Hello! Just bought an iAudio 7 and was wondering...

[BOWi]

Hello everybody, I'm BOWi! ;)

I'm still waiting for my audio player since I order it from ebay.ca... I would like to know what lossy format you suggest me to use...

I have 80 albums in wma lossless but I won't be able to put all these in my iAudio 7 without compressing them... I consider myself a little bit like an audiophile(without the 700$ headphones) so I was wondering what format to use... I don't have any codecs from Xiph.Org Foundation, nor any special decoder/encoder except the one coming with WMP 11... I don't have JetAudio(anyway... it will probably come with the player... ;))

What do you suggest me to use?

Oh... BTW, is there any hearphones/earbuds you consider I should buy? ;)

Thanks!

[breakfastchef]

You can rip to OGG with JetAudio. This is considered a good quality, compressed format. Also check out MediaMonkey, a free and popular music managr, ripper and convertor.

[GSV3MiaC]

I second the suggestion to use .ogg. You can decide what bitrate you need by using something like winabx (google for it) to see what, if any, differences you can actually hear. Most people overestimate wildly.

[BOWi]

Thanks for the help!

I'm going to use the two programs... ;)

[BOWi]

Damn! 128kbit/s .ogg files seem juste fine for me! ;)

[Vintage]

Bowi, most any quality setting in OGG sounds great, but the one setting I use exclusively is the quality setting "6" and let OGG make all the rest of the decisions.
The thing about OGG Q6 is that it is that setting that "forces" full stereo and doesn't let OGG combine channels at any time.
By the way, I'm sure JetAudio does a fine job at ripping to OGG, but try Cdec. It's free, very configurable, and has been my first ripper of choice for over a couple of years.

If you NEED to save space on your drive, you can go less and still have it sound great, but I often play my X5L through my "audiophile" system* and don't want to give up anything in sound quality.

Like I said, I have had an X5L for more than a couple of years, and I love the thing, but it now needs a battery so I'm thinking of getting an I7/16gb player instead of having to invest in a new battery. Just thinking out loud at the moment....



EDIT: Added Cdec reference.