> I'm not audiophile but I can almost always notice the mp3 distortion on 128.
In the early iPod days, "The Jobs" was quoted as having said (more or less) that the first thing people do when they move into a new home is set up their stereos, but the first thing they'll do in the new age is hook up their iPods.
I remember cringing at the thought of all the people who would get in line behind him and spend the rest of their lives listening to 128Kbps music, never knowing what they were missing.
> Also a warning - if you take a track that's already encoded, and "transcode" it to a different bitrate, say 512 down to 192, the quality will be LESS than 192 due to the multiple compression/decompression steps. Try to start with the source material if you can, to encode down.
> And what is not obvious to all, transcoding UP from say, 128 to 320, does not improve quality, it actually lowers it. All you get is a bigger, worse sounding song file. Never transcode up for any reason.
I had a difficult time wrapping my mind around those concepts when I began recording streaming music (The developers of software such as AudioHijack Pro need to make a point of them.), but I think I finally understood them and wound up importing 128Kbps streams in Apple Lossless format which, I think, gives me the best music I can get under the circumstances and in the least space.
