question on downloading music
 

Hope this question fits here,be gentle if not. Where do you guys get most of the music you download and play in your cars. And how do you play them back. Ipod,usb,burn to a cd or what. And why is there such a big difference in the sound quality from one song to the next.Meaning one might sound louder than the other. Sorry to ramble own trying to get a consistent sound
from my collection.........

FYI i use itunes with a iphone4

Quality does not really determine how loud it is actually.
I get all my music from CDs, rip them to two formats (one loseless and the other as MP3). Currently I have a cheap MP3 player plugged in via a USB.

I use music from itunes and play it through by blackberry

Download FLAC convert to Apple Lossless and play via IPOD, best quality you can get.

I want mp3s rather than a format I can only use in an ipod, so i download music off of amazon.

Actually it has a lot to do with quality.

The compression not only can compress the song and omit things but depending on how the pervious person "obtained" that song can be recorded at different levels. This is why I buy cd's and rip directly uncompressed to my computer for the BEST sound quality.

Here is plenty more info on audio compression.
http://www.the370z.com/audio-video/6...dio-101-a.html

That is not volume level though, that is compression removing frequencies to help reduce file size. Volume level differences will have more to do with genre of music or the message the music is trying to show.

While compression will remove certain notes, the volume level stays intact.

For best quality you want to play .wav files which are CD files or convert files to .flac format. Both formats are optimal.

If you don't wanna play CDs, you can simply burn tons of mp3 compressed files to a CD and play these, which i do.

I also keep a ipod with mp3s files in my car.

Regarding mp3s, you will want to download 192kps (minimum) quality. 320kps are the highest quality, and sound pretty good for most sound systems.

When you start getting into high-end car sound systems like McIntosh, then, i would stick w/ .wav or .flac format simply because you want to hear how the music was originally intended to be heard i.e. no loss in quality, non-compressed files.

Stay away from peer-to-peer networks, which could result in getting a virus on your computer..

You can also run your files through an audio editor and 'normalize' the volume output levels. You'll definitely find the sketchy sources of music tend to be the ones up and down.. obviously if you're ripping your own CD's or getting tracks, they are usually optimized.

But if you find your library is up and down, get familiar with some basic audio editors, and you can fix that issue..

If you download illegally the person before you could have used a line input from a radio or a microphone for all you know and that can lead to different volume levels. That is one of the many reasons I do not download. Not everyone rips a cd and puts it online for your to copy from. I understand the difference from volume to freq omitting.

That comes into play way before mcintosh, even doing a good quality amp and speakers you can start to hear the difference.

But I will say when I put something on my martin logans at home I can immediately tell if it is from my friends compressed files or from my cd collection coming through apple tv.

There is a massive selection of highquality FLAC discography files on the torrent systems, for the most part I have never had a single issue with downloading FLAC files.

For someone to go through the hastle of ripping in FLAC and uploading you can be pretty sure the quality is excellent. Trust me when I tell downloading in FLAC is the only way to go, then you can convert back to WAV for CD burning or Apple Lossless for IPOD playback.

If you do go IPOD then be sure to use the DOCK to Aux connector, this by-passes the IPOD amp and DAC delivering the highest quality possible.

Has anyone even considered the acoustic stage of the 370? You'll be too busy listening to rocks dance under your car to tell any noticeable difference between a high bit rate mp3 and lossless.

This is a good point, if anyone has spent any time driving in the Z you would agree with this point.

This driving season I will playing music on my new Fast Intentions exhaust.:excited:

I like the idea of .flac files but I have some hard to find albums in mp3 and it would take FOREVER to replace my 60 some gigs of mp3's since some of my cd's have be stolen since then. I second the 320kbps as not too bad to listen to. I like Vuze as a bit torrent downloader/search engine.