About iTune 9.1

The new option for iPhone / iPod Touch users able to "Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC" took nearly 6 hours to sync already and on going right now...

It's only 1600 songs of my 9800...

: (


I'm stunned...

but I think it will worth it... save up 30-40% extra spaces.

 

Saw that option and briefly considered it, but I've got ~7600 songs in my library, many of which are at 256 kbps or better on average. I'd be worried about having taken a clean source, ripped to a lossy format (mp3, despite high bitrate), and then converting again to another lossy format (AAC, at a lower bitrate).

I understand that the conversion is for songs only on the device (the original stays the same), but... eh, still.

 

Yeah I wouldn't convert mp3 into another lossy format, especially at such a low bit-rate.

 

Don't expect the music to sound as good.

But then again, if you're listening with cheap earphones such as the ones they bundle with the device, then you probably won't be able to tell.

 

i noticed the sound quality with my Ultimate Ears SuperFi 4 but on the trade off it only used up 7gb of space. Before it was taken up 20gb of space.

 

Wow that is a lot of saved space! Although I personally would have kept the quality and bought an external instead . I'm using Sennheiser IE7s so I'm after pretty high quality music, but then again my music library is pretty small, around 500 songs (I'm still young ), so storage isn't a huge problem for me.

 

It all depends on the user. I know many people use the stock buds that come with the ipods, and are perfectly fine with that. Another person I know only uses one earphone, so he converted all his songs to mono to save space, and hear both channels in the one ear.

For me, listening with my shures I can hear the diference in bitrates, and the same for when im driving in my car.

But probably for the vast majority of people, they'd rather have more songs at a lower quality, then higher quality. And have more space for videos, apps, etc

 

Ultimately, yep, that's it.

(But listening to mono music all the time? Oh man.)

 

Ya about a year ago I became a neophyte audiophile, bought my self a pair of Westones UM3x and found Flac versions for all the songs in my library and god how different my music sounded.

 

The irony is that a few years back Apple switched the iTunes store from 128 kbps to 256 kbps... and the improved quality was a selling point. Now they have this new feature which makes it easy to convert everything down to 128 kbps...

 

Yeah I'm surprised they let users turn mp3 and other lossy formats to AAC, even if its a better format than mp3, you should never convert from a lossy format to another lossy format, as you'll lose even more data, usually sounding real bad. They should at least warn you that you risk losing a lot of audio quality.