One last link

[andrewducker]

EMI starts selling non-DRM downloads. Which is _great_ news if they weren't putting the price up by 30% at the same time. And only making them available in AAC format. And only at 256kbps. Which means it'll take up twice as much space on my MP3 player. I don't actually _want_ them that high quality when it means I only get half as many songs to carry around with me. It's a plot, I tells ya, a plot to make us all go out and buy bigger iPods!

Comments

[drplokta]

You can always recode them to smaller MP3s for your portable player while keeping the original higher quality files.

[andrewducker]

Which is what someone on Slahdot suggested to me as well. Encoding a 256kbit AAC to a 128kbit AAC isn't likely to give the same quality as encoding a CD to 12kbit AAC though, is it?

Still, better than nothing. Especially considering that AllofMP3 is no longer an option :->

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Like you're going to be able to tell on your portable player*. People are very arsey about encoding rates and with very little reason.

I should disclose here -- for years I recorded live music in ATRAC and re-recorded into MP3. And people still really like some of that stuff...

*NB: if you're listening in a library through high-end portable headphones I'll allow you as an exception. But 99% of all portable use is in environments too noisy to be fretting about bit rates -- cars, public transport, gyms, offices.

[andrewducker]

I agree in certain respects - except that it's not actually audible quality that I'm too worried about ( I could live with pops and crackles) it's that music sounds somehow flatter and less interesting at lower bit-rates. I find myself getting generally bored of it more easily.

I started out with a teeny MP3 player with 16MB in it (back in the 90s), and all of my music was at 64kbps, which really brought this out (but it took me a while to realise). 128kbps seems fine to me - but I am worried that 256kbps re-encoded to 128kbps might suffer the same problem.