Chocolate

I use Nero to put CD quality FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) music on CDs and maintain the original sound clarity. Six CDs is enough music at one time for me. With MP3s, even high bitrate ones, you lose sound quality from the compression.

RX330inFL

If you are going to store your music collection in a digital format outside of the original CDs FLAC is a very good one to use. Another, if you do not mind using Apple software, would be to select Apple Lossless (ALAC) within iTunes in your import settings. MP3s, as you have pointed out, are a lossy format. Why even today I will not purchase from Apple or Amazon as all their files are in lossy formats. Instead, I still purchase CDs of the music I like which I then immediately rip into iTunes as ALAC and move to one of multiple iPod Classics I have. Not even a 160GB model is big enough to hold my collection in a lossless format. As needed these iPods can be used either in the cars or can plug directly into the front of the home stereo which sees and can control these devices.

FLAC is more universal as it is open source, though both have limited support on portable hardware devices and I am not aware of any handheld portable device other than those from Apple that can read ALAC.

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7...mp3-explained/

Chocolate

Good post. Have you tried Rockbox? It's a custom firmware you can load onto many types of ipods and other mp3 players. Tried it on a Sansa a few years back and it was actually better than the factory interface, plus it added FLAC support. A while later, I got a later Sansa on sale for half price (40 bucks) with built in FLAC support. Now I have a quad core Android smartphone which can also play it.

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/WhyRockbox

There is also a lot of legal lossless FLAC backups available at thepiratebay.se . Like classical music

carfan1111

any votes?

Lolodo

Welcome to CL! Great resource for all things Lexus!!

JLeffler

Tried this on our "new to us" RX330 and it worked! That's a pretty cool feature. Didn't know it was even there.