because your opinion matters to me. thanks.


What bit rate do you use in your itunes for importing? if vbr, what is your minimum bit rate?

and what are the rest of your options set as under "custom"?

kaythanksbye!

what is the best way to get album artwork? dl it straight from itunes? or find and mpeg and tag the songs?

and if you dl it straight from itunes, does it tag it properly? or does it just end up in some fucking folder ill never find?

It depends on how much you care about sound quality vs disk usage.

Personally i don't use the itunes mp3 encoder because they don't use LAME. However if you wanted to use the itunes one i would set the VBR to high or highest, with a minimum bitrate of 192. If you are on oink, that will keep your rips within the minimum tolerance (the bitrate will fluctuate between 192 and 320).

When it comes to album artwork i'm kind of anal about it so i download the artwork manually from either allmusic.com, amazon.com or by doing a google image search. I don't trust itunes for that either.

that is what i have it set to now. vbr to highest, with a minimum of 192. but i dont know if i should go higher. lol. im trying to figure out all this shit now while im just starting.

thanks for the album artwork info. that is what i was doing last night.

i do the album artwork manually with google, but there's a program or website you can get to do it automatically.

i'm lazy so i just rip at whatever itunes sets it to automatically, and it's fine for my needs. if i wanted perfect sound i wouldn't be using compressed files at all.

np

anything more than what you have it set at now and you might as well just rip at 320 CBR.

i tried ripping the same album with different bit rates. vbr at highest with a minimum of 192. and at 320. i dont think i can hear the difference. lol. and laura brings up a good point, they are compressed files we are talking about.

the album artwork. man alive that should be mandatory on oink. lol. finding a good jpeg on google manually and then tagging the album on itunes for the 44 albums i barely have on there now is becoming tedious. i shouldve looked into this album artwork shit a few months ago...

yeah, i didn't do it from the start and now i have tons of albums without artwork that i'm too lazy to add it too. half the time i can't even be bothered doing it for the new stuff i add either. it's nice, but it's not like i'm looking at the screen when it's playing anyway.

this is true. im also lazy myself. problem is, im also anal. not a good combo to have.

again, i appreciate the input. and im sure ill be back in this thread shortly with another newbie question.

Since we're on the subject of iPods...does anyone have any idea when the next generation is going to come out? I know the iPhone is coming out later this year, but what about Gen 6 iPods? I'm thinking about getting one, but I'm wondering if I should hold out in case there's something like a 120 gig model somewhere close down the pipe.

i just got done adding tagging all my songs/albums with their related artwork. i sure hope i did this without stepping in some related pitfall i didnt know about. lol.

is there a limit to the size of the jpeg you can use? *charlie, you just asked that question now?*

oh yeah! time for some dumb ass questions!

i noticed that i got about 100mb of "other" used space on my ipod. as opposed to "music". there are no videos or anything else. so i can only assume its the artwork jpeg in each albums folder. along with whatever txt file, winamp playlist, etc that the dl came with.

do i really need all that shit? i mean, if the song is tagged properly, that is all that matters right?

im thinking of shoving all the artwork in a seperate folder.

i don't know if there is a limit, but you really don't want to be using massive files. Remember that the image is being added to the id3 tag of EACH file...so if you have a 500kb image that data is going to be tacked onto every mp3. I don't know exactly how much compression (if any) is done in itunes so ideally you'd want to use the smallest file possible. That is why i try to get all my images from allmusic if i can since they are 200 x 200 pixels and under 10kb.

As for the other space on your ipod, that is the ipod OS. you'll need that.

oops. ive been using stuff as big as 500 X 500 and under 100kb. hey, they look purdy. lol. its ok, i only just started. i should pay attention to the mp3 file sizes to see how it affects it, how much bigger it gets.

thanks for the other space info. it took me a while to figure out it had nothing to do with the jpg and txt files.

i need to add you to my xmas panamanian coffee mailing list.

i gave this a whirl with American Idiot.

difference between the 200 x 200, 10kb jpeg file and the 500 x 500, 90kb jpeg file was 1mb, from 112.7mb to 113.7mb.

so if you figure 1 extra mb per album, you could be looking at 300mb on a 30 gig ipod.

two ipods on one computer? this work? we can both have them set to manual and just add what we want?

and if he buys an episode of lost, can we add it to both our ipods?

kaythanksbye.

Yeah I have a lot of crap on my computer, and then my friend comes and puts my stuff on his (ipod)

Shouldn't be a problem,but I think there's a limit to the number of times you can put a tv show (that you got from itunes) onto an ipod.

The iTunes Library file cannot be saved. You do not have enough access privleges for this operation.

what does that mean?[/i]

i just hovered over my 'iTunes Library Database' file and it reads date modified 11:56am, which was 4 minutes ago.

so does that mean it finally did save it? and if so, why did it have troubles the first few times?