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While cleaning out a couple rooms and closets in my home, I came across several dozen albums on CD I either thought I lost, was happy to find or thought that I no longer needed to own physically but should at least save the music digitally. With that thought, I ask the question… given that disk space is approaching a place somewhat infinite relative to cost, what quality and format should you save your digital music as?

There is ranting and raving about how the quality of the MP3 music format is sub-par relative to a CD or vinyl recording, but the reality is that most people have become accustomed to the 128kbs encode, which basically sounds as if a vacuum sucked out all the highs, lows and any sense of the room the music was recorded in. Of course given digital recording techniques, such nuances were never actually part of the actual music as well as many people at the record companies wanting the music to sound LOUD and punchy so it screams when that non-existent radio-play hypothetically occurs.

Given how super-convenient & portable digital music is, it is very difficult to resist wanting to encode your CDs and even vinyl as digital files for playback in the home, car and on the go. But do you go with the high-end encoding of 320kbs which main strike against it is the amount of space needed per file or do you go with the lowest tolerable setting of 128kbs which allows for more songs on a hard drive or portable device?

There’s also a question of format… MP3 is lossy compression, so you will lose components of the native sound recording, but the reality for better or worse is that most people do not notice in a casual music setting such things. There are lossless audio codecs such as FLAC and Apple Lossless which retain close to all of the original recording, but can be up to ten times the size of the same file compressed.

Some scientists familiar with sound and the brain have said that on a higher level, the brain actually reacts to brittle sounds by instantly portraying the sound as something you do not want to hear again, regardless if you like the song or not… the sonic waves hit your ears as little nails as opposed to sonic candy.

What’s your stance on digitizing your own audio collection? And if you’re a bad person and have exchanged audio files with a friend or stranger, have you rejected music files based on sound quality? Does Michael Bolton’s greatest hits sound worse at 128kbs than 320kbs?

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