If I rip a cd into 320kbps...

[iMore Question]

If I rip a cd album to my computer at 320kbps, will it sound better than music purchased from iTunes, or worse, or the same? Also, if I do that how much space would it take roughly? (11 songs, each one about 4 and a half minutes on average)

 

[evanking527]

320kbps takes more space that’s for sure. As for the amount of space, I’m not sure, but at least that I’ve heard, it hasn’t made that much of a difference when I used to import 320kbps songs into iTunes. I heard a difference from the low qualities to the higher bit rates, but from Apple’s current standard and separately downloading songs in 320, I seriously couldn’t tell the difference. Even though I’m an artist and want the best possible sound quality, I couldn’t see the benefit of going outside of Apple Music to get 320, so I stopped. Now I use Apple Music and it’s great.

 

[Tartarus]

If I rip a cd album to my computer at 320kbps, will it sound better than music purchased from iTunes, or worse, or the same? Also, if I do that how much space would it take roughly? (11 songs, each one about 4 and a half minutes on average)

A 320KBPS MP3 song of 4 minutes is approximately 10MB, whereas a 256KBPS m4p or m4a song (from Music) is 8MB.
As you can see the difference is negligible.

As for the sound, they sound almost the same. Unless you’re an audiophile, you won’t hear the difference.
I have replaced all my MP3s to M4A with Music because I believe that file type has the future.

In your case, 11 songs would take between 100MB to 120MB storage.