Comments on: JHymn http://www.stinner.com/2005/02/19/jhymn/ just some guy from Jersey Sun, 10 Jul 2011 13:56:35 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Anonymous http://www.stinner.com/2005/02/19/jhymn/comment-page-1/#comment-48 Anonymous Tue, 22 Feb 2005 15:44:43 +0000 http://www.stinner.com/2005/02/19/jhymn/#comment-48 You overstate what JHymn does a little bit. There is no loss of sound quality when JHymn converts protected AAC to unprotected *AAC*. Doing so opens up a few more portable players for you, but not too many play AAC. The bigger advantage is being able to use network audio players like Slim Device's Squeezebox, which supports AAC, but not protected AAC. When you convert to MP3 you do lose some sound quality because the audio gets decompressed (AAC->WAV) then recompressed (WAV->MP3). What JHymn's built-in MP3 conversion gains you is that it's a whole lot more convenient that burning to a CD and then re-ripping, the LAME encoder built into JHymn (3.96.1) is a better MP3 converter than the one built into iTunes, and the default LAME sound quality settings (you can tweak them if you like) re-encode the MP3 files at a higher average bit rate than the original 128 kbps from the iTunes Music Store, making the MP3 files a little bigger than the original AAC files, but reducing the audible impact of the extra generation of lossy compression. You overstate what JHymn does a little bit. There is no loss of sound quality when JHymn converts protected AAC to unprotected *AAC*. Doing so opens up a few more portable players for you, but not too many play AAC. The bigger advantage is being able to use network audio players like Slim Device’s Squeezebox, which supports AAC, but not protected AAC.

When you convert to MP3 you do lose some sound quality because the audio gets decompressed (AAC->WAV) then recompressed (WAV->MP3). What JHymn’s built-in MP3 conversion gains you is that it’s a whole lot more convenient that burning to a CD and then re-ripping, the LAME encoder built into JHymn (3.96.1) is a better MP3 converter than the one built into iTunes, and the default LAME sound quality settings (you can tweak them if you like) re-encode the MP3 files at a higher average bit rate than the original 128 kbps from the iTunes Music Store, making the MP3 files a little bigger than the original AAC files, but reducing the audible impact of the extra generation of lossy compression.

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