a friend of mine recently cracked open his ipod for me and dumped it into an external HD, from which i was able to transfer 22gigs of music to my desktop. i had been eyeballing the plethora of stuff he had with an eye to burning to some cd's. i don't own a mini device (ipod, zen creative, whatever) but thought it would be cool to mix up some discs.

i gotta tell ya, the ipod 128 kbps algorithm makes for some piss poor sounding cd's, so bad even MY WIFE noticed. are all the mini device compression algorithms this bad sounding, or is it just ipod. am i hearing compression or a particular KIND of compression? when i ran his ipod through my main system, it didn't sound anywhere near as bad. WTF?

Did you listen to the CDs on your main system? CDs should be transparent to the ipod compression artifacts - they should not degrade it any more than it already is. Unless you are going to analog from your hard drive and redigitizing - your sound card could be producing crap.

old tv-- last sentence of my post : "when i ran his ipod through my main system, it didn't sound anywhere near as bad."

i burnt the cd's using the itunes cd burning feature ....

...CDs should be transparent to the ipod compression artifacts - they should not degrade it any more than it already is...

I believe this is incomplete. iPods are capable of storing CD code using Apple Lossless Compression (ALC), which is lossless, meaning you get the same bits out as you put in. iPods are also capable of using MP3 and some other compression schemes, which are not lossless, meaning that upon decompression, you actually get out less than you put in.

If the friend's iPod contained files downloaded from iTunes, they would all be some variety of MP3, because iTunes won't download ALC, only MP3 at several rates. If it contained files crossloaded from CDs, they could be in ALC or MP3, depending on his settings in iTunes.

The original question was why the iPod would sound better than the copied CDR. How old is your CDP? It's possible that the decompression algorithm in the iPod is newer and better than the one used in your CDP. In theory, they should all be the same. In practice, they seem not to be. Why? I'm hoping someone here can explain that!

NT-- thanx for getting back to me on this. here is what i know: the friend bought the ipod, and gave it to his friend, who already had a very full iTunes library-- 22gigs. if i get it correct, this person had transferred his entire music collection to an HD via itunes, in order to then load HIS ipod. my friend's friend then transferred the same collection to the new unit. i was going through his one day when i saw just tons and tons of stuff that i thought would be interesting-- all kinds of american roots and garage, blues, ancient c & w, etc.; so we arranged to do the transfer.

my buddy is uncertain of the transfer bit rate, ALC or MP3...going by what i heard when listening to sample tunes on my stereo, i felt confident i would get acceptable transfers to CD, mainly for listening in the car. i have a 2005 honda element, my wife has a 2005 Acura TL. these CD's sound tinny and compressed in both cars. other CD's i've burnt sound great in the cars, including ones i've burnt from vinyl using a Marantz stand alone CDR. i chose the slowest transfer rate when burning the discs in iTunes. also, i know enough about this stuff to get myself going, but nowhere near enough to solve problems.

thanx NT

a friend of mine recently cracked open his ipod for me and dumped it into an external HD, from which i was able to transfer 22gigs of music to my desktop. i had been eyeballing the plethora of stuff he had with an eye to burning to some cd's. i don't own a mini device (ipod, zen creative, whatever) but thought it would be cool to mix up some discs.

i gotta tell ya, the ipod 128 kbps algorithm makes for some piss poor sounding cd's, so bad even MY WIFE noticed. are all the mini device compression algorithms this bad sounding, or is it just ipod. am i hearing compression or a particular KIND of compression? when i ran his ipod through my main system, it didn't sound anywhere near as bad. WTF?

Hi
if its mp3, i heard the iTunes mp3 codec is MADE that bad to let the own AAC codec sound better....
but - it also depends on how they are generated - fast coded, bade codec, bad result. then maibe gain raised until massive clipping (because the ipod is not loud enough), or recoded from AAC to mp3, or again recoded mp3s because of size.....
You never know what you get if you didn't code yourself, 70% what u get in filesharing is rotten stuff made by incapables.

i only use Lame, slowly generated and >192kbs (192kbs for simple Techno, cheap Pop, 256kbs vor Rock, Pop, Latin etc, 320kbs for Jazz and classical)
128kbs is ok for a mediocre system in a car or a boombox...

if you understood german, this would be the knowledgebase for this field: http://www.audiohq.de/
maybe theres something alike in US.



Helge

a friend of mine recently cracked open his ipod for me and dumped it into an external HD, from which i was able to transfer 22gigs of music to my desktop. i had been eyeballing the plethora of stuff he had with an eye to burning to some cd's. i don't own a mini device (ipod, zen creative, whatever) but thought it would be cool to mix up some discs.

i gotta tell ya, the ipod 128 kbps algorithm makes for some piss poor sounding cd's, so bad even MY WIFE noticed. are all the mini device compression algorithms this bad sounding, or is it just ipod. am i hearing compression or a particular KIND of compression? when i ran his ipod through my main system, it didn't sound anywhere near as bad. WTF?22 gigs doesn't tell us how much compression. How many SONGS at 22 gigs will give you an idea of how much compression, as an average. All the songs may mot be encoded the same! I do not own an iPod, but I do use iTunes. The higher the bitrate of the original encoding, the more truer the sound to the original. If the songs have been re-encoded (transfer to 'pod, transfer from your drive to CDR) it could easily result in low-quality reproduction. There is a thread HERE (http://audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=63185) that is discussing compression and interpolation of digital audio. If you want a quality CDR, the best bet is to rip the songs from the original disc in AIFF or FLAC format, and burn a disc from that. The downside is the storage issue - an AIFF file will be ~30MB for a 3 minute song, as opposed to 128kB MP3 at ~3MB for the same song. That's why the question - How many songs in 22GB?

my buddy is uncertain of the transfer bit rate, ALC or MP3
Did you do a straight drive-to-drive copy, or did you use iTunes to transfer the songs? If you used a straight transfer, the songs should still be in the same format they were stored in on the iPod - check the file extension! That still won't tell you what the original encoding was, the files may have been down-converted for storage on the iPod, but at least you'll know what you've got. Also, turn off the "Sound Enhancer" and "Sound Check" in iTunes, it adjusts the playback of each track to try and make them all sound the same. Doesn't work very well in my experience.

There are several types of music compression codecs out there the most common being MP3, AAC, OGG and WMA. All of them sound marginal at 128kbps in my mind. You need to take a step back to understand what is going on here with codecs. The whole compression thing was started as a way to make music portable for use in the great out doors and not in your living room. This being the case and the out door enviorment is noisy most folks welcomed the portability with the trade off being the loss of quality.

There are two families of music comperssion, lossy and lossless the second is used for archiving but can not compress the files as much. Playback quality of lossless is exactly the same as the original source CD. Lossy on the other hand can compress a file a ton BUT you lose some quality. The trick with lossy is reaching a balance between file size and sound quality. To this end I use lossy at a high bitrate...something in the order of 300kbps OGG VBR. To my ears, with my gear, using my music the playback quality is exactly the same as the source AND the file size is small enough to meet my requierments.

There is much more on this topic over at www.misticriver.net

Read through their FAQ section on codec selection and you will become an ezpert.

sdz

There is a lot of bullshit being spread around in this thread. OK, maybe that is a little too strong, but there are at the very least some serious misconceptions about how iTunes and iPods work.

First, iPods do not have a compression scheme. This is a misunderstanding of the technology. The iPod is a portable playback device, nothing more. It simply regurgitates what it is fed. Feed it AIFF files and you'll retrieve excellent sound. Feed it 128kb MP3 files and you'll retrieve crap.

"if its mp3, i heard the iTunes mp3 codec is MADE that bad to let the own AAC codec sound better...." This is utter bullshit. AAC is simply a better format than MP3. Apple did not purposely cripple its codec to make AAC sound better by comparison.

seadzz has it right. From your description I'll hazard a guess that the 22 GB of music on the drive was ripped as low bit rate MP3. I rip all my files as 256kb AAC, and the sound is nearly identical to the originals.

And BTW, 22 GB ain't diddly squat. I have 21,000 tacks in iTunes, taking up about 145 GB. :music:

thanx PB-- i posed my original query because i was talking to yet another friend who said, "oh, yeah, everyone knows that apple compression algorithms aren't as good..." knowing little or nothing of the topic, as i am a 99% analogue person, i thought, "hmmm, i will ask the braintrust at AK about this"....i believe that the issue has to do with the fact that more'n likely, the discs were transferred at MP3 rates. i am not looking for high quality, critical listening transfers, just discs for automotive use. even at that, so far i find them unlistenable.

somebody else asked how many songs are there in the 22 gigs? i think itunes counted 4500 or there abouts, or, 10.7 days...

somebody else asked how many songs are there in the 22 gigs? i think itunes counted 4500 or there abouts, or, 10.7 days...
Works out to an average of 5MB per song. Low bitrate, indeed!

First, iPods do not have a compression scheme. This is a misunderstanding of the technology. The iPod is a portable playback device, nothing more. It simply regurgitates what it is fed.When transferring songs from iPod to a "new" computer, would iTunes re-encode based on the import preference settings? That is what I was referring to, don't own an iPod yet, so I have no experience. Never meant to imply that the actual 'pod did anything except act as storage.

"if its mp3, i heard the iTunes mp3 codec is MADE that bad to let the own AAC codec sound better...." This is utter bullshit. AAC is simply a better format than MP3. Apple did not purposely cripple its codec to make AAC sound better by comparison.


AAC MAY be a better codec BUT the codec itunes uses to encode mp3 is the hearable worst mp3 encoder i EVER used. So, under the BAD(der as AAC) actualmp3 encoders the by itunes used is really the LOWest end.
With my cluttered BULLSHI* i didn't campare AAC to mp3 codec, i compard itunes mp3-codec to comparable mp3 codecs.

got it?

Helge

iTunes uses the standard Fraunhofer (http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/) codec (codec = coding/decoding). There is no "special" iTunes MP3 codec. It is the exact same as all other Fraunhofer MP3 encoding/decoding. If you are referring to the sound of the Franhofer codec as being inferior to that of Ogg/Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/) , et. al., well, perhaps everything German isn't perfect.

MP3 was developed in the late 1980s by the Fraunhofer Institute (http://www.fraunhofer.de/fhg/EN/index.jsp) in Germany. It uses perceptual audio coding to compress the data by eliminating frequencies that would not normally be heard because they overlap and cancel each other.

The only proprietary codecs used by iTunes are the options to use AAC (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/aac/) or Apple Lossless.

Perhaps this (http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/tutorial/segment102082b.html) will help?

on one point i am with dynacophil, the itunes may have the worst mp3 codec avaliable. all mp3 codecs are not the exact same, try ripping a song with two differnt software packages, they will not both be the exact same number of bites, if the codecs were the same they would be

however i am going to have to disagre with dynacophil on the statment about the files having the levels reased becaue the ipod is not loud enough. with the supplied earbuds the ipod will produce over 109dbs

however i am going to have to disagre with dynacophil on the statment about the files having the levels reased becaue the ipod is not loud enough. with the supplied earbuds the ipod will produce over 109dbs

Hi

ok, i just know folks as my sons, who both always rises gains until brutal clipping because in their opinion their (no ipods) mobile equipment isn't loud enogh. i don't take any music from them any more - its dead. Just a few minutes ago my son told me that he makes his mp3 with mp3gain to 98... but why the highs sound like krx krx then... he didn't even know clipping.

Helge

iTunes uses the standard Fraunhofer (http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/amm/) codec (codec = coding/decoding). There is no "special" iTunes MP3 codec. It is the exact same as all other Fraunhofer MP3 encoding/decoding. If you are referring to the sound of the Franhofer codec as being inferior to that of Ogg/Vorbis (http://www.vorbis.com/) , et. al., well, perhaps everything German isn't perfect.


mmh - i read (i hope i can prove this. i am searching for the source) that iTunes uses a modified[B] Fraunhofer codec, but i also read that itunes uses the original Fraunhofer codec. what to believe and how to find out....

1985 Brandenburg Group at Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen developed the codec. the short form of ISO MPEG Audio Layer 3 mp3 was fixed ten years later, 1995.


right now i just found the info that:

As advantage it is to be regarded that all AAC variants with exception of AACplus bring a better sound out than the old MP3-Encoder (e.g. FhG radium, Xing) with bit rates around nominally 128 kbps. The artifacts, Preechoes and distortions occurring with this bit rate are generally felt as less disturbing. Opposite LAME gets as close to AAC with this bit rate so far that a lead of AAC can only be proved by long time Listening-Test-Periods.
Source:http://www.audiohq.de/index.php?showtopic=512


In all codec tests i found Fraunhofer Codec only in the mid range....

holy codec...
Helge

Dynacophil, "I read somewhere" is a poor way to make a point. People post a lot of crap on the Internet. Reading it does not make it true. I get it, but apparently you do not.

theodoric, AAC is not an Apple proprietary format. The article you linked even states "AAC has also been adopted by the major standards organizations including the ISO MPEG (MPEG-4), 3GPP and 3GPP2, DVB, as well as XM satellite radio."

this page http://ff123.net/signatures.html contains analizer samples of several mp3 codecs. as with most things a analizer test can not tell you how good it will sound, but it dose prove that differnt programs use differnt versions of the mp3 codec, there is also a lot of other informaiton ont he mp3 codecs on the http://ff123.net/ site there are many articulse to this affect talking about the differnt mp3 codecs

this dosnt tell us how the one itunes uses sounds, but personally i think it is one of the worst sounding ones i have herd. but feel free to try it and other oens and make your own conclusion