What is the best format to store my music?

What is the best format to store my music?

Hello Andrew

Conversion of Analog Sound to Digital sound involves a process called sampling. In which the samples are taken at regular intervals to digitize the audio. Keeping the technicalities to a minimum, we can say that more the number of samples, the less is the error in the music reproduced. Now here is the difficult part, more number of samples translates to more data. So it is always a compromise between quality and size. But there is more to it. The quality of sound is merely not a function of the number of samples, but also depends upon many other factors such as the Recording Studio, the Artists, Your own Audio Player, etc. Lastly the ability of our ear to understand the fine differences should not be ruled out.

Going by the above discussion, I would suggest the following :

(a) Rip your favorite song in different formats.

(b) Listen to each one of them on all possible platforms (this is the toughest part)

(c) If you are able to differentiate the quality of the audio files, then you can choose the best, if not, take the middle path where the quality and disk size match. This would be the most ideal solution for you.