iTunes to iRiver

imac david

Hi,



a friend of mine is running iTunes on a PC, and bought himself (despite my protestations) an iRiver.



He's now bought some tracks from iTMS through iTunes. To play them on his iRiver, he burned a CD of these tracks, and then ripped the resulting CD using EAC to create .ogg files.



But I was wondering - the downloaded file from .TMS is a 'lossy' codec produced file. If a CD is created, the file is effectively padded out, is it not, to create the .wav format for a CD. If you then use EAC to rip the track to the .ogg format, aren't you effectively compressing an already compressed file, resulting is a significantly poorer quality sounding file?



Or am I talking out of my derriere?!



Cheers,



David

ipodandimac

yes, it's called generational loss. the resulting file will sound fairly the same, but worse. your friend screwed himself over.

imusic_andrew

As the friend referred to above here's some background: I installed iTunes on my PC & bought a couple of tracks only to find it's not possible to put them onto my music player



The options I've considered for listening to the music I've paid for are:

• Burn a CD from iTunes. Then rip that CD.


• Record WAV files off my sound card.


• Try to decrypt the m4p/m4a files to play on my player.


• After this experience I've discounted buying an iPod.

Any thoughts appreciated- thanks.



Andrew



P.S. I've had my iRiver iHP140 for over a year. It's been superb and here are 10 reasons why it's so great:

1. Excellent sound quality (supporting OGG as well as MP3).


2. 12-15hr battery life.


3. FM radio.


4. Great PC linkage: plug & play; drag & drop and fast USB2.


5. 40Gb hard drive.


6. Wire remote provided.


7. SRS, WOW and Truebass 'enhancement' supported (as well as graphic equaliser). Though for OGG it sounds better without.


8. Can plug in 2 headphones at the same time (handy sometimes when travelling by plane or on the train).


9. Voice recorder.


10. Can record directly off music players using the line-in.

Oh, and it's a cool black. The iPod may be simpler to use and look more stylish but for sound quality and functionality my iRiver is better.



(I use Sennheiser MX500s & Shure E2c's).

shetline

Any conversion from one lossy codec (such as AAC) to another lossy codec (such as MP3, OGG/Vorbis, etc.) will result in a loss of sound quality, no matter how you capture the music -- burned to CD, pulled from the data stream to your audio card, all of that makes no difference. You'll even lose sound quality going back to the same codec if you decompress then recompress (for example, DRM-protected iTMS AAC -> CD -> ripped back from CD to unprotected AAC which some non-Apple players can play).



You can, however, limit the damage from such conversions by using a higher bit rate for the second round of compression. For instance, I've edited music from iTMS to trim intros, add fade outs, and join tracks into a single track, by opening the original tracks with Amadeus editing software (you can imagine burning your iTMS songs to CD and re-ripping them as AIFF as how this <ahem> might be done), saving the edited results as AIFF, and then using iTunes to convert the music to 192 kbps AAC. I've found the results quite acceptable, and much, much better than going all the way back down to 128 kbps.



There's software out there which will converted protected AAC files directly into higher bit-rate MP3 files, without the nuisance of burning a CD or capturing playback streams in real time.



I can't tell you what software that might be, but I can suggest Googling, say, "itunes music convert aac high quality mp3" and seeing what might come up.

imusic_andrew

Thanks for that.



Andrew