Our Digital Music

For many years, MP3 has been the standard for audio storage on computers, some CD players, and MP3 players galore. When iTunes hit the mass market (basically when it hit iTunes 4 and branched to Windows), the Advanced Audio Codec (AAC) made its presence known by having it be the default codec in iTunes. And there’s good reason that Apple has set it as the default codec.

AAC files are notorious for being the same quality as a higher encoded MP3 file, not to mention a smaller file size. While an average 3 minute song in 256k MP3 format is about 5.6MB, a 128k AAC file of the same song has nearly the same quality and only weighs in at about 2.8MB. File sizes generally vary depending on how much “action” is in the song.

While AAC formats are beneficial to iPod users, you may run into problems with other and older non-Apple MP3 players. The AAC codec is has started to break through most of the players, but for those who have yet to upgrade to an iPod-compatible head unit in their car (I’m guilty) and use MP3 files on their CDs, you may not be able to play AAC songs, thus making you convert the songs to MP3 format. While it’s not hard to do (for most songs), it is a tedious process.

Just a word of warning before you do go encoding your entire MP3 library to AAC, note that re-encoding a song does take some of the quality away, so you might be best just sticking with whatever format that you may currently have.

Comments Off