Since I have publicly disclosed my love affair with iTunes, I thought I would share some the my lessons in love. 😉
The first lesson I learnt in importing one’s music library into iTunes is: Do it right from the beginning. (Not really helpful eh?) 😛
What I mean by “right”, is that you should import all of your songs off the entire CD, and do it at the top end of the bit-rate range.
The first mistake I made is that when I started doing the importing about two years ago, I was anxious about running out of hard drive space. I would try to pick the top five songs off every CD. When I started importing my CDs, I would listen to them, identify which tracks that I wanted to import into iTunes, write those down, do the import, and finally place the CD in storage. It became a headache in having to debate when a song made the cut or didn’t.
Well, I eventually learned that a song that I might have not liked when I first heard it, might be worth re-listening to when prompted by an article or recommendation. Now I had to go dig the CD out of storage and then insert it, find the track, etc. It would be so much easier to go to iTunes and load the track to play instantly.
The second mistake I made is that I was importing at a lower or shallower bit-rate. I started with 128 and later moved up to 160 bit. I then decided that it would be best to do the most optimized bit-rate of space and sound. My settings are: 192kbps / VBR-on, Highest-on 44.100 kHz, Smart-on, Filter-on
I am now re-ripping a bunch of CDs because I was too cheap to begin with. 🙁
And I am keeping to MP3 format and not using the Apples AAP format mostly for legacy purposes. I still burn MP3 CDs for use in my car and various CD players. Even though I am sure in five to ten years, MP3 CDs will not be required, the MP3 format is just too ubiquitous to be usurped by the next generation of digital music.
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