Are Seven

Nutshell: Make sure you’re storing your digital music in a way that’s optimal for you.

More and more people are taking their music libraries entirely to their computers, and just as so many people moved to the internet age without taking a few early and necessary precautions, so too have most people gone digital without considering a few basic questions.

I’m going to try and take a different approach here, and lay out the details in as brief a way as possible. If you have any follow-up questions like “Huh?” or “WHAT?!”, please ask in the comments.

Note: kbps refers to the quality level of an audio file. The higher the number, the better the quality. The lower the number, the more likely you are to hear “artifacts”, which are imperfections that make the sound come out sort of warbly or watery.

If you’re using iTunes and have never changed your “Import” settings in the preferences, you are ripping your CDs into the AAC format at 128 kbps. This is a decent quality, and while it’s not as easily portable to other software besides iTunes, if it’s just for you, it’ll be fine. AAC is a good format, in that it has higher quality at lower bitrates, so the files are smaller. It’s just not as shareable, and if you switch to another software besides iTunes to play your files, you might have trouble.

If you’re using Windows Media Player and have never changed your “Ripping” settings, you’re burning your files as Windows Media files. Stop it.

If you want a portable solution, one that can work with almost any player out there and can be shared with anyone, you should use the familiar mp3 file format. This will require changing the settings in your preferred audio software, but that’s not difficult.

If you’re ripping your files as mp3s, the minimum quality you should be using is 192 kbps. For some insane reason, iTunes refers to this as “Better” quality. 192 is the MINIMUM quality you should be using. You can still listen fairly happily to 128 kbps mp3s, but it’ll sound bad on a lot of systems, and if you’re trying to build a quality library, you should be going for at least decent quality.

The quality level you choose should be dictated by how much hard drive space you have. Go with the absolute maximum that your space will allow. Get an external hard drive if you need to. If you don’t want/can’t have an external hard drive, you can rip at 192 mp3s or 128 AAC, but you’re still going to have space trouble somewhere down the line and will have to start jettisoning songs off of your computer.

If you want top quality and space is not an issue, look into creating “lossless” files, which means that they don’t lose any quality at all, and can be converted to . There’s several well-established file types like AIFF (Mac) and WAV (PC), but the latest favorite of digital audio fans is the FLAC file format. FLAC can be a little high maintenance (iTunes doesn’t play FLAC files), but it’s top-quality at lower file size prices.

Remember: high quality files can easily be converted to low quality files, but low quality files converted to higher quality will sound so bad that they’ll be annoying to listen to even by the least discriminating music fan. To anyone else, they’ll be unlistenable.

What I use:

• 224 kbps mp3s (but should go higher)
• iTunes

Any other recommendations?

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