encoding

I have a bunch of songs on itunes, most in the AAC 128kbps format. I want to burn a bunch of songs from there onto CD's for my car stereo. I tried one CD but it did not work very well and skipped or did not read. My question is..can I just encode my songs using a software to make the quality better. I heard 192kbps and even higher than that like 320kbps is alot better. How do I do this, and are 192kbps and higher alot better? I use DVD Power Burner to burn my CD's.

 

No, it will not improve the quality. Most likely, it will sound worse. AAC is a lossy fomat. It uses a complicated mathematical formula to filter out sounds that you are less likely to hear. The lower the bitrate, the more of this sound information was removed. Increasing the bitrate will not recover this lost sound information. A 128 kbps file re-encoded to 192 kbps, for example, will still only have the sound information of the 128 kbps file and it will most likely have added noise to the file in the process. If you bought them from itunes, there's no real solution. If you ripped them from your own CD collection, change the default for importing music into itunes to a higher bitrate.

As for your CD problem, it's not likely due to the bitrate of the files. It may be a bad CD or the burning program you used. Have you tried using the CD burner in itunes yet? It's worked well enough when I've used it.

 

I will try itunes burner, i just figured that was not a good enough burner. Also, for changing the bitrate, when I do that it will improve the quality, but it will also take up more hardrive space correct? There are many options in the importing options...Is it better to keep the setting on AAC encoder, or should i change it to something else like MP3 encoder and If i check the VBR option, will it make the quality better?

 

Itunes burner is as good as any CD burner. Yes, sampling at a higher bitrate will keep more of the original sound file which will take up more space. If you are definitely going to get an ipod, stick with AAC. If you don't plan on an ipod, I recommend MP3 since most portable players and many newer car CD players will play that format. Go with variable bitrate. It will automatically adjust the bitrate as it samples the song to get the best quality for the file size. I'm attaching a screenshot of my setup with 128 kbps as minimum for an example. If you want a constant bitrate, I wouldn't go below 192kbps though.http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y293/VladimirPukin/itunes.gif

 

Hmm, my attachment didn't take.

 

Thanks just playing