I looked through "Music" and couldn't find a topic about this. What audio quality and format do people here use/download?

I usually rip CDs to FLAC and I download at 320kbs which is about as high as I stop caring about quality.

I download stuff in FLAC whenever possible and rip my CDs in that format. I have plenty of hard drive space so it's not a big deal. I don't have a portable mp3 player, or really go anywhere, so it's not like it's impractical. I suppose if I did have a player I would transcode my FLAC music to a high quality variable bit rate, like the v0 setting for Lame. Though I've also heard good things about Ogg Vorbis. 320kbps is kind of a waste of space I think. For example, if you encoded a CD track with a ton of silence at the end and a "hidden track", using 320 kbps would encode all the silence at 320kbps all the way through, as if it was encoding actual music, whereas most variable bitrate encodes would apply a very high compression to the silent bit. Also, I've actually seen albums (usually l0-fi recordings) where a 320kbps encode is actually larger than the same music in FLAC since it would encode the whole thing at 320 kbps, even if that amount of information isn't really needed. Strange but true.

I download FLAC and rip FLAC using EAC (Exact Audio Copy) using very specific settings. I only rip a CD if I know that the settings I'm using will result in a bit-perfect rip and only burn a CD if I've set a correct write offset for the specific burner I'm using so that my burnt copy will also be bit-perfect. I also make sure to make it so that the FLAC files have a level 8 compression setting to save a bit of space; compressing at any level under 8 doesn't really make sense. When I'm done ripping a CD, I generate a log with EAC and skim through the log to make sure there are no mistakes to be found. If I find errors in the log, I scrap the rip.

EAC's defaults suck, so it usually takes me about ten minutes or so to configure it the first time.

When I convert FLACs, I generally use Helix MP3 audio encoder and use the highest quality VBR setting in dBPoweramp. Helix, when it comes to pretty much anything other than metal, does a better and quicker (it encodes about five times quicker than LAME) job of encoding music than LAME MP3 encoder, so it's definitely worth checking out.

I-I'll be honest, I usually don't bother with caring.

I mean, FLAC is grea,t, but then my iPod will bitch at it and then I'll get all bitchy and everything will be bad times overall.

320 usually does me pretty well. Also I'm kinda smooshed for space, so all that FLAC would make things hard.

Like Grandville said, 320 CBR is a waste of space because it considers all parts of a song as being the same. Even non-complex parts of songs (silent or quiet parts) are encoded at 320 kbps while VBR reduces the bitrate at non-complex parts of songs where a high bitrate is totally unnecessary; this saves you lots of space. A VBR setting encodes audio in a more logical manner than CBR (Constant bitrate).

I recommend V0 or V2 VBR (Variable Bitrate) setting for people who "do" MP3. People who download their stuff in 320 kbps might as well switch to FLAC and buy an MP3 player that has native FLAC support. If it doesn't have native FLAC support, they can modify their MP3 player's firmware to make it support FLAC.

I've heard that the Rockbox firmware for the iPod makes it possible to play FLAC and has other nice features like Replay Gain, but one downside is that it decreases the battery life. You could convert your FLAC files to ALAC, a lossless format made by Apple, which works without any modification to the firmware. There would be no loss in fidelity, but it might change some stuff in the file headers, which might bug people who want their rips to be "perfect". I wish they would really just support FLAC though. It seems like it would be kind of a pain in the ass to convert everything, even with dBpoweramp or similar software.

So does it decrease the quality of quiet parts any?

@Grandville: I put Rockbox on my iPod a while back but, like you said, the battery life was practically nil. My iPod has a pretty shitty battery as is, so it was like, 3 songs then kaput. Which is a shame, because I liked the interface for it a lot.

That's interesting about 320kbps and It could be helpful information if I need to free up space. I've always wondered why some vo albums have been 50% smaller than other rips. I should educate myself sometime.

I prefer v0, but will sometimes get FLAC if it's a really good album and I think it will make a difference.

I recommend taking some double blind ABX tests to figure out what level of compression is really "transparent" to you. It's really the only objective way to approach this sort of thing. There's several programs that can be used to perform these tests, and also a plugin for Foobar2000. It makes little sense to have all your music on a portable device in 320kbps if, to you, there's no discernible difference between 320kbps and v2, or whatever. However, having your music in a lossless format is nice for backup purposes, even if you don't notice a difference in sound quality.

i really should take a class because i don't know what any of this stuff means. flac? 320? i'm lost. i just download mp3's and don't bother after that.