music quality

[za gophar]

discuss.

right now i am in the process of converting all of my mp3s to 128kbps to save space on my mp3 player and computer hard drives, and also to save battery life on my mp3 player. is there any reason that this could be a bad idea? what sound quality do you guys prefer?

[NaiLed]

i can never hear any difference (i don't even know what it means)

Tech Support

[Jason]

for the casual user, 128kbps is fine. if you're an audiophile (which i am) i'd go with 192kbps. the most important thing, however, is to keep everything at the same rate. a lot of shit is at a variable bit rate and that's just silly.

[NaiLed]

so what IS the difference? i mean, what makes a 128 differetnt to say a 192 file? what differences in sound are there?

[Kolar]

When you up the bitrate of an MP3 you can get it closer to CD quility.

[Jason]

as far as i know, your standard retail CD is encoded at 192kbps, so yeah, basically what kolar said. most people really don't (or can't) notice the difference between 128 and 192. i'm just super picky about my audio.

[Stabwound]

There are a lot of people who refuse to encode in anything but a lossless codec, which creates files of about 40MB+ for each song.

If you can't tell the difference between 128 and up, you might as well go with 128. It does save a significant amount of space/battery power on some portable mp3 players. I personally can only tell the difference between bitrates on certain songs, although once you go lower than 128 it's pretty obvious.

[Jerome Scuggs]

as far as i know, your standard retail CD is encoded at 192kbps, so yeah, basically what kolar said. most people really don't (or can't) notice the difference between 128 and 192. i'm just super picky about my audio.

I think its higher than that, because you can choose to rip a CD into bit rates in the 4-500's

I go with 256 normally, and 192 is the bare minimum, but thats because my computer is hooked up to nice speakers that would get damaged if too much low-quality music was played. Playing a friend's mix cd cost me a left speaker once, so that's how I learned that lesson

[Kuukunen]

for the casual user, 128kbps is fine. if you're an audiophile (which i am) i'd go with 192kbps. the most important thing, however, is to keep everything at the same rate. a lot of shit is at a variable bit rate and that's just silly.

Audiophile? I constantly talk to this guy in IRC who will not be happy with anything less than CBR 320. (Maximum bitrate for mp3) And that's when he's not using FLAC. (lossless compression.) Those people are just silly though.

Personally, I'd be happy with radio quality. But whatever quality you do, make sure it's VBR. (Variable BitRate) This way the parts of the song that are easily compressed have lower bitrate, making the overall size/quality better. There are other ways to improve quality too. And afaik, you should use LAME.

When you up the bitrate of an MP3 you can get it closer to CD quility.

I don't know if that's what you were after, but everyone remember you can't reencode lower bitrate to higher... Well you can, but that makes no sense, it would just make the quality worse and file size bigger.

so what IS the difference? i mean, what makes a 128 differetnt to say a 192 file? what differences in sound are there?

The number means how many bits there is per second. So 128kbps has 128 kilobits per second. (=16 kilobytes per second so 5 min song is 16kB/s*300s=4.8Mbytes) This means that more information is saved and makes the sound closer to the original. What does the difference sound like? Well dunno, try encoding yourself and listen. I just encoded one song to 16kbps (CBR, without any optimization options or anything) and it sounded like it was coming from bad speakers, or from another room, or from inside a pillow. There's no hiss or anything and even though I might not want to listen to songs like that, it was surprisingly good. (For being 1/8th of normal file size.) I'm not quite sure, but I think it's the high frequency sounds that suffer the most, because high frequency sounds need more information. But I haven't looked into the compressing methods so they might as well balanced the suffer of quality over the whole spectrum.

[Kuukunen]

but thats because my computer is hooked up to nice speakers that would get damaged if too much low-quality music was played. Playing a friend's mix cd cost me a left speaker once, so that's how I learned that lesson

What? :fear: ----^

[Kuukunen]

Oh and one thing you have to remember that many people don't have that high quality earphones/headphones for their portable players, so the loss of quality matters less.

PS. Yay for triple post.

[Kuukunen]

as far as i know, your standard retail CD is encoded at 192kbps

Hmm, not really. Let's see... This CD I have in my hand says it has 700MB or 80 mins... That means about 1166kbps.

You see, the normal music CDs (unless mp3 CDs became normal while I wasn't looking.) aren't encoded in anyway. The audio data is completely uncompressed, so it's not that much use of talking about bitrates with others than with compressed audio. That's why you can fit 10 CDs of mp3s in one CD-R.

And I'd like to note that the number doesn't mean the sound quality per se. It also is based on the encoder, and options of the encoder. And most of all, the codec. Mp3 isn't the only one out there. For example ogg is already a lot of better.

PS. Yay for quadruple post. Sorry, but I just keep missing things.

[Sufficient]

Exactly what Kuu said.

If you're interested in audio stuff check out this forum. It is THE audiophile forum. Lots of tech-heads here too. They know what they're talkin bout.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?act=idx

And lossless FLAC is what a lotta audiophiles use ... although to me it's just wasting diskspace. I've heard good things bout vorbis .ogg too when comparing it to mp3 etc other spacesaving options.

[Sufficient]

for the casual user, 128kbps is fine. if you're an audiophile (which i am) i'd go with 192kbps. the most important thing, however, is to keep everything at the same rate. a lot of shit is at a variable bit rate and that's just silly.

I used to think variable bit was stupid. But it actually can give you better results under certain circumstances. I forgot when but there was a thread bout it in the forum I posted above.

[Facetious]

i like the variable bit rate stuff

i find that if i listen to mp3s on my car stereo, 128 is fine because the speakers suck. but on better speakers the lack of depth is frustrating.