Get the best iPod sound quality

If you are like me you want to get the best iPod sound quality possible. There are some ways to achieve this and I will show you how you can do just that.

You may have wondered how you can fit so many songs onto your iPod, and still having room for thousands more songs. The answer is compression. If we just copy a CD right over to the iPod without compressing it into MP3 files it would not hold so many songs. And it would be painful to transfer the songs over the Internet, because of its size.

If we DID copy a CD directly to the iPod without doing anything, the sound quality would likely be much better, you might hear more details and the music quality would likely be a lot better. And that is almost exactly what I am going to guide you through right now.

Hold on! wont this fill up my iPod fast?, and give me less room for songs? Good, you understand me. You are absolutely right, this will fill up your player pretty fast but let me ask you ... How many songs or albums do you really listen to? Do you listen to thousands of songs? Or do you have favorites you mostly listen to? Do you really want that best iPod sound?

Right, rip those favorites of yours in Apple Lossless and keep those songs you listen to less in their current quality state. I will now guide you in how to rip your CD in Apple Lossless with iTunes.

Rip a CD with Apple Lossless

Insert your CD and this window will popup, select NO here because we are going to change some settings.

Now get into the Preferences.

Click the Import Settings button.

Choose to import using Apple Lossless Encoder. Then click OK to get out of this window, and OK again in the other window.

Now click the Import CD button in the lower right corner of iTunes, and it will start to rip the CD and encode it with our newly set settings.

Now you just connect the iPod to your computer and drag the newly ripped CD to your iPod, and you can enjoy lossless music on the go!

One more thing ...

Are you using the original earbuds that came with your iPod? If so you should think about replacing those with some other high quality earbuds instead. This will not only give you higher sound quality but it will be helpful to take full advantage of the lossless rip you just made. The perceived difference might not be so high if you use the original earbuds and you want the best iPod sound I assume?

If you want new earbuds, but cant afford so much, get these: JBuds Hi-Fi Noise-Reducing Ear Buds (White). They cost only ten bucks! They are a lot better compared to the original earbuds you get... You can get better earbuds of course, if you are willing to dig deeper in your wallet.

What about FLAC iTunes support?

I have to confess, sometimes it annoys me that Steve Jobs insist on doing things his own way. For people having their entire music collection in FLAC format it is cumbersome to get it over to iTunes. First you have to decode the FLAC files to WAV for example, then you have to re encode those to Apple Lossless ... and not to talk about the metadata lost in the conversion process. Pretty annoying to punch in the track names again, but there is a solution. And as always I try to find FREE solutions and I found one.

Your solution is the following free application: X Lossless Decoder. This will help you with the entire process and save you a lot of time! Now you are one step closer to the best iPod sound.