There have been significant increases in hard drive size in that time and hard drives are now large enough to easily cope with the size of Apple Lossless files. I now suggest you use Apple Lossless Encoder for all importing of songs from CD.
When this article was first written in 2008 I suggested 320kbps AAC as the best setting.
The difference between Apple’s upgrade of 128kbps and 256kbps is very noticeable and it is worth upgrading all your existing iTunes purchases, but 256kbps is not as good as 320kbps though, so if you have a CD I recommend importing at 320kbps if you choose to import as AAC. When Apple first launched iTunes the songs on the store were encoded at 128kbps, but from 2010 even Apple now use 256kbps on the iTunes store which is an immense improvement. If you want better quality music you should use a higher bitrate than 128kbps. It’s not as clear and some details are missing.īest Bit-rate for compressed audio – 320kbps. It’s not that listening at 128kbps sounds really bad, but if you compare it to the original, you will notice that it’s different. But if you listen carefully to your iPod through your stereo, and compare it to a CD, you will hear a significant difference in audio quality at 128kbps. Unfortunately I assumed the defaults were the best, so I used the built in defaults in iTunes to import my entire CD collection. How good is the default setting of 128kbps (high quality) (See picture below – click to enlarge). Why does Apple allow me to use different formats like AAC and MP3? Which one is better?Ģ. If you go to the ‘iTunes:Preferences’ menu and click on ‘Advanced’ then ‘Importing’ you will see some options like ‘Import Using’ and ‘Setting’.ġ.
This article describes how to import songs into iTunes with the better quality bit rate. you want to fit it on your iPod or a laptop) then use the bit rate of 320kbps rather than the default 128kbps of iTunes. It’s far better to use the ‘Apple Lossless’ setting which will keep your music at CD quality.
You can always start with Apple Lossless and convert later to FLAC/AIFF or downsample if you feel constrained by Apple's software.Importing songs into iTunes is easy – you just INSERT the CD, SELECT it in iTunes, and press the ‘Import’ button!īut… the default setting on iTunes is not the best setting to use when importing songs. Going higher is generally a waste of space for little to no discernible impact on listening enjoyment.īasically, it's only worth encoding higher if the recording is precious and archival in nature or you really do hear a difference for that one piece that makes it worth re-encoding at a lossless level. I would guess most people that don't use an external DAC and premium headphones ($400 to $1500) with audiophile amplifiers will rarely need AAC bitrates more than 240kbps for most recordings. The benefit of stock Apple Lossless format is about 50% compression rate with no loss of data or sound quality. If you are worried about the proprietary nature of Apple Lossless instead of FLAC (the best free lossless alternative), it is very simple to batch re-encode the entire library to AAC / MP3 or AIFF/WAV or burn to a CD at full resolution.
I like to be able to update iTunes whenever a new version arrives and depend on easy syncing across computers (home sharing and streaming) as well as across devices so I try not to add plug ins or non-supported formats unless the need is great. Apple lossless is the way to go in iTunes.