“Can I make an mp3 version of my CD?”
Absolutely.
CDs and AIFF files
The digital files on an audio CD (like the Streisand album you rushed out to get last week) are in an industry-standard digital format called aiff (audio interchange file format). The aiff is the leading digital audio format used by professional audio and video applications, and it is the purest, uncompressed format of digital audio, offering the best sound quality. Since they are uncompressed, aiff files are rather large in size and take up a lot of disk space, making them impractical for storage and playback on iPods, iPhones and other portable devices with limited space.
Enter the mp3…
The mp3 format is a compressed audio format that is designed to greatly reduce the file size, creating a relatively faithful reproduction of the original audio file by reducing the fidelity of certain parts of the sound that are considered imperceptible by most people. There are different quality resolutions of mp3, measured in something called a bit rate. The lower the bit rate, the smaller the file and the lower the sound quality. iTunes used to sell mp3s with a bit rate of 128 kilobits per second (kbps), but upgraded their catalog to a higher bit rate (256 kbps), which means a larger file size but higher quality sound.
256 kbps is a pretty good quality. Though when I rip mp3 versions of CDs, I use a bit rate of 320 kbps (bigger file, but even better quality).
Creating mp3s from your CDs
In a word… iTunes. By default, iTunes will ask you if you’d like to import a CD when you insert it. When it iTunes imports a CD, it creates mp3 versions of all the songs (at least the ones with a check in the box next to the track name). The default bit rate for this mp3 conversion is 128 kbps, but you can change this setting in the Preferences panel by clicking the button for “Import Settings.”
You can find much more expansion on this in iTunes Help, where you will find most of the answers to the “How do I…” questions.
You can also get support for iTunes online: http://www.apple.com/support/itunes/
Hope this was helpful.
George
