most compatible itunes music file

[TitusG]

Thinking of ripping my cds to a NAS. I will start off using itunes through my pc because of mine and my wife's ipods, but in the future I don't really want to have my pc on, so could be using a squeezebox, sonos, naimuniti or any other streaming device.

What music file is the most compatible with manufacturers?

thanks

 

[Anonymous]

Well if I presume you're talking about lossless files with that equipment and itunes, apple lossless is way to go. Thing is since you use itunes, FLAC which probably is the most broadly compatible filetype is not available unless you use one of those rubbish transcoders someone will mention. Don't forget with lossless you can convert backwards or forwards anywards.

 

[TitusG]

Thanks for the reply

I was going to use Apple lossless but noticed AIFF and WAV in the options and didn't know if these were better.

Will apple lossless fit onto my ipod or will I have to backwards convert?

Thanks

 

[Anonymous]

AIFF + WAV are completely uncompressed, or to but it better raw files. Apple lossless and flac compress the file a bit like a zip file so you save on disk space. You do not however lose out on any hard disk space because the player 'unzips' the music in real time. You're best converting to apple lossless if you're using itunes as your software.

 

[Binman]

I started off ripping all my CD's using Itunes with Apple Lossless. I then bought a couple of squeezeboxes, which seemed to struggle using Apple Lossless (I think mainly as the server software is on a very low powered PC). So I converted it all to FLAC, and have had no issues.

What i'm saying is that ripping music with Itunes using Apple Lossless is very easy, but as its lossless, you can easily convert to another lossless format using something like dbpoweramp at a later date if/when you have any issues. Dbpoweramp has a 'batch convert' facility, so you can set it running over a weekend to convert.