I'm interested in ripping my CDs, and would like to know how many minutes of music one would get from using Apple Lossless or MP3 VBR per gigabyte of memory. Would anyone over 35 years old be able to tell the difference? Jerry Goldstein
The music on an audio CD uses about 10MB a minute. Lossless encoding could almost halve that, but it depends on the complexity of the music. Using a "lossy" compression system such as MP3 at 256kbps will get you a little under 2MB a minute, while 128kbps will produce music files that play at around 1MB a minute, regardless of the type of music. A 1GB music player should therefore hold between 2.5 and 3 hours of lossless music, 8 hours of 256kbps MP3s, or 16 hours of 128kbps MP3s. You get a little extra by using VBR (variable bit-rate) recording. For best results, follow the instructions in The Quintessential Guide to Creating High Quality MP3s by Chris Myden.
MP3 files have the advantage that almost any device will play them. However, if you want to save space, you could encode files using the more efficient AAC codec at 192kbps, instead of MP3 at 256kbps. This should give files of about 1.4MB per minute, so a 1GB player will hold about 12 hours of music. I would expect most people to regard these as having the same sound quality, when played on a portable device, and to be acceptably close to Apple Lossless. (Different compression systems create different artefacts, so you can learn to tell them apart, but this doesn't necessarily mean one "sounds better".) The only way to find out which sounds better to you is to run a double-blind test with different encodings of the same music, played in a random order.
You can get better sound quality by buying better headphones (or earbuds) than the ones supplied. You could also compare different MP3 players. Some Cowon iAudio models, the Kenwood HD30GB9 and a few others have a reputation for high sound quality, if that's your main objective, but most people prefer iPods even if they don't sound as good to some audiophiles.
