Well I recently reloaded my laptop and after I installed iTunes, I thought I would rip an album and see how it sounded encoded with AAC at 192kbps. Before this, I have been using LAME 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard and EAC for all of my ripping.

To my astonishment, the iTunes rip of the album sounded extremely good. Must be the placebo effect I thought, so I burned several encodes of the song to a CD and had a friend run a blind-test for me.

To my astonishment again...I had a real problem picking out any differences between the LAME 3.90.3 and the AAC 192kbps file. In fact, I couldn't conclusively pick any differences at all.

I ran a couple more tests on a more wider range of music and the results were the same. The key was the difference in bitrates...many of the LAME files had bitrates well into the 200s, while the AAC file stayed at 192kbps, saving a ton of hard drive space while keeping about the same quality (give or take).

So I decided to do more research into AAC. I had an uneasy feeling about using CBR (yes I know, Apple claims to use VBR, but all the file seem to be 192kbps). I see that Nero has a highly regarded version of AAC with high-quality VBR, problems is I don't have the money to test it.

I'm now in a bind...I have my LAME 3.90.3 files still waiting to be copied back to my computer. But iTunes with AAC 192kbps has really given me pause. Then there is Nero's version that I really want to try, but can't at the moment.

I love the iTunes intergration between the ripper, auto-tags, library, and playlists. Makes ripping so easy it is insane.

Nero apparently has a very good VBR AAC codec which would ease my fears that I have with CBR codecs like iTunes. But I have to buy Nero and as a college student I have no money.

Then there is keeping with LAME. --alt-preset standard MP3's sound great, but with the music I listen to the bitrates often hit the 240s-260s.

No matter what, I am going to use iTunes to listen to my music. That leaves the question of whether ripping using iTunes, Nero, or EAC/LAME.

I can't decide!

Welcome to the club

I can't distinguish the difference between iTunes encoded 192kbps AAC files from the original myself (on my equipment, and with my ears). So i've been in the same situation.

I decided to go with AAC. I've mostly used iTunes for my CD's, and i have some NeroAAC encodes (transcoded from either APE or FLAC with Foobar2000, as iTunes cant play them).

The ripper in iTunes isn't all that though, to be honest. It works perfect on perfect discs, but on scratched/old discs you get the occasional click & pop. Error Correction in iTunes does not work at all on my Plextor PX-W4824A drive (rips at 0,1-0,3x, constantly spins up/down, and i have the newest firmware). Burning works perfect though, and also ripping without Error Correction enabled. As i know, nobody here really knows much about iTunes error correction system.

So i have decided to use EAC and rip to wav+cue, then mount this image with Daemon-Tools and rip the CD easily and fast in iTunes from the image, and this works perfectly (CD gets recognized perfectly in CDDB and everything). This way i can also be sure that my rips are as perfect as possible.

iTunes uses Quicktime 6.5 which (in its previous version) won the AAC 128k listening tests of rjamorim's last time. We'll see who the winner is soon when the current 128k AAC listening test concludes. But in my opinion, you can't go wrong using iTunes (especially if money is a problem for you). Either listen to check for pops/errors or use another ripper app (like EAC) then use iTunes for the encoding at 192k.

At 192k AAC LC, you should be quite happy with the quality as compared to a MP3 encoder like LAME at the same bitrate.

IIRC, you can download the nero demo and extract just the aac dll's from it...

And if you use them beyond the allowed trial period of the demo, you are still doing something illegal...

I agree. Even if QuickTime/iTunes doesn't win this test, it already proved to be a very high quality encoder.

Evil person, you are.

Hmmm...I really like that idea of ripping an album with EAC into a WAV+CUE file, mount it as a virtual CD, and rip with iTunes...

Thanks for the help everyone. I'm edging closer to a decision.

A momentary lapse of reason on my part.

But if he just wanted to test them, wouldn't this be acceptable under the demo period? Also, i know this has been discussed here before (often when a new nero release comes out and everyone bitches about a 23 mb download instead of just an update)

I tried this... I was very disappointed to see that the iTunes rip/encode of the virtually mounted CD was no quicker than ripping the physical CD. I know the main reason to create the image in EAC is accuracy and not speed, but I don't know if I can justify double the encoding process.

But surely it doesn't take you long to rip a CD. Even on my old PII-350 it doesn't take long to rip a CD with EAC (unless it's got serious errors on it)....

Anyway, if you're convinced on using iTunes to play music, and can't/won't buy Nero 6, then I think you yourself have eliminated all but one option, that being using QT AAC. If you are going to go with iTunes ripping, definately rip it in EAC first and mount it using daemon tools (or whatever mounting program you want).

chrisgeleven: I know by now you already love itunes. But have you ever tried listening and doing the same audio quality test using yet another codec, called musepack (.mpc)?

You would get your file sizes even smaller, to around 170kbps (average since its VBR), having undistinguible quality than the lame aps ones, and encoding even faster.

This nice thread contains more details, for ripping, tagging and encoding.

Just one more choice so you can make an even better decision

Don't forget though that MPC has no hardware support, and it's not likely it ever will. Futhermore, it won't playback in iTunes (at least, I don't know of any plugin that will enable this). AAC has hardware support in a number of players, including the iPod.

I'm not trying to turn you off MPC as it does have amazing sound quality, I just want you to understand the disadvantages to using it.

(P.S. and don't someone turn this into a war between MPC & AAC, that was not my intention).

actually, the traditional line says that MPC will never have hardware support, but i'm not too sure.

exciting things have been happening recently, and i wouldn't be surprised if hardware support appeared in the future.

chrisgeleven, you can do a pretty good deal on upgrade for nero, even from for example 5.0 OEM iirc.
(edit: /me is no way connected to ahead.)

MPC SV7 already has hardware support & the source has been released .

Of course, the little chinese player. Well, as far as I know you can't buy it outside China and it only has 128mb of ram as standard. Of course it does actually play MPC's so I guess MPC does have extremely limited hardware support.

Yeah, that is weird. For the moment, I'll stick to ripping with EAC into separate WAVs, encoding using iTunes, and tagging using Tag&Rename. At least that way I get the album art too.

Although I'm still trying to get qutibacoas to work properly. That would at least make the encoding part easier.

And exactly what is so weird about this? my computer (XP2000+) rips/encodes in iTunes at around 12-13x, if i rip from a mounted image or from the cd-rom, it doesnt matter.. Why you say? maybe because it is limited by the encoder speed???? Just maybe?? It doesnt help if you rip from a mounted image then does it, when your cpu/memory bandwith is the limiting factor.

iTunes rips and encodes on-the-fly, it doesn't save to .wav's first.

I used to use Musepack. A great format, but I just had too many compatibility problems and time restraints to use it full time. Since Musepack wasn't and still isn't playable on 99.9% of portable players, I was forced to re-rip or reencode to MP3, which in my eyes was a waste of time that I didn't really have.

I have a friend who maybe willing to give me a copy of Nero that he doesn't use (he bought Nero 6 then for Christmas he got a new CD burner that came with another copy of Nero 6). So I might be able to try it out after all.

I have a P3 750 or something like that. I can't get above 5x. Which is about the same as if I use EAC.

Of course this is still hardware support & because the source has been released it makes the possibility of further hardware support more likely than unlikely.

Is Ahead recruiting from HA? Now I see yet another developer here go that direction... (ok, I guess it's just through personal networks, but it looks funny to have three of you guys here now )

I have had a very similar experience as the original poster. I have researched as well as I could. Here is what I determined based on my experience and research:

I have to use EAC. I have some CDs that produced errors in with Itunes ripping.

I use an Ipod so I want compression, however I would rather have increased quality than have ever song I've ever owned fit on 20gbs.

whilst this is marketing, this influenced me as well (192k alleged to be indistinguishable from CD (not "near CD" but "indistinguishable"):

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Q...section_10.html

I trusted this person's review based on this person's audiophile credentials (not necessarily for the mp3 review - since the person used itunes mp3 - but for the bit rate to use with aac)

http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijli...servations.html

Whilst Nero perhaps may be better than itunes/quicktime, I can't justify $70 when I could buy 6 new cds with that same money.

As far as VBR versus CBR, I guessed (since I am completely unqualified, but based on some research ) by using 224k aac I wouldn't have to be paranoid. There are some VBR atributes to itunes encoding (according to what I've read on here). Also, since the max size of a VBR sample with mp3 is 320K and aac seems to be more efficient (224K is 70% of 320K) those samples that VBR would want up to be 320k under lame should be fine at 224K. Obviously encoding slience at 224K is a waste of space, but the net effect is smaller than most -APX files I have.

Incidently, I can't hear a difference between 160K and 224K on my grado sr 60 with my Ipod. But I figure, having only 2800 songs versus 4000 songs is worth not being paranoid.

So I use EAC with error correction, DAEMON tools with 4 drives, itunes/quicktime 6.5 at 224k aac.

thanks for listening

Do I have to rip the entire CD in EAC to a WAV/CUE in order to load it into daemon tools?

From what I've read iTunes' error correction setting only has issues with Plextor drives, so if you don't have a Plextor, feel free to enable it and do some test to see how it compares to EAC. All my CD's have always ripped perfectly but I'm using OS X on a PowerBook so different hardware/different software. iTunes AAC encoding is not CBR, it's actually ABR. I don't think you can even have a CBR AAC file.

If you use the image cue sheet method with EAC you'll rip the whole disk. From there you can pick only selected songs to rip.

An alternative that may work is:

rip with EAC, then rip to AIFF or WAV with itunes (this is 27x speed.)

then batch encode all of your Wav/aiff files

then delete the wav/aiff

Yes