MP3 CD Ripping Compression Rates

At what rate should you compress your CDs?

If you have spoken voice CDs such as audiobooks you can get an acceptable result, and save disc space, by going with 64Kbps. When it comes to music the lowest we'd recommend is 128 Kbps.

If you like classical music, if you have a decent amount of hard drive space and speakers or headphones that will carry better music, go up to 320 Kbps. Our CD ripping service defaults to 320 Kbps.

There's no higher setting for MP3 music, if you want much higher quality you should be thinking in terms of an uncompressed format such as AIFF or a lossless codec such as Apple Lossless.

Music Servers

CD ripping onto music servers - units like Systemline, iMerge and the MusicM8 - demand a slightly different approach compared to iTunes / iPods or systems such as Sonos. The latter happily handle music stored as data files on your PC, these music servers typically are network attached devices and demand a different approach.

We can provide MP3 files compatible with both. You have to transfer the data files we produce onto your music player. This can be done over the network from your computer to your server, or in the case of Systemline you can import directly from a USB connected device such as a portable drive.

One small word of warning, this operation can take time. Recently loading a modest 9 Gb of music onto a Systemline 160 from a USB drive took almost two hours.

Music Servers

CD ripping onto music servers - units like Systemline, iMerge and the MusicM8 - demand a slightly different approach compared to iTunes / iPods or systems such as Sonos. The latter happily handle music stored as data files on your PC, these music servers typically are network attached devices and demand a different approach.

We can provide MP3 files compatible with both. You have to transfer the data files we produce onto your music player. This can be done over the network from your computer to your server, or in the case of Systemline you can import directly from a USB connected device such as a portable drive.

One small word of warning, this operation can take time. Recently loading a modest 9 Gb of music onto a Systemline 160 from a USB drive took almost two hours.