music quality

[Kuukunen]

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.

I haven't looked into this, but at least in theory, if the encoder is made well, variably bitrate should be better in all cases. Because often there are parts in the songs that are silent or just made of some simple sound. And even if there aren't, some parts always compress better than others. This way there are more bits left for the hard to compress parts.

Only thing I could think of would be that the numbers that indicate the bitrates for the time windows take space too much, but I doubt the windows are that small.

Meh, well, this really is the wrong forum to talk about this. :P

[Kuukunen]

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.

If you want to try yourself, go to:
http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html

There's an informative story there too.

[Kolar]

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.

Maybe you should try it. Anyways I meant when ripping off of a CD to Mp3.

[Kuukunen]

Maybe you should try it.

Nah, if the information is lost, it's lost.

[Kolar]

You can upsample it if needed but yes, you'll lose a lot of the orignal. When I reencode my Mp3s from 128 to 320k I can hear a difference, I don't really care that much about music to do it anyways.

[Jason]

okay so i was way off base

wrong on all accounts even

i'm listening to CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH right now though

and i'm enjoying the living fuck out of every minute of it

[Mulkero]

I usually use at least 250kbps. I would use ogg, but my mp3-player only plays mp3. 192kbps is the minimum for me.

[NaiLed]

after downloading some music from limewire, i noticed that nearly all the tracks have 128kbps - how do you fussy guys find 192kbps music?

[Stabwound]

Full albums of IRC or usenet.

[Jerome Scuggs]

What? :fear: ----^

Playing low quality music on high-quality speakers is a bad idea. My laptop connects to my hifi system via some monster cables. As you can see, it's fairly nice equipment, so I gotta be careful.

Edit: here's some photos, because I can $
The main setup
Turntable & CD's
rest of the CDs
The whole thing (bad flash)

And finally...
the records - See how many baby pictures of pavement and I you can find

[Mr. Peanuts]

Another one, use BitTorrent for albums.

[Vykromond]

lower encoding = more music on my hard drive, so i can usually deal with 128 for most music since most music sucks or doesn't need the increased quality that much (for example, there's absolutely no point in having my franz ferdinand music encoded at higher than 128, even though i like them plenty).

[Kuukunen]

Or you could just re-encode to a small ogg. (Check the http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html)

[project dragon]

what about music in .mp4 / .m4a instead of .mp3?

what is the difference in music files?

[Stabwound]

Or you could just re-encode to a small ogg. (Check the http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/listen.html)

It's a very bad idea to convert from one lossy format to another. You will usually lose a lot of quality in the conversion.

If you do that, you will have to rip from an original disc and encode.