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Topic: Mp3, AAC and Sony Walkman (Read 2459 times) previous topic - next topic
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Mp3, AAC and Sony Walkman

For a long time I have been following this forum carefully, it will be almost twelve years and for what concerns compression and audio in general it has always been my point of reference.
I hope you will excuse this long post of mine.
Since 2000 I have had the habit of converting the CDs I bought into mp3s in such a way as to have a digital library easier to use: you can then imagine that over time my archive has grown in size. It grew so much that I had to go from a first version of 64 Gb iPod to a 160 Gb one.
I always compressed my files using LAME, with a bitrate higher than 192 Mbps in VBR: I had imposed this solution after having reflected a lot on the pros and cons of this solution.
I went on like this for 19 years, updating from time to time the codec and archiving the music: I abandoned the use of the iPod when the archive had become too large to use the smartphone with a microSD card as storage.
I recently abandoned this solution by opting for a Sony Walkman NW-A40 Series player and I discovered, despite myself, that it does not accept the tags present in my Mp3: without falling into the specifics, the only valid solution to remedy a thousand problems is to convert the music into AAC.
Now, at this point, since LAME is already a bit old, it may be acceptable that it is no longer accepted by today's players, with such peace of mind for backwards compatibility.
What I wonder is if:

Is it worth converting all my songs to AAC? It seems to me that it is, to ensure greater compatibility, but you may have some useful advice for me.

Which bitrate in AAC should I convert my files to? I would opt for 256 Mbps, but maybe it's too much...

Thank you for your attention and patience, I look forward to your advice.

Re: Mp3, AAC and Sony Walkman

Reply #1 –
Quote
Now, at this point, since LAME is already a bit old, it may be acceptable that it is no longer accepted by today's players, with such peace of mind for backwards compatibility.
I believe MP3 is still more common than AAC.   Amazon sells MP3s and as far as I know the place you can buy AAC's (of major releases) is from iTunes.

It may be an issue of ID3V1 vs ID3V2, or something else about the tags.    You might want to buy one MP3 from Amazon to see if it works.

Google found this:
Quote
For my Walkman it works only perfect with the ID3v2-tag-version 2.3. If I used ID3 version 2.4 the album art don't work![/'quote]
 

Re: Mp3, AAC and Sony Walkman

Reply #2 –
ID3V1 tags are a known problem.  Pretty poor for a Sony Walkman, but that's progress I guess.  You could convert some tracks to ID3V2 and check that's your problem, would be easier than transcoding everything to a format you might not want to stick with longterm.