As in the previous post, I’m converting all my CDs to mp3s and storing them in a closet. Or at least I thought I was until a coworker planted the seeds of doubt into my process. He (as a person with SGI and Industrial Lighting and Magic experience) stated that I should be using AAC or Apple Lossless encoding for my “one rip to rule them all”.

I agree with the Apple Lossless but I can’t afford that kind of filesize. AAC is a mystery to me and my tools at hand are mainly MP3 based. I thought I’d overcompensate with the dated and often rivaled MP3 format by bumping the codec to 320kbps and 48khz (which doesn’t buy me anything off a 44.1khz CD).

When I got home, I ripped a track on the album Reprazent by Roni Size in Windows (Cdex) and on OSX (iTunes). The OS isn’t the question here, it’s the codec.

I turned on my Yamaha HS-80 self-powered monitors. I opened both files side by side. I turned off my display and hit Apple+` a random number of times. When I hit the space bar, I wouldn’t know which file was playing. I listened to each track about half-way through. The song starts slowly, has a drum-n-bass groove and then breaks with a string-delay section that doesn’t feature drums. All in all, it’s an electronic song that includes some space and variety.

I choose the AAC track as the crappier version. It sounded compressed in sections. The snare wasn’t as crisp and the strings sounded like a high-pass filter was done on them. In addition, the AAC file sounded quieter and less punchy. I thought for sure I was hearing the MP3 file as the “lossy” one. And factor in the fact that the MP3 was ripped at 320kbps and still is 2mb smaller, I think I’ll stick with my MP3 encoding.

I’m 70 CDs into the MP3 codec anyway (phew).