When I ripped the audio songs from an audio cd, the songs of 10MB reduced to 3MB.

and then there are various free song downloading websites which have songs of 3MB in mp3 formats.

Is there a difference between their quality and the ones which get reduced to 3MB after ripping?

ofcourse there is.. nothing is perfect... FLAC is a lossless format but the filesizes are bigger
mp3 is a lossy format and it's smaller.
on high def speakers there's definitely going to be a difference , a big difference between the 10 mb file and the 3mb one..

on headphones there ain't gonna notice no change because the headphones sound good because they're smaller or i don';;t know why...

The difference is that errors happen during the ripping process. You hear them as pops and other imperfections.

So what is the way to avoid those errors? or is there a way by which the 10MB size can be preserved while transferring them in some player?

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index....tle=Rubyripper

BTW, if the song was 10MB uncompressed, it must have been very short. What format was the 10MB original in?

Thanks for the helpful link, Dugan I have some VERY old songs which are pleasant to hear at a loud volume in a normal computer with the VLC player and Sennheizer PMX 200 headphones.

But when I put the same song in the Ipod and increase the volume, its simply painful to ears (the headphones are again the same)

I wonder if Ipod does something to the song?

Maybe it uses a different equalization than your PC's media player. I wouldn't know, since I don't have an iPod, but maybe there's a way to chage the EQ settings? My portable MP3 player (which is almost never used anymore ) has (albeit very basic) EQ controls that are accessible via the settings menu.

I have tried every damn thing with the Ipod, it just ruins the BEAUTIFUL song

Since you have an Ipod you may as well consider ripping your music to ALAC (Apple Lossless) since it is natively supported.

I have ditched lossy a year or so now, and I regret nothing. The filesizes are inconsequential to me since I have a 1TB external HD so I have enough space for my lossless music.

The original format is in CDA and I don't have itunes right now so I don't know the original size currently.

I would guess you are using a low bit rate. What software are you running what is the default configuration? I would guess you might be using 128 kbits/s. Try changing it to 320, the file size will be bigger but the sound quality is better.

mp3 removes all the sounds that are drowned out by other major sounds on the recording so its not a format that I like... !

Is it necessary to compress the songs by ripping them to put them in the ipod? Any way by which the song gets transferred to the hard disk while the size doesn't change?

The size is always going to be different from the original WAV (uncompressed) file. Once you encode either to lossy or lossless then the filesize is constant whether you transfer it to your ipod or leave it on your hard disk.

You can get slightly better sound from MP3s by encoding your music as variable bitrate rather than constant. Typically a minimum bitrate of around 192kbps and max to 320kbps. Check your encoder for such settings.

Like I said earlier though, you can also rip to ALAC (Apple Lossless) because ipods support that (well they would have to, after all it's Apple's codec. It would be like buying a Zune player, and not having support for Windows Media Audio), and you would have a better sounding file compared to MP3, but still at a lower filesize compared to a fully uncompressed WAV file.

Thanks Jeebizz and Michael,

I read about RubyRipper as mentioned by Dugan above and was impressed by its techniques of avoiding errors, is ALAC better than that?

I some how doubt that Ipod did something to the song, otherwise why would the same song sound nasty on the Ipod?