Best sound files (quality)

mp3 at 192kbps. Use Freerip or itunes to rip. Itunes does a great job at putting all the info into the ID3 tags.

AAC is really good if youre willing to use iTunes.

Very true. It is a proprietary format though and may not play on other MP3 players.

I stick with MP3 mainly because it's a more universal format. Like Steps, I rip at 192kbps, for me it has a nice balance of compression and quality.

i have a little hdd and I rip mine at 128
but I play it thru my stereo and my dads expensive surround and it sounds great
playing with equalizer helps too

theres hardly a difference from the 128 and the 192
basically unoticeable

wrong-o mp3 @ 320kbps as that is true CD quality, you dont want to degrade your music do you? for this task i reccomend jet audio.

If you want maximum usuability with programs, file naming tools and MP3 players, use MP3. The bit-rate doens't really make a difference, but 192 is great for size issuses and the quality is decent for most people. If you want a better quality, use WMA. WMA is a great sounding format. If you want to burn back to a CD, using Easy CD Creator is best. I have tried to use other CD burning software and not all decodes WMA to re-burn it to a CD, so just make sure you have a CD burning software that will.

AAC is great, but its protected music format by Apple. It won't play on a lot of different devices. I wouldn't use it unless you have an Ipod and you iTunes regularly.

The choice is yours, just weight want you want/need.

"KB"

So WMA is the best format to rip to the computer for storage and/or burning? That will give the best sound possible? And MP3 is best at around 192Kbps? I've always ripped my mp3's at 192 just for space purposes on my mp3 player. Is it KBps or Kbps?

And, what programs does anyone suggest for ripping MP3's to put on an mp3 player? I've use audoigrabber and I like that you can normalize while it rips...but is there a better program?

Check out some of the lossless formats. They make pretty big files, but are supossed to loose zero percent of the audio quality.
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
the most popular lossless format.
also, if youre gonna go with mp3, alot of audiofiles swear by the LAME encoder.
http://lame.sourceforge.net/

hope that helps!

Is it 192KBps or 192Kbps? This sounds dumb, but i'm trying to figure out how much MB a 3 minute song would be at 192. I think im just ******ed because I can't get it.

If it is 192kbps, then 192,000 * 180 secs = 34560000 bits. 34,560,000 bits / 8 bits = 4,320,000 bytes. 4,320,000 bytes / 1024 bytes = 4218.75 kilobytes. 4218.75KB / 1024KB = 4.12 MB?