Hi,

since I'm getting an iPod Classic 80GB for christmas I decided to rip all my CDs into AAC. However I'm not really familiar with this format so here are some questions:

1. Will the iPod gaplessly play AACs encoded by Nero? I've often read gapless is only available when using the iTunes encoder. Is this true? By the way, what about gapless MP3 playback? Does the iPod support this as well?

2. What bitrate do you recommend me? I'll use the AACs exclusively on the iPod with in-ear earbuds (not the most expensive ones, though - Sennheiser CX300). I can quite easily ABX MP3 at 128 kbit/s CBR. 192 kbit/s CBR is (almost) always transparent for me, at least on normal loudspeakers - will the earbuds make a difference here? I've read that AAC needs less space, so will -q 0.4 be sufficient? I mostly listen to metal and rock music.

3. Can the iPod read the embedded cover artwork and/or lyrics from AACs?

4. In many threads I've read that Nero and iTunes AACs have about the same level of sound quality. Are there any advantages to one of these encoders or is there even another encoder you'd recommend me instead of them? Nero seems to be more popular in this forum, why?

I've used the search function, it did not really give me convenient answers though. Thanks in advance!

1. I believe iTunes will detect the gapless info on Nero AAC files. I definitely know iTunes does this with MP3's and iTunes AAC files.

2. It is entirely up to you. I am quite happy with any rock/metal music encoded at 192kbps or higher. In fact, I could probably get away with 160kbps without noticing a difference.

3. iTunes embeds artwork into AAC and MP3 files, so assuming the previously embedded artwork is in a format that iTunes can read, then the iPod will read it as well.

4. From what I read, both encoders are probably the same or close enough. Nero is probably used by a lot of people because you can get a command line encoder to use it in EAC.

3. With regards to lyrics, the iPod (as well as iTunes) will also display them. I think that, for mp3 files, they must be under the 'UNSYNCED LYRICS' tag; whilst, for aac files, they must be under the 'LYRICS' tag.

First of all, thank you very much for answering so quickly! Your posts are both very helpful for me.


Can anybody verify this? If it's true I'll definitely go with Nero as I can use my beloved foobar then to rip the CDs instead of iTunes whose ripping mode to me seems comparatively insecure.


Great, I'll use -q 0.5 then I think, just as a "safety margin". Strangely there are many people claiming AAC is transparent at already 128 kbit/s, well, I could not really believe that anyway.



Well, I just tried that. I embed the album art with Mp3tag and iTunes recognizes it without any problem. Does it necessarily have to be a .jpg file and is there a maximal resolution for the iPod?

Once again, thank you. Now as soon as anyone verifies chrisgelevens information about the iPod being able to play Nero AACs gapless I can finally start ripping

You can still use lame MP3 with iPod if you want. It is fully compatible and gapless as well.

Why is that unbelievable to you?

Nero AAC was confirmed gapless on ipods around a year ago. The posts are here somewhere if you search for them. I remember because I didn't consider using it until it was confirmed gapless on itunes/ipod.

About transparent bitrate, you could always test a few tracks in foobar's abx utility. Then you wouldn't have to believe what bitrate is transparent or not, you'd know. For me, 0.4 is sufficient for nearly everything.

Yes, I also thought about this. I wonder which of both codecs consumes more battery power on the iPod - an important factor for me. MP3 might be bigger, thus needs more HDD accesses but AAC might be harder to decode, I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe not exactly unbelievable but... well, I was just wondering because codecs like MP3 or MPC are said to sound best at bitrates over 200 kbit/s. 128 is so low, I'll have to get used to that
I once encoded some 96 kbit/s WMA files for my old portable and they sounded like crap although WMA was considered to be more effective than MP3, so I just thought transparency would be impossible at such low bitrates.

Great, thanks! I guess I'll use Nero then instead of iTunes AAC or MP3.

Yeah, many people say this. Other sources claim differently. I do not really have those "golden ears" either and if AAC really is that much better than MP3 I guess using much more than 0.4 or 0.5 would be pointless since I'll use AAC mainly to save space compared to MP3. I'll just give it a try.


To all who answered, thanks a lot!

just a suggestion: since you're reripping all your cds, consider going lossless. just in case you change your mind with your ipod codec choice in the future, you don't have to rerip.

128kbps is transparent to most people these days. link

should you go just for lossy, my advise go for LAME -V2, just in case you need you need to use those files in a non-aac portable.

I am really surprised how well LAME performs in this listening test. Way back I tried ABXing 128 kbit/s MP3 (don't remember the encoder used) and it wasn't much of a problem for me. However, I just ran an ABX test on -q 0.4 Nero AAC and only had one part of a song where I thought I could hear a difference, however it only ABXed 9/16 so it certainly was just coincidence.

Not so long ago I ripped parts of my (relatively small) collection to FLAC -8 but I quickly ran out of HDD space so I'd have to buy a bigger drive before being able to store all my CDs losslessly. But basically your suggestion is very good. Reripping wouldn't take that much time on my small collection of ~100 CDs anyway. Besides, if I used lossless I'd want bit-identical rips which at the moment is impossible to do with CDs containing a data track (please correct me if I'm wrong here).

I won't use MP3 however due to AACs superior quality/space ratio. I doubt I'll ever buy a portable only supporting MP3 and/or WMA again (my last one sucked sooooo much).

Slightly off-topic , but I'd just like to know how you know you're getting an 80G Classic for Xmas. Is it the only thing you've asked for? Have you been very, very good this year? Do you have a 'mole' on the inside at the North Pole? (If so, can they check how my requests are going?) Enquiring minds need to know!

Only thing I've asked for, yes. Is there anything else one could ever need?
My parents asked me what I wish for and if I just said "whatever, it doesn't really matter to me" they'd get angry so I chose a "black 80G iPod Classic"

/me somewhat misses the surprise in christmas... always knows what he'll get before

Actually iTunes does not embed anything into AAC or mp3 files. Apple instead copies all the album artwork to its library file. You must manually add album artwork if you want to embed it into the AAC/mp3 files. The good news is that Tag&Rename can handle both AAC and mp3 files and it can embed the album artwork for you. What I do is have iTunes look up the album art for me, I then open up Tag&Rename, then I drag the album art from iTunes into Tag&Rename. iTunes uses the iTunes Store to look up album artwork and most of the album art is around 600X600 pictures coming it at ~1MB. So the album art is of high quality.

I'll do it manually: searching for the cover via google, resizing it to 500x500 and using Mp3tag to embed it since iTunes wants me to create an iTunes Music Store (or whatever it's called) account in order to download artwork and well, I cannot accept this.

Now two new questions arose: Will AAC be much superior to MP3 in terms of battery life on iPods? It accesses the hard drive less often due to a lower bitrate. I also tested decoding speed of a MP3 with V2 (~261 kbit/s) and an AAC with 128 kbit/s. To my surprise, the MP3 was decoded at about 30-35x realtime while the AAC was almost twice as fast with 60-65x. I was amazed because I thought the better audio quality of AAC had to lead to a much slower decoding like for example H264 is really slow compared to DivX or XviD. Did I maybe do something wrong or is AAC really that much faster than MP3?

My other question regards album art. So far I've always only embedded the front cover. However, foobar offers me the option to switch between front cover, back cover, disc and icon. Does AAC standard allow to embed more than one picture and will the iPod be able to switch between the pictures?

I have found through tests on my computer that Nero AAC decodes significantly faster than LAME MP3, even at comparable bitrates. I can only state that for these two encoders, because they are the only two that I have tried. Faster decoding means less of a load on the processor, so there will probably be a slight gain in battery life - but I haven't tested this; it just seems like a likely conclusion. The main killer for battery life on HDD based players is the Hard Drive seeking rather than the processor load, though - so lower bitrates, which will lead to smaller files, will likely save you more battery life in the long run regardless of whether it is in AAC or MP3.

It would be nice if you already had the iPod and could do some tests before re-ripping all your stuff!

Good Luck
Adam

I think the AAC format used to cause a slight decrease in battery power due to it requiring more processing power than mp3 (back in 2003 when Apple was really pushing it). That has all changed though as both the iTunes and Nero AAC encoders are pretty efficient. I don't notice a battery playback time difference between mp3 and AAC on my 5G 60GB iPod, my 30GB Halo 3 Zune, nor my 4GB Creative Zen. The bottom line is I wouldn't worry about it. If there is a battery playback time difference it is very minimal. Although you do have to keep in mind that with your tests, the mp3's had a much higher bitrate thus causing a bit more processing power than the usual 128kbps VBR mp3 (ie -V 5 --vbr-new).

iTunes does not allow for multiple cover art for your AAC/mp3 files. In fact, you can download a album off of the iTunes Store that comes with virtual cover art and it is a PDF file that doesn't get synced to your iPod. You can only use one picture for your cover art and you can't flip through it.

The nice thing about the iTunes store art is that it is not embedded in the music files themselves, but stored in a database. This means that only one copy of the artwork is used for each entire album.

If you have 5000 songs from approximately 500 albums, this could mean a savings of about 450MB on your iPod.

As to signing up for an iTunes store account, it is harmless and costs nothing. Even if you don't buy any music there, you can access thousands of free podcasts and download album art. The only problem may be that the original poster is a minor without a credit card.

I don't know . . . maybe the 160 GB iPod?

That would be nice indeed
Anyway, I think I've (finally...) come to a decision: I'll rip my albums to Nero AAC @ -q 0.4 or 0.5, I'm not sure about this yet. The 128 kbit/s multiformat listening test twostar posted convinced me - if 128 kbit/s is transparent for so many people I think I won't ever notice a difference either. If I used a higher bitrate I could just go with MP3 so more than 0.5 would surely be pointless. I just wonder why iTunes AAC outperforms Nero in the listening test...
Great, thanks for making this clear.
Too bad, however this is not such an important feature for me I think
Well, although I'm not a minor I don't have a credit card. I guess even if I had one I wouldn't give my personal information to a company like Apple just to download covers. But that's more an ideological issue...
Can't the iPod read covers if they are in the album folder named album.jpg or cover.jpg or whatever?
for that matter an iPod touch with 160 GB would actually make me wet my pants


Once again, thanks to all who posted here. You've helped me a lot and I don't think I have any questions left at the moment.

iTunes can do this - but what it does in the process of importing a folder like that is to embed the jpg into each individual song. It does NOT copy the jpg into some other folder when imported.

I setup iTunes to manage its own folders, and so it always copies songs from the original source to the iTunes Music folder. If I drag a folder full of songs that contains a cover.jpg file into iTunes, it creates and retags the copies. The jpg file is then embedded into each file and does not appear in the folder containing the iTunes tracks.

This all means that for some music files in my collection the artwork is embedded. For others (those tracks that got artwork from the iTunes Store) the artwork is stashed in the database structure and is not embedded. These two behaviors are transparent from the iTunes/iPod interface.

No. While AAC is somewhat more complex to decode, the difference is minimal with good software.



Well, 2x the bitrate, but what you're really seeing here is the difference between decoders. AAC and MP3 are both so fast they're not all that well optimized in a lot of software. The results you get on PC won't really be applicable to what you'd get on an embedded target.

I am sure Apple has tuned the AAC and MP3 decoders on the iPod to the max, so yeah, the difference is probably minimal to none. Could be one reason (along with improving the batteries themselves, less power hungry components, etc.) that the iPod's battery life has gone up with each model.

can an ipod display album art without embedding it into the file itself? how to please.

OK, just for your information: I decided to go lossless now - I managed to free some space on my HDD and accepted that this is the best solution. This way I can decide on the codec and bitrate later.

Yes. You must sign up for a iTunes Store account and have it automatically lookup your album art. If it can't find your album art then the only way to add it to your files is to embed it. In iTunes, if you add album art manually, it will embed the artwork in the files themselves.

You can use a command line encoder in EAC with iTunes too.

If you use windows, unless you had made the same mistake as me, you shouldn´t have any problem with the winamp plugin ml_ipod as well as with iTunes. As I (really, really) hate iTunes, before purchasing an iPod, looked for alternative to that pain for me. And I found this plugin and you can forget iTunes and keep it only to upgrade the firmware (thing I did once and only realized since then I´ve got Nike support . Very useful...).

With this plugin you can tweak many things and do many things on you own avoiding iTunes-does-every-thing (my opinion).

So, maybe you could have a look to this plugin to see alternatives to handle iPod.
Edit: Reply to kornchild2002


With the plugin mencioned before, you can add artwork too without embedding. It is placed in iPod->iPod_Control->Artwork by ml_ipod. So, I think this answers your 3rd question: it´s not read directly by ipod: it´s added by the software in a special folder.


And, of course you can get your music and (I think) artwork from the ipod back to your pc again.

Hope been a little useful.

bye.

That is interesting. I embed all my album arty anyway as it makes it so that my Creative Zen, Zune, PSP, and PS3 all display it. I prefer iTunes's default method of just adding the album art to the library file as that save space. Embedding is the only way for my files to display album art on all of my devices (though I believe the Zune has the same ability as the iPod as it doesn't embed album art if you let the software look up the track ID information but I am not sure).

Make sure that the nero-encoded aac files have the .m4a extension, not the .mp4 extension.

That's my experience on my ipod classic. .mp4 is not gapless, .m4a is gapless

Or solid state?

Actually, I think if I were buying now, I'd get a Nano. I've got a 30GB iPod that's only about half full. Even that much would run over what the largest Nano is capable of holding (although the larger iPod Touch is 16GB), but I think I'd exchange a bit of fiddling around with synching playlists for what's a more robust solution for a portable device.

Thanks Persona, that ml_ipod sounds great. I'd be more than happy to have an alternative to iTunes which, to be honest, I neither really like nor fully understand...

However, since I want to scrobble the music on the iPod to last.fm I guess I'll be forced to use iTunes anyway. At least I don't know of any alternative, maybe you do? According to their FAQ, ml_ipod seems to have problems with submitting repeatedly played files... I've read about "iSproggler", a small tool that reads the playcount from iTunes and submits my plays to last.fm. The official last.fm client won't work without iTunes either. So I guess I have no alternative for scrobbling...
If I fill the iPod using ml_ipod will iTunes still be able to recognise it without screwing up the database or something like that?

I recently tried to move my FLAC archive to my iPod (80GB video iPod) after transcoding to Nero AAC. Using the Nero and the recommended encoder settings from here

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=44310

I ended up with the result that approx. half the files would not play on the iPod. They worked fine in iTunes. On the iPod, the songs would be skipped over until a functional track was found (one Gorillaz album that wouldn't work, followed by the next album which did work, for example). This mirrors my experience from a few years ago where I tried a similar exercise with my then-new 3rd Gen iPod.

I would recommend that you try only a small portion of your tracks at first. Confirm that the resulting files will work on your iPod, then proceed to do the whole library.

I didn't have the time to mess with mine (and the forums around here looked to say that I shouldn't be having the problem), so I simply dumped the faulty batch and re-did it using itunesencode.exe instead.

Perhaps something like this problem?
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=57805
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....c=58978&hl=

Nero AAC should not have any problems with the iPod as long as you are using a filename of *.m4a. Don't use the defaults *.mp4 as they won't play properly. The steps on the hydrogenaudio page state that one should use *.mp4. Keep in mind that those instructions are not for making iPod compatible Nero AAC files, it is just for making Nero AAC files.

After transcoding via foobar2000's Converter, I opt to "Optimize MP4 Layout" (from the right-click menu)... never had a problem with Nero AAC playback on either of my iPods (2G Mini, and 5G Video), though it could depend on the model you have.

When I encoded AAC for my wife's nano (I transferred them with the foobar iPod plugin) I found that all the aac files skipped on the nano.
Must have been an iPod database problem: I looked up all the iPod tracks with iTunes, started playing each of them, and this updated the database with the correct track length. After this procedure everything was alright.

I'd just like to say that I'm pretty sure this is wrong; iTunes has supported multiple cover art (there appears to be no limit to how many you can have) ever since the feature appeared.



Artwork not related to the song obviously, I just chose a bunch of random files off my HD to demonstrate that it does actually have the feature.

What setting should i use with Nero AAC Encoder for Ipod Nano 3G, lc, he or he2?

iTunes and iPod unfortunately do not support HE-AAC (in either variety,) so if you have settled on Nero AAC, it is best to use the LC mode.

I wonder how long that feature has been there. I checked and the new Nine Inch Nails album (Ghosts I-IV) has two album artwork pictures for the first file. The iPod can only display one or the other but still, iTunes can display either album artwork picture. I am not sure how old this feature is though but it has been many years since someone asked me that question. I just assumed that not much had changed in iTunes since nothing ever really changes other than the GUI and the AAC encoder.

Is it related to the fact that it's in an MP4 container?

AFAIK, one of the advantages of using an MP4 container in the first place is that you can put more things in one. With enhanced podcasts that means you can have a series of pictures that changes as the AAC files runs through -- and you can see those on your iPod. Note the choice of formats here:

http://www.themaccore.com/files/show056.html

Enhanced podcasts also allow for clickable links in the file.