Trying to shrink my comps music collection down to 20 gigs or less to fit on my Lyra 2820 music player and am wondering what format to convert to. From what I have read they are about equal. Any sugestions?? THe other question is can some one sugesst some good stable encoders to change my files to either of these formats??? My comp is only 1.2 w/ 700+ megs of ram some programs freak it out.....thanks for the help
what format are your original files? Are they compressed formats like mp3 or wma? If so, recoding them at a lower bitrate is severly going to decrease quality. Provided you have the CDs for your songs, I'd highly recommend starting with the CDs, and rip them at whatever compression level you want. That all depends on what songs you have. For mp3s, normal good quality, is VBR 192-256kpbs, but if you want to shrink them down to fit more on your player, don't go below 96kpbs, as that will be bad enough already. The ripper I use and recommend is EAC with LAME plugin. We have a guide for using it under the guides section. Don't worry about your computer, because although compressing files is CPU intensive, it does not require a powerful computer, it will just take longer depending on the speed of your CPU. So with 1.2G and that much ram it will be fine.
