MIA

[Empty_5oul]

cd quality is much less than 320k though, surely you can't lose that much quality during a conversion.

what would you recommend to store music in then richard ?

[Anonymous]

The MP3 format is very old and admitted to be the worst format of any existing format currently available. The best one I know of is Sony's and they made it proprietary so no one can use it, the next best is microsoft's WMA format. The best format is the old wave format. The wave format doesn't compress the data file.

The reality is this. The best file format (wave) for music is also the largest, the worst (mp3) gives the smallest file.

[Ototero]

Have you looked at OGG files. Supposed to be better quality and smaller files.

But there arn't many players around.

[rrcrain]

Never heard of them.

I've the hard drive storage to handle wave files and do only those anymore.

now, if I can only cure my main computers ills.

[NeoGen]

And there's also APE files, of Monkey's Audio, that is supposed to be a lossless compression format, although I don't know much of it.

And I wouldn't recompress my mp3's to wma, that wouldn't improve anything. But many of the songs I got on the pc in mp3 I own the original cd's, and those maybe it would be worth re-ripping from the cd's this time to WMA.

[Empty_5oul]

neo you could try it and the play the WMA and MP3 and see if you notice the difference. i doubt the difference would be that much with MP3 being at 320

[rrcrain]

Depends on your system. Car audio won't make much difference either way if any. A system from Rat Shack, Best Buy or Circuit City MIGHT make a little bit of difference but probably not.

Find someone with a high end stereo system and you can definitely hear the difference in the dynamic range and frequency response. MP3 "squishes" the dymanic range and lops off a bit from the very hign and very low end.

I didn't believe it either until I heard it for myself... Unfortunately, I have a high end system that makes the differences very obvious.