256kbs MP3, please
HydrogenAudioFAQ
Ok, I've officially changed my methods... again
Please tell me you thoughts on MP3 quality & BitRates. It may be a boring topic, but of the upmost importance if you, like me, want to maintain and grow a digital music library... hopefully for the rest of your life. Quality of life investment or boring, you choose.
A couple-a years ago, I started in earnest ripping my CDs to my computer I made 160kbs files. I ran my computer into my stereo system and I was living great... only thing, and it's a thing alright, was the music didn't seem as vibrant as a CD. Seemed kinda flat so I bumped up the bitrate to 192kbs, sounded better, so I made the change. I actually can't really complain about this level, it sounds just fine to me... normally. A month or so ago, I did a head to head test, CD vs. 192MP3: Lo & behold, there is a difference that even I could decern. Then I tried out other bitrates 224, 256, 320, & vaious VBRs (Variable BitRate). Now I don't claim to be an audiophile, scientist, or purest, but higher bitrates produce better results... of course it makes sense, less compression, higher quality. 256&320 MP3s produced TrueCD Quality -> meaning I was unable to decern difference between the CD & the MP3. To the best of my ability, using relatively high volume, I couldn't differenciate between the CD, 256MP3, and 320MP3... needless to say, I couldn't differenciate between 256&320MP3, therefore my NEW STANDARD for MP3 ripping is Now 256kbs.
I won't rerecord eVerYtHing, but I've started the very slow process of upgrading many albums. File size just means less and less and less and less. So there's just Less and lEss and leSs and lesS reason to limit them... I guess by that reasoning I should rip at 320 (the highest I'm able to at this time)
*I use Musicmatch 8.2 to rip MP3s
*I have a 5gig MP3 player, the larger files do effect this thing. LArger files mean less # of songs on player... but that's alright, I play with it's contents daily
*Stereo Systems are great. It is possible to copy audio from copyrighted DVDs. Realtime, only though. Different output option on the stereo... digital or analog... can record on the digital, record analog... beautiful.
*Now I just need a needle for my record player... then I kin rip records, pops and all... we'll see.
*I find some articles on MP3 BitRates and post links shortly... read some interesting stuff a few weeks ago.
2 Comments:
Dr. Weasel,
There are lots of stories and lots of opinions regarding bit rates, encoding techniques, and ideology about digital music. The bottom line is that the big book of opinions comes out once a day but the book of fact only comes out once every three years, or so.
Ok, regarding all this audiophile stuff, there are two paths. 1) follow your ears, and 2) follow the path of less likely problems in the future.
Specifically, if you can hear a difference, go with the one that sounds better, but the likelihood is you can't. 128 is crappy, 192 is good, 256 and greater is prob not worth the difference in data size.
What I mean by following the path of less likely problems in the future... is you dont want to encode your whole library in some format that won't work on the new cool iphone (or whatever) you might buy in 2007.
So... that being said. The current standard is 192k Mp3's. There are of course WMA and AAC files, these are not really better, just different.
The background on this stuff is as follows. When an artist records an album in the studio, she/he sings/plays into a microphone which is wired into a soundboard in another room, plugged into this sound board is either an Analog Tape machine (something like Studer 827 24 track or a Tascam DA-88) or a digital (ADAT like an Alesis ADAT HD24 24 track). In the case of the "reel to reel" analog tape, this is as good as it gets... dump this to vinyl and you have the highest quality there is. In the case of the digital environment, this recording is likely to be a 24 bit/192khz recording which will need to be downsampled to what is called "redbook format" which is at 16 bit/ 44.1khz which is what all "regular" - non HDCD or DVD-A Compact Discs are released at.
Given all of this -- you need to respect that the standard MP3 (192k) is a 10:1 compression of the redbook format - so you are essentially listening to 10% of the data that is contained on a regular CD - this is why a typical redbook track (also cal AAIF, or WAV) is about 35MB in size whereas an MP3 is about 3.5MB.
Regarding "ripping" I use iTunes exclusively for everything and use only the 192k encoding. Don't try to speed this up and when you burn to CD go as slow as possible. (Itunes will handle huge files and as many of them as you have).
Ok - I hope that this answers some of the questions.
Good Luck,
AudioNerd
Mr. MBA
i'll be coming back to this... now that's what i call a commment, thanks
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