Converting audio files to MP3s (CD, Windows, work, software)
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To ask another way, if you convert to MP3, can you tell from examining the MP3 file, what program was used to make it?
There are certain restrictions on what you can put on your Ipod.
To ask another way, if you convert to MP3, can you tell from examining the MP3 file, what program was used to make it?
There are certain restrictions on what you can put on your Ipod.
No, you can use whatever program you want for converting. If you already have iTunes and are going to load them on an iPod, it would be easiest to just use the CD to MP3 conversion in iTunes. I personally hate iTunes and haven't owned any Apple products in years but my kids still have iPods and iPhones so I occaisionally have to mess with them. iTunes used to default to Apple's AAC format when converting from CD but you could change it to MP3 which I always did to allow for portability of music files to other types of devices. I have also used multiple other programs/applications and codecs to convert to MP3 and all of them have always worked fine on iPods.
mp3'S have meta data fields, it contains information like the song title, album, track etc. Those fields can be edited, I don't think there is any filed for what encoded and that can certainly be erased if there is. I'm not aware of limitations on MP3's on Ipod's, while I'm sure Apple would love it if they would just go away the reality is they the most popular format and any player that doesn't play them is doomed. See Sony's early player for reference that only played a proprietary format.
If you going to do this Robert and you have a lot of CD's what I would suggest is first convert to FLAC, lossless WMA or some other lossless format. The most work is actually physically putting the CD into the tray etc. If you convert to a lossless format you can use those files in the future. It's an exact duplicate of the audio on the CD, MP3 is lossy and achieves compression by throwing some of that audio information out.
Those formats don't have wide support however you an do a batch conversion on the lossless files to something like MP3. For example you can organize them like this:
My Music/Lossless Files/
My Music/MP3's/
My Music/Some Other Format/
The MP3 folder and files is created from the lossless files, it's an easy process because the files are already on your computer.
The reason you might want to do this is if in the future if you need some other format 10 or 20 years down the road you're going to want the original source quality. You can always go back to the lossless files to create different ones.
I use Free CDtoMP3 Converter. I did make a donation and the guy sent me a code but it is free to use.
It can connect and retrieve album/song info from one of the free Internet databases.
You can easily select bit rate, etc., it is really simple to use.
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