Dell Jukebox question (but possibly general) technical question

Graphics are perhaps a good example. Imagine you have to save some picture that's a basic horizontal gradient of colour, blue to white. You could save this what's known as "losslessly", which is to save every single pixel in the image to disk. What's more, each pixel has to be stored large enough to handle every possible colour. This is typically 32 bits nowadays (in fact, 24 bit is all the eye can see, but computers work in bytes and best in powers of 2; 32 is 4 bytes and 4 is a power of two). So you can see that for 1 million pixels you have to save 1,000,000 * 4 bytes = 4,000,000 bytes = 4 megabytes.

Alternatively (as a made up example), you could save an "instruction"; something like this:

Start at 0,0 (colour = blue); Finish at 1024,0 (colour = white); angle = 90

The picture can be reconstructed from this information by saving about 60 bytes of information, hundreds of thousands smaller; but it will not be the exact image you started with (most likely); however, it's likely no-one will be able to tell the difference. Hence, this is known as lossy compression.

This is basically the principles upon which sound recording works. CDs are lossless (at least in as much as is possible; there's still a recording frequency of 44 KHz to consider). MP3s are lossy, in that they record differentials rather than actual data points (pretty complicated; involves fast-fourier transforms/complex-plane maths).

In a nutshell: even although you'll theoretically lose quality, at an appropriate "quality" setting, you'll not be able to notice the difference.

Did that help?

I have my doubts about the loss not being noticeable, based on the many horrible sounding mp3s I've heard, but I guess that doesn't prove anything one way or another.

Aren't .flac files both lossless and somewhat compressed?

Also, as a rule, Dell Jukebox sucks- it's just generally annoying to use. I recommend Roxio's products instead.

Sorry, I didn't realise you were looking for the quality setting... What piece of kit are you using to do the ripping?

In most cases, it's a case of choosing the sample rate, so in Windows Media Player for example, it's Tools->Options, Rip Music tab and there's an "audio quality" slider. It also allows you to choose the format itself, which makes a difference (128KBps MP3 roughly equivalent to 64KBit WMA, which means (loosely) that the WMA file will be half the size for the same quality).

The basic rule if you're ripping your CDs into digital format, specifially MP3, is that 128kbps is considered 'typical', and to many people is the rough equivalent of CD quality.

You say that you don't buy that, so my suggestion would be to bump it up to either 192 or 256 kbps. If you're a true audio fanatic, go to 320 kbps instead.

You will lose information with any of these settings, but the theory is that you'll lose information that your brain won't notice. It's a matter of endless debate, but really, just rip the same track several times in different quality settings, and see what your threshold is. Then go with the lowest kbps setting you can still tolerate.