OT: MP3 and Classical music

[Vatz Relham]

Chris,

Yes it does, but I haven't tried it. I figure if I'm going to start learning about MP3 players I might as well do it and also have the benefit of storing more music in a small space without the hassle of changing discs.

It's nice to have choices though !

Vatz

[Amphissa]

Well, here is a way to go about it.

Copy one movement of a symphony into a folder. Then convert that movement to mp3 at mid-rez -- into the same folder. When you are done, you will have the original wav file and the mp3 file in the same folder.

Then burn both the MP3 at mid-rez and the original wav to the same blank disc.

Then you can switch back and forth between them through the same playback equipment. If you don't hear any difference between the mp3 and the original wav, you've found a quality level of mp3 that you can live with. If it sounds obviously degraded, try again at a higher rez.

[Wunderhorn]

Bruckner's 3rd Sinopoli/Philharmonia

1st movement:
http://www.megauplo ad.com/es/ ?d=4FJMDF14
2nd movement:
http://www.megauplo ad.com/es/ ?d=UABH17ZU
3rd movement:
http://www.megauplo ad.com/es/ ?d=MI7AAP81
4th movement:
http://www.megauplo ad.com/es/ ?d=LJ8QOXBP

[akiralx]

I rip at 256, mainly because I have a 30Gb player (Creative Zen Vision) and can easily fit tracks at that rate, but I think 192 is fine really.  One thing I would say is that Creative players sound better than iPods (I've checked this at length) and that good earphones are even more important - get some Etymotics, it's worth it.

[stateworkers]

Ripping CDs is tedious, especially since CDDB isn't very friendly with classical music. 
...

I have an 80 gig iPod and I think the large capacity ones make people go crazy....mine has fourteen M2s thirteen M9s, seventeen Beethoven 9ths, six Ring Cycles, four Bruckner cycles....stick with an 8 gig, you'll spend more time listening and less time deciding.   

Tell me about it! "Shuffle" is my best friend. I've come to accept the juxtapositions of Chopin's Nocturne op.9 no.2 (Moravec) followed by Slayer followed by Jeff Tain Watts and then a Richard Pryor rant as a happy fact of life. keeps folks at red lights perplexed.

[Russell]

If you have a high-capacity iPod, I see no reason not to rip at anything less than Apple Lossless, unless you have a large CD collection and are bound and determined to have most of your collection on your iPod.  Apple Lossless is exactly what its name implies: it's compressed but lossless encoding, meaning no data is lost when you rip the CD, even though the file sizes are roughly half the size of an AIFF or WAV file, which are uncompressed.  On my measly 30GB iPod I have one each of all the Mahler symphonies (of course!), as well as all the symphonies by Shostakovich, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky, plus all of the 'Ring' cycle and at least 5 other complete operas.  All this with room to spare for lots of other pieces.  And all of it is encoded with Apple Lossless.  It sounds great.  I also have an 8GB iPod Nano, and there I've chosen to use 320kBps AAC (which many say sounds better than MP3 at equivalent bitrates, though I haven't done any comparisons), and it sounds quite good as well, though perhaps not quite up to the level of Apple Lossless.

Russell