I’m pretty stressed out at the moment and I need something to help me relax, so I decided to buy some new music. I’m a big fan of BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge (my claim to fame – Radio 1’s Jo Whiley went to the same school as me, albeit 7 years before I did!) so I bought all three Live Lounge double CDs (120 live tracks) from Play.com for just £25.97 (once again, physical media was less expensive than digital downloads…).

Before I use CDs, I like to take a copy for my iTunes library and, when I imported the rest of my discs a couple of years ago, I used iTunes’ built in encoder to rip them as 192kbps MP3 files but these days I’m buying 320kbps tracks from 7digital, so I might as well rip at the same rate. The only problem was that I struggled to find the a dialog in iTunes 8 to adjust the import settings.

It turns out that Apple has moved the import settings from the Advanced menu to the General menu in iTunes 8:

The dropdown doesn’t include 320kbps but this can be selected as a custom encoding rate:

Incidentally, I found some notes from a recording engineer that make interesting reading – I’m encoding at a higher rate because I can, and as MP3 because I want portability, but he makes an interesting point about always enabling error correction.

Now those CDs have been ripped I add them to the collection in the living room, from where they will be slowly wrecked by my wife leaving them lying around in her car, or my sons thinking that CDs are pretty toys… but at least I have a pristine digital copy of my new music!