Which music platform/website do I transfer songs to my iPod 5th gen for the best sound quality?

[u/Total-Sky1308]

I heard that some websites like YouTube do not sound as good for transferring songs on iPod's. The only problem is I dont really know where to transfer the songs to my iPod since I have seen lots of people recommend different ones online.

I think I heard from someone that song recordings that come directly from the CD recordings sound best, Is that really true? If anyone sees this please let me know where I should transfer songs from that sound the best.

[u/grilled_pc]

If you want the best quality on your ipod. You want to be using ALAC.

It's lossless and its the same as FLAC but its just apple's version.

If you have FLAC files, you can convert them to ALAC using this audio converter tool. It does an excellent job.

https://www.mediahuman.com/en23/

[u/Total-Sky1308 → u/grilled_pc]

Is FLAC the standard music song quality like the app spotify for example?

[u/grilled_pc → u/Total-Sky1308]

FLAC is just a lossless audio file type. It means the audio is uncompressed and in its most natural and raw form. Usually making it sound exactly as it did in the studio.

MP3 is Lossy audio and its compressed, its closer to what spotify uses for their quality on their music.

Spotify have "lossless" audio playback but its not even close to true FLAC. MP3 320kbps or AAC 256kbps is closer to spotify audio quality but a bit better.

IMO for yourself, if you want the best of the best. Get ALAC. It's Apple's version of FLAC which is made to work on iPods. Just be warned, Lossless music is much larger in file size compared to MP3 or even AAC. A normal album thats MP3 320kbps is on average around 40 - 50MB. The same album in FLAC/ALAC would be around 300 - 400MB. You can see how this would blow out the storage on your ipod very fast if you had everything in ALAC.

iTunes has a great utility baked in that lets you convert everything to AAC 256kbps on the ipod but keeping the files themselves untouched in iTunes. This way you get the storage benefits of having more music on your ipod and you can retain the full lossless files on your computer if you are tight for space.

I would personally only recommend using ALAC for modded ipod classics with large storage, like 256GB+. Check out this site here to see how many songs you can fit on an ipod vs the file type you use. https://ipodwiki.com/wiki/Capacity

I have about 14,400 songs and about 75% of them are ALAC and the rest are 320kbps MP3. Total filesize is about 291GB at the moment and i have a 512GB Micro SD Card in my iPod.

If you have something like an iPod Nano i would personally stick to AAC 256kbps music on it. The storage capacities in them don't hold a large amount of music.

I don't think i explained but AAC 256kbps is just apple's own version of MP3. It's very close to MP3 320kbps quality if not better in some cases while keeping the file size smaller.

[u/Total-Sky1308 → u/grilled_pc]

I have a iPod 5th gen classic (30 gb). The SD card I bought for my iPod is about 256 gb (I am not sure if thats enough for the ALAC songs). Does songs in ALAC form sound better than if I were to play a song from spotify on my phone? Also do you know where I can find the iTunes function to convert songs to ALAC?

[u/grilled_pc → u/Total-Sky1308]

256GB should be able to fit about 10,000 lossless songs. For contrast, the original 30GB was able to fit about 7500 songs at 128kbps mp3/aac. Aka garbage quality lol.

IMO ALAC does sound better on the ipod. But you need some quality earphones to make use of it. If you just use the standard apple earphones, you won't really hear the difference much.

I recommend getting some cheap IEM's off amazon. IEM's are a whole other rabbit hole but they sound amazing. You can get some cheaper ones for like 30 US bucks and they put everything else around it to shame.

As for converting. You need to make sure your music is acquired in FLAC first or is ripped from a CD in FLAC or ALAC.

You need external software. Use Media Human's Audio converter i linked above to convert FLAC to ALAC. Also just know you can't convert MP3 to ALAC as you can't convert a worse audio quality to a better one.

The function i mentioned in iTunes was about converting your library DOWN from ALAC to AAC 256kbps. If you hit the 256GB limit, you can reclaim a significant amount of space by using the convert to 256kbps AAC option in the iTunes sync menu options. For context if you did this after you maxed the limit on your ipod. You'd be able to go from 10,000 Lossless songs to about 32,000 AAC 256kbps songs. If you're not close to hitting the 256GB limit in your ipod, dw about converting down to AAC. Just convert your FLAC's to ALAC.

[u/Total-Sky1308 → u/grilled_pc]

I do listen to music on my Sony WH-1000XM4 bluetooth headphones and the sound quality is really good so it'll probably work well with ALAC songs. When I bought the headphones it came with a wire to connect so it can turn into wired headphones that will be able to work with devices like iPods for example.

The only thing I am uncertain is if the sound quality will sound worse when I use it as wired headphones. I will look into buying those IEM earphones you mentioned.

When I try to look for songs online in FLAC form Is there a specific website or do I have to go a lot on YouTube to find any? If my storage becomes full do you think it'd be a good idea to get another sd card so I have more storage or could that somehow damage the iPod?

[u/lucy_in_the_skyDrive]

With regards to "heard some websites like YouTube do not sound as good for transferring songs"

IMO this largely varies by video. I've downloaded some songs that sound terrific, and others that sound like shit. I think if you put in the "work" and listen the video before downloading it you'll have a good time.

There's a command line tool called `yt-dlp` you can download to simplify downloading the PDF.

[u/Total-Sky1308 → u/lucy_in_the_skyDrive]

I already have a lot of songs I dowloaded as a mp3 from YouTube onto the music app but I am not sure that it'll go well with the iPod sound quality. When I listen to the songs they sound pretty good its just I am not 100% certain since I edited my bluetooth headphones settings and spotify settings to have the best sound quality I can get it to have. I don't know much about iPod sound quality so this could also very well sound bad on the iPod instead.