Monday, January 18, 2010

The great music restoration

As I alluded to in a previous post, a lot of my digital music collection suffered from poor fidelity ripping from CDs as a result of me not really knowing what I was doing.

I've been slowly working to change that. I don't have all of my original CDs, but I'm re-ripping what I do have into higher quality mp3s - 320 kbps minimum, and lossless if I can find it.

You wouldn't think you can hear the difference between a low quality 128 kbps song and a 320 kbps song, but play the file on any speakers other than laptop speakers and I'd wager you would be surprised by the variances your ears can pick up on. Especially now that I do so much of my listening in a car stereo - not even a super premium one, mind you - it really diminishes my listening experience when, in the middle of a shuffle block, an older song comes on that is noticeably lower quality.

I've been trying to take mental notes of what all of those songs are. iTunes is making the job easier by allowing me to sort by bitrate. So, I'm starting at the bottom of the list (some songs in ghastly 96kbps, eek) and trying to make improvements. Fortunately I've got the hard drive space to accommodate my elitist ears and general neuroses.

No comments:

Post a Comment