Audio Codecs...What is Best for me?

[Wiredchild]

Hello everyone

I recently, through great effort, managed to get my hands on a Sony Vaio Pocket...tis a seriously amazing music player. Kicks the ass of iPod; i love it.

Thing is this:
I don't know a) what format to use (MP3, Atrac, Atrac3plus...etc etc), and b) what bitrate to encode the format at. Irritating this is that it was suggested that i used Atrac3Plus at 256kbps as that is the best thing to CD quality without being a ridiculous file size, it's irritating because i have all my music (about 70 albums) ripped into media player as .wma at 192kbps, i did that before i knew anything of codecs and bitrates and left it at that as it was the default.

...SO, main thing is that i really really really don't want to rip all my CD's again, but would that mean it pointless converting a 192kbps .wma to a 256kbps Atrac3plus. Would it just be the same quality???

Should i just use 192kbps Atrac3plus? Would i notice much difference between the 256kbps and the 192kbps???

Is the 192kbps atrac3plus the same quality as the 192kbps .wma???

And finally, what sort of file sizes am i looking at here? I do want to have very good audio quality and i believe i should be able to with a 40GB player, but, i also don't want to fill it up with the 70-odd albums i have using a stupidly high bitrate, just to get near 'lossless' quality. Would i experiance good enough quality with a 192kbps Atrac3plus file? How much worse would it be than a CD?

So, SIMPLY, it's a choice of the 3:
1) Convert my 192kbps .wma's to Atrac3plus at 192kbps (Is that decent enough quality??)
2) Convert my 192kbps .wma's to Atrac3plus at 256kbps (Is that pointless and stupid??)
3) Rip all my CD's again to Atrac3plus 256kbps (i REALLY DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS...I know it's better in the long run and prevents me from having to do it sooner, i'll have to do it 'eventually'...I just don't have the time)

Sorry, that was a great deal, i just need to get all this understood so i can put some music on my player.

Thanks

 

[Half Evil]

Easily put .mp3 saves the most space, becuase its compresses the file the most. Although 128kbs should be what you have for an .mp3. Because you cant tell the sound quality difference through the headphones. With you having your albumsat 192kbs, you just wont be able to hold all the songs you want. Because the quality is higher, which makes less room avaliable for storage. Never put anything higher then 200kbs on an .mp3 player, unless you have a good size one.

 

[ndsbass]

i have a sony minidisc and it also uses atrac. i believe that atrac removes all of the high and low pitches inaudible to a human ear, thus creating extremely small file sizes. i had some mp3x around 3-4 MBs go down to about 1-2 MBs. you cant tell the difference, since obviously there isnt a difference to hear lol. anyways you should check out atrac since your mp3 player supports it.