This is a questions that we get asked the whole time and whilst is a pain having to buy bigger and bigger hard-drives, compressing your music can really damage the sound quality and effect the sound output of your music. For this reason we generally don’t recommend that you compress your music and instead buy larger hard-drives to store music on given that these days they are quite cheap.
The problem comes along when you decide that you want to take music with you on the go. As an example, what happens if you want to take your entire music collection with you to the gym or in the car. It’s simply not feasible to take a massive hard-drive with several terabits of music in your car – what happens if your car is stolen? For this reason we generally recommend that you compress music that you’re planning to take with you out of your home meaning that you can get up to five times as much music on one hard-drive as you would do without compressing.
If you’re planning to compress your music file then you need to follow the below instructions depending on whether you want compress your music on either a Mac or a PC.
For Windows Based PC's
For a PC, the easiest way to compress your music is to use Windows Media Player as this allows you the option to re-write your music in the format that you want to. At home screen, press start and then open the Windows Media Player. From the Menu’s section within Windows Media Player press Tools and then Options and select the “rip music” tab. In this section you have a choice of both the type of music that you want to save your into and the number of MB’s per CD. Ideally you want to choose “MP3” and then and audio quality of around 320Kbps.
For IOS Mac
For a Mac you need to use iTunes and from the “Menu’s” tab, press “Import Settings” and then “MP3 Encoder”. Within this section you need to alter the settings via the custom box. In this tab, you need to choose a stereo bit rate of around 320kbps. One important point, you need to make sure that the “Variable Bit Rate” box is not selected.
Both of these options are great and the choice of whether you want to use a PC or a Mac is really based on personal choice. Neither one is better than the other given that they both offer the same quality of music, whilst at the same time giving you the same amount of music per megabyte. If you have decided to compress your files, then your next option is what format to save your files to.
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