RAZR V3i iTunes bitrates?

[ethans]

The bulk of my music collection is currently MP3 VBR 192-320 (LAME --aps). I have read several conflicting comments on the V3i in regards to supported bitrates. I'd really prefer not to maintain two copies (at different bitrates) for all of my music.

Does anybody have anything definitive on what's supported?
MP3 ABR bitrates?
MP3 CBR bitrates?
MP3 VBR bitrates?
AAC ABR bitrates?
AAC VBR bitrates?
Is Apple lossless supported at all?

TIA for your help.

[troyboy30]

max is 192

[kms-lai]

max 192 at CBR

[Däch]

Yeah, what they said. Max supported bitrate is 192kbps, and the phone only supports CBR, for both MP3 and AAC. VBR requires so much more work from the processor that very few portable devices (outside of dedicated music players) will support it. Using an extra 40MHz for VBR is no sweat for a laptop, but if your phone only has 30MHz to work with, it becomes a problem.

[LocutusX]

ouch, that kinda sucks.

For those of us who have primarily a VBR-encoded mp3 library, what would our options be for playing our stuff on V3itunes?

[joe_banana]

i tried auto encode but i just ended up rewriting the mp3 to a lower bitrate! sux! im know manually converting my songs using razorlame.

[ethans]

thanks for the responses. i, too, feared this would be the case. iTunes doesn't seem to readily support multiple encodings of the same song (they'll just register as two songs). i probably wouldn't mind lower ABR/CBR encodings for "cell phone" style use, but maintaining two copies might prove cumbersome.

i've been debating using a V3i to listen to music during workouts or getting a Nano; this might tilt the scales toward the Nano.

anybody know if the restrictions the same (or similar) for DAP?

[Bunsen Burner]

It's not iTunes restricting the bit rate, it's the phone. 192 kbps MP3 or 128 kbps AAC constant bit rate is as good as it gets.

BB

[ethans]

bummer. well thanks for the info.

[4n7]

I have songs on my L7 that are VBR but they are at around 100kbps

[LocutusX]

ok, this is not really a big deal - at least for cell phone usage.

iTunes has an option called "Re-encode higher bitrate mp3's to 128kbps AAC" so basically your high-bitrate MP3's should automatically get transcoded down to AAC format. And I guess iTunes does this on the fly as it copies sound files to the phone, so it shouldn't leave 2 copies on your HD.

any sound quality loss should not be a big deal for most people as we're just listening to music on a phone, using sub-standard earphones anyways!

me, i listen while on the bus/train so environment noise would prevent me from hearing the quality difference between an original or a re-encode

[ethans]

perfect! that quashes all of my concerns!