I've been playing with dBpowerAmp (plus the Sveta Portable Audio add-in) to connect to my iPod mini and also Anapod. I have all my music as FLAC on my PC and was recently given an iPod Mini so I want to get some of my music onto that. (Throughout the rest of this post all uses of "AAC" refer to lossy AAC compression.) To maximise space on the iPod I really want to go for AAC as the iPod format (see my "aside" on quality at the end of this post).
I think both the above programs are impressive but for me, since all I want is to get music to the iPod (I use EAC to rip) I prefer Anapod to dBpowerAmp since it is cheaper (am I correct in assuming that to fully license what I need I would need to buy both dBpowerAmp and Sveta = $38?) and Anapod allows me to delete stuff on the iPod as well as just add it. The trouble is that as far as I can see, there is a show-stopper with Anapod in that it doesn't support AAC transcoding. Am I correct or does anyone have Anapod configured to do FLAC -> AAC transcoding onto an iPod? As an aside on quality, I would be interested to hear people's opinions of AAC vs MP3. On my current portable player I rip to 128kb CBR MP3 (with LAME) and that is OK quality given that I mostly use it in noisy environments (planes, cars and the gym) but I wouldn't want to go lower since very occassionaly I plug it into various friend's home hi-fi systems so any lower than 128kb would be embarassing. Most discussions I've seen of AAC vs MP3 seem to indicate that at lower bit rates AAC is at least as good as MP3 and most of the reports I've seem seem to indicate that AAC is better. This seems to indicate that going for 128kb AAC encoding would at least match, if not exceed, the quality of my current 128kb MP3 stuff and maybe I could even drop down to more like 100kb and preserve my current quality. I have noticed on the dBpowerAmp encoder that it has really wierd options for the quality settings, i.e. 100kb as the default with the next higher ones being 125kb & 150kb (i.e. not powers of 2 which, for a computer scientist, counts as "wierd" :) ). Does anyone know why this is? Anyway, I'd be most interested on people's thoughts on (a) am I correct in my fear that Anapod doesn't support transcoding to AAC and has anyone else emailed them about this and got any interesting answers (I emailed them just now but don't have an answer yet of course)? and (b) general thoughts on AAC vs MP3 quality since clearly one option I have is just to stick with MP3 but, for the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph, I would prefer not to go down this route since space is at a real premium on my iPod. - Julian -- JulianL ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JulianL's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1088 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=16240 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
