Is 320kbps full CD quality when importing?

If you want CD quality imports, you really need to check out Apple Lossless. Personally, I import in AAC @ 256 kbps VBR & I can't tell a whole heck of a lot of difference between that & the CD. Hope this helps!

i think either 128kbps or 192 kbps is cd quality in mp3. just remember the higher the kbps the more space is waisted.

Actually it's the highest bitrate MP3 conversion you can make at this time, but it's still a compressed format so you will have lost some quality as compared to the original CD track. WAV is an uncompressed format and probably the closest to actual recorded quality--the Apple and Windows lossless are supposed to be comparable to WAV files. It takes a very trained ear and very sophisticated equipment to tell the difference between any of these higher bit rate sound files. I personally keep my songs in the 320 kbps MP3 format because I don't like re-ripping things and I don't have enough hard disk space for wav files. But when I load songs on my Nano, I convert them to 128 kbps AAC to get more songs on the device. Truth be told--I can't really hear any difference between the actual CD and the Nano version.

As my son says, mom it's all in the equipment and you have bad speakers so why do you care about high quality files? (He's probably right, but someday I may own better equipment and I don't want to re-rip my library.)

Dell XPS Gen 3, Pentium 4, 3.4 GHz Windows XP

128 was listed as CD quality when MP3 players were first released to the public. Now, I'm not saying the marketing spin is true or anything. But, one thing to remember. Songs purchased from Itunes are 128kbps (although probably a better format).

Try 128kbps and see if you can hear the difference. If you can't, then great! You are going to save yourself a lot of space. I only hear the difference during a very few songs at a very few parts, through very expensive headphones.

There's some misinformation in this topic. Apple Lossless (and other lossless codecs, like FLAC) files are "full" CD quality if you are encoding from a CD. They are mathematically lossless. This means that you could convert a WAV rip to Apple Lossless, convert that Apple Lossless file back to WAV, and you would get an exact bit-for-bit match between the two files.

MP3 and AAC files can be perceptually transparent, meaning that although they are not "full" CD quality in the sense that lossless files can produce bit-for-bit reproductions, they can sound equivilent. LAME (a better MP3 encoder than iTunes) is probably the most tested MP3 encoder available. Using version 3.97b2, it is generally thought that it will provide transparent files using the setting "V 2 --vbr-new," which is a VBR (variable bit rate) setting that usually averages out to between 160 and 220 kbps.

iTunes' AAC encoder has not been as well-tested as LAME, but it is generally thought to give transparent results at 160 kbps VBR or 192 kbps VBR, depending on your tastes.