Should I convert all my audio to 256 AAC? Options

[DaGrandMastah]

Hi all, I'm currently researching what the best route is to go with when converting over my CD library. I realize that everyone loves Lossless (which I'll use for archiving the CD's) but I'm looking for "the best" lossy encoding.

I was originally planning to encode all my CD's into 320 CBR but it seems that almost everything I read states that this is a waste of space as their is nary a difference (except to the most trained ears) between 320 CBR and VBR v-0. Ultiamtely, I don't mind the difference in space when on my computer hard drive but it does become more of an issue when uploading to my iphone for portable listening so then I switched course and started thinking I would go with VBR v-0 (I posted a similar question to this in the mp3 forum) but now I'm reading that I may even be better off going with AAC 256?

This may make the most sense for me being that I'm a Mac user (imac, iphone, ipad) and I'm going to playing all my music out of my itunes library.

Is there any reason I would regret the decision to go AAC over mp3?

Also, for those with experience with this, could you direct me to the best possible setting to use in XLD for encoding CD's/FLAC files to aac?

[DaGrandMastah]

Thanks a lot! I'll check this out later on when I get home.

As a follow up, I'd like to thank everyone for giving me their opinions and helping me decide.

I'm now ripping my CD's to FLAC (for backup) and then converting the FLAC files to AAC True VBR 110. The songs sound absolutely fantastic and it doesn't waste nearly as much space as 320 kbps.

[yourlord]

I rip to FLAC for a couple of reasons.

1st, I can directly play the FLAC file on my home network. I don't use any devices on the network that can't deal with FLAC so there's no reason to keep another lower quality copy around just to play.

2nd, in the lossy codec world I prefer OGG Vorbis, but I do occasionally wind up with a device that won't play Vorbis files. So, with my FLAC archive I can directly encode to whatever the target device supports. Vorbis for my portable DAP, mp3 for my car stereo, etc. This allows me to use devices that don't support my codec of choice, but when a device does support a modern codec I can use the space savings they afford. I almost ended up with a car stereo that would play AAC files and if I had bought it I could have then encoded to AAC to gain the advantages of that format over mp3, but the reviews for that stereo weren't as good.

3rd, CD's can get scratched by kids, eaten by dogs (it's happened!), burned in a fire, etc. Once converted to FLAC I have a perfect copy which I then backup on 2 separate machines at home, an external USB drive at home, and that I rsync with another machine of mine at my parent's house for off-site backup. With 3 local copies I also run a monthly checksum comparison between the 3 copies to monitor for drive errors to ensure I don't lose data that way.

4th, royalty free and open source. No one is going to come in and tell me I'm a criminal for using it. I have the source code and therefore will always be able to access my collection, even if the computer architecture changes. I can always port the code to any new platform that may emerge.


Anyway,

I'm now ripping my CD's to FLAC (for backup) and then converting the FLAC files to AAC True VBR 110. The songs sound absolutely fantastic and it doesn't waste nearly as much space as 320 kbps.

I personally dislike Apple, but if you're determined to use their wares then I would suggest converting to ALAC and just using that in your itunes library. Play the ALAC files directly, and you can transcode to AAC or whatever when you want to copy to your ipod, etc.