After going through hoops to get my music from iTunes into my Media Center UI it got me thinking about music formats.  When I started with my iPod, I chose M4A because it enabled me to save space on my iPod.  iTunes now has a facility to transcode songs down to a smaller size when it syncs to save space.  Media Player can also do that which is important for my Samsung YH-999 Portable Media Center (http://product.samsung.com/cgi-bin/nabc/product/b2c_product_detail.jsp?eUser=&prod_id=YH-999GS%2fXAA).  That set me wondering whether I might just be better creating high quality MP3s for my server and then just letting them be transcoded down when I sync.  Of course, I have to figure out exactly how I'm going to create those high quality MP3 files as well as what "high quality" really means.  Maybe I could even go lossless?

Issues

  • Space.  I'm going to need a bigger hard drive.  With a 40Gig library at 128kbps I'm going to increase that to MINIMUM 60Gig if I go MP3, more if lossless.  I only have 80 Gig allocated at the moment.
  • Time.  Do I really have both the time and inclination to re-encode 800+ CDs?

I'll keep you posted.