Sonicstange Sounds Way Better Than Itunes

[bobbyboy987]

well first of all i thought all music players were the same

i have always listened my music using itunes and have been very satisfied with the functions and controls of it

but recently i played a song in SonicStage and it sounds sooooo much better

im not an audio freak and usually dont notice slight quality differences but this time it was noticable

the vocals were crisper and the bass hit harder

i think it might be the encoding setting on iTunes

when i downloaded it i left everything almost default

after some tweaking it looked like i had it set to AAC Encoder on the import section

could this be the reason why the songs arent sounding as good as they can be?

or

with sonicstage u convert the songs into OpenMG to get them into the "music drive"

i have read that after converting the songs they tend to sound better but i thought it was just some kind of gimmick

what are your thoughts on this?

[SimonMackay]

Hi!

It often depends on what codec you are working with for your music-manager application. SS naturally would work with the ATRAC3 family of codecs while iTunes would work with AAC and Media Player with WMA. As well, even if you work with MP3 across all the applications, some of the applications install a decoder that may be more refined than the other applications.

Often the DRM encryption method like MagicGate or WMA-DRM doesn't affect the sound quality because its role is to be a "sealed envelope" for the audio file.

Other factors to remember include how many kbps you are encoding your audio files at. Different codecs can perform better even at lower "speeds" than other codecs.

With regards,

Simon Mackay