Anxiously Awaiting On Everything Eternal…

I hate being analytical

I have been brooding over the best way to rip my music collection lately. Most people slam their Cd's into iTunes or Windows Media Player and reduce the quality of their encode to nubbins with default settings. There are a couple of really good resources that I have been using to try and solve my dilemma. One such site is hydrogenaudio. It has a lot of explanations of how the different bitrates work, and has some codec comparisons. Turns out I can't really tell the difference between a 192kbps VBR mp3 and the original CD track, so that's the bitrate I'm sticking at. It has a nice size reduction too.

My biggest issue is getting my iPod to do gapless playback without having to use iTunes encoded media. I have a hack that involves copying the music that I wish to load to my windows based laptop and transferring it to the iPod from iTunes. It works on both AAC and mp3s. Then there's Amarok. My favorite Linux music player has some annoying issues with gapless playback on mp3s but works rather well on AACs. So the question is mp3 or m4a?

Soon we shall see.