I have been a subscriber to different online audio sources, and ever since one of them managed to screw up the DRM on the tracks I had bought I have been an advocate of tranferring music to my official music collection drive without DRM.
For that, I burn myself a CD-RW with the downloaded songs, and then use dbPoweramp to rip the CD without errors. The result? DRM-free tracks. (And no, I never share my music, and am a strong advocate for artists making money like everybody else.) But the result is also an MP3. It does not make sense to turn a 128k or 256k I-Tunes (or I-tunes Plus for the latter) track into a FLAC. My entire collection is either FLAC or MP3, the latter for its universality. I do not want to introduce more formats. The question is what compression to use. Right now, I have used 192k MP3 for tracks that I biught as 128k I-Tunes tracks, based on the fact some say the latter format is superior when it comes to musicality at the same compression rate, which makes 128k MP3 unsuitable. Some tracks I have compressed at 160k. And actually I have downloaded some good soft jazz albums (Grover Washington, Chuck Loeb ..) that sound quite satisfying at 92k, and when I mix them into playlists with FLACs they do not stand out like... Any thoughts and experiences anyone would like to share? -- pablolie ------------------------------------------------------------------------ pablolie's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3816 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=39123 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
