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Will Google ever step up its media syncing game?
- Thread starter billobob
- Start date
Penguissimo
Android Enthusiast
Exactly. Tweaking the settings or using a differently-optimized encoder will never make as big a difference as simply increasing the bitrate.
I was wondering the same thing.
I've started collecting .flac files. I can tell the difference between those files and .mp3 with a fairly cheap set of Bose headphones.
It's my space. I'll waste it if I want to...
That might be the difference between ripping with EAC and using say Windows Media Player.
Penguissimo
Android Enthusiast
It all depends on your situation.
The DAC in the Droid, for example, isn't good enough that lossless will sound any better than a 320 kbps MP3, and the space savings of the MP3s will add up once you get enough files, especially with a relatively small SD card. Same goes for an iPod. And if you're listening in a car, lossless (or even 320 kbps) is mad overkill—road noise, Bluetooth streaming (if you use it), and poor car speakers all take their toll on the sound quality.
In these two situations, the quality advantage of lossless is obliterated, since none of the sound systems involved can reproduce the music accurately enough to make a difference anyway. In this case, the space savings of MP3 are well worth it.
On the other hand, if you're listening at home on good speakers and using a high-quality Firewire DAC (i.e. in a situation where the quality difference IS noticeable), the lossless files are indeed worth the extra hard drive space. I actually keep two copies of most of my music—a set of 256 kbps AACs for portable use and a lossless set for home listening. Obviously it's not worth keeping a lossless copy of, say, spoken word files, or tracks that have been transferred from 78 RPM records. But you haven't lived until you've listened to the Beethoven symphonies in CD quality on a set of studio monitors.
