Posted 06/01/2007 at 04:11:25pm

Apple's iTunes uses ABR or Average Bit Rate. To get a better encoding, you should use VBR or Variable Bit Rate. The aac consortium's recommendation is just that. They used to be here: http://www.audiocoding.com/ but the website is now down (maybe the Wayback Machine will work). I guess with VBR it's too complicated to calculate how many songs an iPod holds... Marketing weasels. Nero makes a very good aac encoder that is way better than iTunes, but is Windows only. I haven't ried QuickTime Pro though. Also, I really doubt very many iTunes songs are remastered. My brother-in-laws and sisters CDs aren't. They weren't even asked for their masters, just their pressed CDs. My guess is that anybody who uses any kind of compressed audio (of which I would argue aac is the best of the sad lot), they don't spend very much on music/concerts/equipment anyhow. Not catering to those of us who aren't deaf and would actually buy music that is at least lossless, and actually could be encoded for better than 16-bit 44.1 (downloadable music would be awesome for this) is just another misstep by the entire music industry.