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April 6, 2005
Another reason to dislike iTunes
Will the torture never stop? I was using iTunes to rip the Screaming Trees album last night and remembering how much I liked the album, I decided to listen to the songs as it ripped. Oh, what a fool. There was a warble in the background. Sounded like maybe memory contention was keeping iTunes from pushing all the bits to the sound card fast enough. The songs played, but the base was choppy and it sounded like the singer was singing into a coffee can. Thinking it might be the version of the song, I skipped to another from the library. Same problem. Wondering if it was just iTunes, I fired up the browser and surfed over to Energy Radio. There was the warble again! Even when the music is not delivered by iTunes. Stopping the import function in iTunes makes the warble go away. Hey, Apple, I know on your own platform you are used to being in control of the whole stack and can force your users to do one thing at a time, but over here in the REAL world on Windows, people share. occasionally we like to have our computers do more than one thing at a time. If you can't play nice, you should go home. I am on the hunt for a more friendly ripper now....
Posted by Martin at April 6, 2005 9:04 AM
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Comments
Could be artifacting from low bit rate encoding. Like JPEG images, MP3 is a lossy compression format, which particularly suffers when trying to compress an already digitally-enhanced source. What encoding settings were you using in iTunes?
Go to Preferences-->Importing
Try some alternative "Custom" settings, such as 192Kpbs or above (if you want to use MP3) -- to get higher quality, try the AAC encoder, or even better, the Apple Lossless.
Sticking with MP3s, you can
">install a script which calls the LAME encoder into iTunes for even more fine-tuned control of MP3.
A quick review of one forum has some posts comparing the formats back in 2003.
Posted by: Leflyman 
at April 12, 2005 10:56 PM
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