is there a rule of thumb for bitrate when converting?

[roborob]

Hi.

I am just about to convert a large number of WMA's so that I can play them on my ipod classic, just a few questions first.

1, does anyone have a general rule for which bitrate to convert to? for example, if I have a WMA as 128kbps then there is no point to convert it to AAC at 192kbps as I wont gain any quality, but if I convert it to AAC at 96 then I will definitely loose quality, but I also know that 128kbps in one format is not the same as 128kbps in another.

2, what's best: mp3 or m4a? I suppose my main priority is what format uses the least battery power on the ipod, does anyone have any information on this? after that, file size is the second most important criteria.

3, I read somewhere that the ipod only takes LC AAC and not the other HE or HEv2 variants, can anyone confirm this?

[Nonreality]

Re: is there a rule of thumb for bitrate when converting?

Hi.

I am just about to convert a large number of WMA's so that I can play them on my ipod classic, just a few questions first.

1, does anyone have a general rule for which bitrate to convert to? for example, if I have a WMA as 128kbps then there is no point to convert it to AAC at 192kbps as I wont gain any quality, but if I convert it to AAC at 96 then I will definitely loose quality, but I also know that 128kbps in one format is not the same as 128kbps in another.

2, what's best: mp3 or m4a? I suppose my main priority is what format uses the least battery power on the ipod, does anyone have any information on this? after that, file size is the second most important criteria.

3, I read somewhere that the ipod only takes LC AAC and not the other HE or HEv2 variants, can anyone confirm this?

You're going to lose quality no matter what other lossy format you change a lossy file to, but it won't get any better than what you have now. So I guess you should just change to m4a of the same bit rate. I think that is probably the best for power savings but mp3 is nice if you have any non apple players or programs.

[LtData]

Re: is there a rule of thumb for bitrate when converting?

1. I would keep the bitrate the same, even if technically you could go up or down and keep the same quality, I would just convert 128kbps to 128kbps.

2. Either one is probably fine. The best way to get better battery life is to use a lossy format (mp3 or m4a) as opposed to a lossless format (ALAC or Apple Lossless) as more songs fit in the cache and require spinning up the drive less. Note this only applies to the iPods with actual hard drives in them.

3. Correct, only LC AAC is supported. HE and HEv2 are designed to give better sounds at lower bitrates, but require device support, which doesn't exist here.

[roborob]

Re: is there a rule of thumb for bitrate when converting?

Cool, thanks for the replies. If anything goes wrong I will post it here, otherwise assume that it is all good.

(Rob cracks his knuckles, rolls up his sleeves and prepares to: reorganise ~10,000 songs, convert ~2000 WMA's to MP3, ensure that all the tags are in id3v2.2 (except when the id3v1.1 tag is correct and the id3v2.2 isn't), add ~1000 new tunes and tag them correctly, downsize the ~500 tracks that are unneccesarily big (but not the ones that are neccesarily big), not make any mistakes whilst doing so, reorder all the folders (automatically), find data for the ~100 tracks that have no tag data, load the collection into itunes and then (and only then) put them all on the ipod. God, do I really want to do this?)