A newbie's first question:

I wish to fill a new iPod Classic 160Gb by ripping my CD collection for primary use connected by USB to my car's headunit, a Pioneer DEH-P88RSII.

The operation manual for the headunit describes support for WMA/MP3/AAC/WAV discs but mentions nothing regarding codecs used on the iPod:
http://docs.pioneer.eu/Manuals/DEH_P88RSII_CRD4261_manual/

If it makes no difference to the headunit what the iPod uses, is FLAC the way to go for a technologically naive audiophile using a Windows PC ?

Whatever advice you can give will be much appreciated - I only want to do this exercise once !

Thank you in advance for taking the time to help.

H

iPod's don't natively play FLAC. For a very quick answer, I'd recommend you get dbPoweramp and use the Apple Lossless encoder to do your ripping. This will let you use AccurateRip.

If it's just for car use, ripping to FLAC is probably overkill. Cars are less-than-ideal listening environments, and you would be making better use of your iPod's space by using mp3 or another lossy format.

That said, if you have the space on your computer, it may may sense to rip to FLAC for archiving purposes and then create mp3s of the FLAC files for use in the car/on the iPod.

If you want my advice, I would recommend you to just rip your CD's using EAC/dBPowerAmp losslessy to PC to use it as an archive and transcode to mp3/aac for your iPod. Lossless on iPod doesn't make much sense... especially NOT in a car! I have yet to see anyone perfectly ABX higher bitrate LAME mp3's even on high-end equipment. Personally I use LAME -v5 for portable uses (my laptop, iPod etc) and cannot distinguish it from the source, but if you're paranoid, settle with -v2 or -v0. Besides that additional space you get, you will also be able to use tags, which you probably will have a hard time telling your iPod to do with .wav-files

You might take a look at foobar2000 especially with the foo_dop component.

Metadata associated with wave files is not a problem for iPods (or iTunes). That said, I also think lossless is overkill for portable use or use on the road; even home use for the vast majority of people with most music regardless of the system used to play it.

If he creates the wav-files in a program that does not support tags properly (as the one i mention) he will face problems using them on an iPod, but yes I should probably have explained it better.

There may be other considerations than overkill in audio quality. It is most likely (well, practically certainly) true that in a car one would not be able to hear the difference between lossless and lossy.

On the other hand, the OP said he only wanted to do this once. Secondly, if ripping to lossless, there would be a digital archive of the CDs. Now, if there is enough space on the iPod to store the desired CDs in a lossless format, going for Apple lossless would save him effort: the effort to keep a lossless and a lossy library in sync.

I am currently having the joy to keep a lossless archive and a lossy library in sync for home listening on PC and Squeezebox, mobile listening on iPod classic and iPhone. Although I have a working solution now thanks to help from this forum and good tools, I can only say one thing: the day the storage becomes large enough to store my entire library on an iPod and a sufficient subset on an iPhone, I will go for lossless (apart from lossy purchases, of course).

What on earth are you talking about ? I've (also others) abxed many tracks from my collection even on V2 and higher. Even had several catastrophic failures - try the intro for nightwish angels fall first or the outro of Skidrow 'i remember you' . V5 ? i can abx EVERY sample i tried from my collection even if it requires some concentration and time.

Harold,

Could you give an indication how many CDs you have/want to rip to the iPod?

Thank you all for your interest and opinions thusfar.

I have around 500cds but they don't all have to fit on the iPod at once. When not in the car, I listen to the iPod on custom made ACS T2s amplified by Ray Samuels Tomahawk, connected by ALO Jumbo Cryo.

I'm warming to the idea of AccurateRipping the CDs to an external 1Tb hard drive using dBpoweramp and FLAC to create a lossless archive, from which I can then transfer what I want to the iPod. I have read as much as I can understand but still can't work out which would be the best format to do this while retaining the ability to play in the car.

Over to you experts,

H

You might be lucky and the 500 CDs will just fit on your 160GB iPod in lossless format. The compression varies with the music type, classical for instance usually compresses better than hard rock.

If you use FLAC, you can't play it on the iPod and you are forced to transcode to either AAC or MP3.

My recommendation in short is: use Apple lossles (ALAC) as a format, dBpoweramp for ripping and iTunes for organising.

ALAC because then you can save any transcoding effort. dBpoweramp because I have used it for a while, it is quite convenient and reliable to use (500+ CDs), it has not caused any problems for me. iTunes is supposed to be good when talking to iPods and has some nice synchronisation features.

What does this have to do with anything? The notion that the better the system the easier to identify lossy artifacts is a myth. In fact, the more flat the response the better lossy works.

I'm not really trying to push lossy on you, just trying to address some common misconceptions.

Thanks Kfal.

I mentioned my portable rig Greynol because I don't just listen to iPod in the car.

All interesting replies people, so thanks again.

Final question though, will my car headunit be able to deal with lossless ALAC ?

H

As soon as the audio reaches the line out or the headphone out of the iPod, the codec should already have done its job. I am saying should because I have a very, very vague recollection that the line out can act as a digital out on the iPod, but I do not know exactly if this is true or not; specifically I can't say if your headunit would use it. But it should be easy to verify since you already have the iPod and the headunit and only need one ripped CD to test.

I think I used the term "ABX" a little loosely there Of course I know that killer-samples exists and that no lossy encoder are able to compress completely perfectly. What I meant was that you shouldn't be able to notice encoding artefacts "especially in a car" if you use -v 2/0. I know you deal with killer-samples and that you are trained to hear mp3-artefacts, but do you think you would be able to hear artefacts in a car with casual music playback?

My point was that in a normal listening environment, especially in noise environments as a car, mp3's are sufficient and that the whole point of lossless ripping are for archive purposes. That's of course just my opinion.