I will soon get an Ipod video... & would like to know the best way to get actuAl cd quality into the pod... ? does itunes have lossless format.
Lossless? Lossy? What?
Most people think that MP3 just means 'music file'. In fact, MP3 means MPEG Audio Layer 3, and is only one way of converting music into digital files. There are many audio formats, and almost all of them compress the audio data so that it takes up less digital space, that's less room on your hard drive, or less space on your portable music player.
Audio compression comes in two forms: lossless compression, and lossy compression.
The MP3 format is one that uses lossy compression. This means that it loses some of the audio information found in the original to make the compressed file much smaller. The information that lossy compression loses is the information deemed least important to the file. In music, this tends to be the very high and very low frequencies that are not considered to add as much to the music as the range of frequencies in between.
Many audio formats use lossless compression. This means that they retain every bit of information that is found in the original, so nothing is lost at all. Because of this, lossless compression cannot make the compressed file as small as it would be using lossy compression. However, lossless compression means that you get a smaller file without losing any information, and so is the only method that can be used when absolute fidelity is required.
What's wrong with MP3 as a format?
The advantage to creating your collection using a lossless compression format is that each file will be identical, in terms of information, to the original. The music stored in a lossless audio file will be exactly the same as the music stored on the CD (or other audio source) you created the file from.
Yes itunes has a lossless format...but the file size is almost as big as the original file...so you'll have to decide if suffering a little sound quality and getting alot more songs on your ipod is better than having cd quality but a lot less songs.
I personally use 256vbr and have never had a problem with the sound quality