Hi @ all!

Some days ago I registered at www.itunes.at (iTunes Austria) to download music
from Apple's great iTunes music store.

At first everything looks really good and fine... the design of the shop, the iTunes
software and everything round it/them is amazin... typically for MAC.

But when I bought my first song form the music service (3 Doors Down -
Kryptonite *g*) I realized that the quality of the file is only about 128 Kilobits (!?)

I was really angry because I thougt that Apple represents "high quality" so that
everything from this company really is "really high quality". The 128 Kilobits are
not bad but they are not really high fidelity...

Because of my little problem with iTunes I searched through the internet and
asked some smart people about the issue... and I found a pleasent solution:

The files offered at iTunes are not MP3 encoded. They have got a special standard
called MPEG-4 AAC (Advanced Audio Coding).

The difference between MP3 and AAC is that a file encoded with AAC at 128
Kilobits is equal to a file encoded with MP3 at 160 to 192 Kilobits (depends on
the song, etc. )

So the AAC standard is cleverer than the MP3... same size, better quality.

An short excerpt of the AAC wikipedia article explains the differences
( Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_audio_coding )

AAC's improvements over MP3
Some of its advances:

Sample frequencies from 8 Hz to 96 kHz (official MP3: 16 Hz to 48 kHz)
Up to 48 channels
Higher efficiency and simpler filterbank (hybrid → pure MDCT)
Higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (blocksize: 576 → 1024 samples)
Higher coding efficiency for transient signals (blocksize: 192 → 128 samples)
Much better handling of frequencies above 16 kHz
More flexible joint stereo (separate for every scale band)

What this all means to the listener is better and more stable quality than MP3 at
equivalent or slightly lower bitrates.


I hope that I could bring some light into this iTunes secret :-) so that no one
will wonder anymore about the 128 Kilbits in his/her music.

For more information about the differences of the music standards or some
other information visit the following websites:

http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/musicstore/songs/
(Official Apple Support Site)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_audio_coding
(Wikipedia Information Site)


Greetings & Have fun with your great iTunes music @ high quality :-)
Harry1984a

if you want you can look for programs that can re-encode music files to a higher bit rate to whatever you want, or make it a variable bitrate if you want, i'm sure theres some programs out there. good luck!!

do you know how to change music files from .wma to .mp3 ????

But that won't help a lot, since you can't improve the qualtiy with that. Sure, you can raise the bitrate, but the sound would remain pretty much the same. It's like enlarging a jbg image. Anyway, 128kbps is like a standard, and the difference between 192kpbs and 128kbps isn't really noticable.



Just Google for 'wma to mp3 converter' or visit www.download.com. That usually helps

Hi,
If you want to convert files that have the extension '.m4p' to '.mp3' or '.wav' or something which has a higher bit-rate like 256 kb/s or something like that, you should download the Xillsft Audio Convertor. It's good in converting files and their bit-rates. Click this link to do so:

http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Au...Converter.shtml

I don't understand why the '.m4p' files aren't working as well as MP3's. They should have a high bit-rate as well. Did you try downloading files that take up a bit too less space or something? If you download these sorts of files to save space, they will be with a lower bit-rate. To have files with a quality that's at least higher than average you must be ready to use up a lot of space.

use iTunes. seriously. Even if you don't have an iPod, even if you're never going to get one, even if you hate Steve Jobs to the core.

Just open your songs up in iTunes (wait for it to load if it's a big library) and then select as many as you want and right click. There is a choice that says "convert selection to mp3". Click that. Wait a little bit (or a few hours, depending again on the size of the library) and iTunes will save all of the files separately as mp3s. Find where they're located, (usually under My Documents>My Music>iTunes) and then move them somewhere else if you like.

Actually, maybe disregard all of that. I think iTunes may actually convert them to mp3 as they are being added to the library.
You'll wanna check that out for yourself.

AM radio versus AAC?
iTunes' .m4p Music-files With Bad Quality?

That's so weird why anyone would like to still use mp3, it must be the same people who when buying a new car still want to use their old AM radio from the old car or rip music from the LP's instead of the remastered CD's.

I bounce multitrack sound files daily with Logic Studio to 24 bit WAV, 192kb mp3 and 128kb AAC. There are still some artifacts even on 192kb mp3 files, I don't think they matter but the customer with golden ears accurately pinpoints them and keeps complaining.

AAC really is the next generation compressed audio format and after 7 years in the market you would think everybody would be using it, but nah...The AM radio still seems to rule. But hey it's OK, there are lot of companies that benefit from it, after all, people need to buy 30-40% more memory to hold the same amount of music.

According to my buddy who imports mp3 players, there is still one generation of suckers he can sell the mp3 limited players, then the whole gang will come back and replace their old mp3 only devices with "plays mp4/AAC too" devices. Money, money, money...And he doesn't like me who still is using a 4 years old 40GB iPod.

-Studio dude