[kingskel]

Hi all:

Apologies if this is not the correct forum for this question:

I am currently in Canada, and heading over to Japan soon. Thus, I just purchased the 17" iMac (thought about an iBook, but this seems just as small/portable - plus I love the LCD!). It has not arrived yet, but I'm trying to plan...

Currently, I have about 40 commercial CD's, and around 160 CD's that are made up of some commercial tracks, and some MP3s that have been decompressed to AIFF format. The purpose of this is that these CD's can all be played on stereo equipment.

Of course, now my plan is different. I would like to compress, or at least save, all these songs on my drive or on a DVD (the iMac has DVD burning built in). This way, I can bring the (relatively) small computer with me, along with my entire music collection on a few DVD's - totally portable.

My question is this: what would you do? I can either:

1. Save all the songs as AIFF format on quite a few DVDs (anyone have any idea of how many DVD's that would be?). This will ensure quality, but take up a lot of space.

2. Save all the songs as MP4 format. This will be slightly lossy for the commercial CDs' and fairly lossy for the songs that started out as MP3s (they will have come from AIFF/WAV to Mp3 to AIFF to MP4). Also, MP4 playability in the future is unknown as most hardware/software is optimized for MP3 right now. However, this will save space.

3. Save all the songs as MP3 format. Even more lossy, but also saves space and is relatively compatible.

Do any of these sound reasonable? Or is there something else I'm missing? What would you do? Any suggestions appreciated.

[subego]

I'd suggest making an test mp4 of an mp3. Unless the codecs interfere with each other (which is what you would be testing for), the mp4 should be close enough to the mp3 to not matter to most ears. Use a high bit-rate though.

To iron out any future compatability issues, make an mp3 of your test mp4, and see how that sounds. If its good enough, you can just mp3 your mp4 collection if you need to download to an player.

Personally, I can't tell the difference between a 192k mp3, a 192k mp4, and an AIFF. At least with the kind of stuff I listen to (I did my test with "Six Days" by DJ Shadow).

Other tidbits:

4.7GB/650MB = ~7.4, less if you use OS X, which can't burn a full disc under 10.1 (I get about 4.2GBs)

So figure somewhere around 30 DVDs for solution 1