[OSX-Users] Re: downgrading sound quality?

[Philip Boulain]

Chris Andrews wrote:
> A useful thing to note is that if you hold "Alt" whilst starting iTunes 
> on OS X, it allows you to choose which iTunes library you want to start 
> it up using. You could always make a second library called "Lossy" or 
> something like that.

...hunh. Why isn't this stuff better documented/more discoverable?

> The application I used for converting a huge amount of files at once was 
> Max, which gives very good quality MP3s when paired with the latest LAME 
> encoder (as in, I converted a 160kbps AAC to ~190kbps MP3 and couldn't 
> tell the difference on reasonable equipment).

Yeah, Max also lets you rip a CD to multiple formats at once, and will 
make sensible use of your multiple cores to do this. Supports batch 
conversion of existing audio too, although Hugh's iTunes suggestion is 
probably easier if that's what you're doing. Can also automatically add 
ripped audio to a specified iTunes playlist. It uses LAME et. al., so 
you get excellent VBR MP3 and other format support.

http://sbooth.org/Max/

Unfortunately its metadata is Musicbrainz only, no FreeDB/Gracenote, so 
YMMV with how much you have to correct/fill in track names etc. 
Personally I've found both it and iTunes' (Gracenote?) DB to fail to 
have useful metadata to about equal proportions.

Steve Harris wrote:
> I wish the UI would do something useful with the near duplicates though, you get two entries, one for each format.

Yeah, I often want a breakdown more like [song, i.e. composition] -> 
[version/arrangement] -> [recording], because I've got different songs 
with title collisions, rearrangements of songs (the popular approach of 
mangling " [radio version]" etc. onto the end of the title field offends 
my inner semantics junkie), and multiple recordings of the same song 
(e.g. CD vs LP, where neither is outright superior---in extreme cases, 
MIDI vs digital audio).

-- 
| Philip Boulain   PhD student |  _`._  |   "Study the past if you     |
| IAM, ECS, Uni of Southampton | /  K \ |   would divine the future."  |
| http://zepler.net/~lionsphil | \__-_/ |                 -- Confucius |