Can someone explain to me what 'bitrate' means when searching for files, what is better a higher bitrate or a lower bitrate? What is better, something with a high quality rating and low bitrate, or a low quality rating with a high bitrate? The whole thing confuses me, anyone that can help me out on this, I would appreciate it! Thanks-Jay

Bit rate is the encoding rate of the songs. mp3's can be encoded up to 320 kbps. Likewise for m4a files, however if you see an m4a file at higher than 320 then chances are it's a compressed lossless file (ie: no loss of quality & same as an aiff or wav except it's been compressed without throwing away information like mp3 does.)

320 is best, 192 also good. Anything under 128 is considered as cheap & nasty so to speak. Too much info tossed out in order to save space during the encoding process.