cd on it (my first car had cassette). I burned a bunch of cd's and when I turn up the volume I get some distortion in some songs while not in others. I used windows media player to burn the cd's under the 'select audio quality automatically' option

would chosing the high quality option in windows media player stop the distortion? or is that a problem of the mp3 themselves i put in the cd being low quality 128kbps??

Im thinking of re-rippin all the songs from my cd's in 256kbps and then burning them to cds at 256kbps under windows media player.

[Danastasio1]

I'm burning any CD with a free program called Nero, and I'm only burning WAV files, I always hated the sound of mp3 files burned to CD.