iTunes and Your Tunes

[villenadecorte]

No Rick
I love SKA!!!! Skeletones are one of my favorite. They played at Blakes on Telegraph so long ago, but they had the place coming down!

[Michael Fanelli]

Am I the only one who find the quality of iTunes lacking? When I bought a few iTunes when it first came out for windows, the files were all set to a 128 bit rate. That sounded more like an average FM radio than CD quality. Have they upped the quality or is everyone just happy with what they hear?

[opus]

Michael, to be honest, I listen to my iPod while cleaning, on an airplane, or for just passing time; I don't listen with a discerning ear. I have only once paid attention to the quality of the music, and did notice that it wasn't the highest I've ever heard, but for my purposes it's fine.

However, I do notice that in your iTunes preferences, you can convert your tunes to ACC files at a higher bit rate if you go to custom settings.

I'm sure the Apple store doesn't use the higher bit rate because that would cut down on the number of tunes that could fit on an iPod, which is one of their biggest selling points.

For the average ear, 128 is "fine enough" I suppose.

Personally, I think the quality sounds better than "average FM radio" quality ... it's a full, rich sound, although if you listen close it's a tad muddy and heavy on the bass.

I'll tell you though, I ripped the same song off of two different compilation CDs, and listened to them back-to-back one day. I would have never noticed this had I listened to them separately, but one of the tracks was clearly of inferior quality than the other track of the same song. The one was almost wavering into a different key. The difference was in the way the CDs were originally recorded, not the way they were converted on iTunes. One track was from "Billboard Top Rock 'n' Roll Hits", the other from "Rock Artifacts".