Jonathan and/or glass or mp3 experts...
|
Silver Member Username: Tdeaton1021Near Tampa, Florida USA Post Number: 269 Registered: Sep-04 | is it possible if you burn the same files on 2 cds and burn one in the regular cd format and one in mp3 format that they could sound different? i havent really experimented with it. i usually make my cds in regular format but i made a lil flip mix CD in mp3 but it didnt seem as loud. i think it might just be because lil flip songs are usually pointed towards bass and i only have highs right now but im not sure i havent tryed it with 2 identical tracks. so basically the question is: do you lose anythign by burning in mp3 format? soundquality? loudness? crispness? anything? |
|
HelpTheSubless Unregistered guest | Mp3 is a compressed audio format, meaning that whenever u convert anything to mp3 u will lose information. The way mp3 compression works is that they cut frequencies deemed out of the range of normal hearing, thus compressing the audio and reducing file size. An experiment that Glass suggested was to rip a song from a cd to mp3, burn it into an audio cd, rip it again, burn it again..at this point u shuld start noticing the sq change.. |
|
Gold Member Username: GlasswolfNorthWest, Michigan USA Post Number: 7778 Registered: Dec-03 | they'll sound the same as original mp3 and mp3 converted back to CDA. both are still the same compressed data. now if you have the original file, uncompressed, and never having been an mp3, that will be a better quality. |
|
Silver Member Username: Tdeaton1021Near Tampa, Florida USA Post Number: 275 Registered: Sep-04 | so your saying when its in mp3 on ARES (where i dowloaded it) and i convert it to CDA it will sound the same as if i left it in mp3... but if i take it off a CD i bought and put it in mp3 i will lose quality? |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2584 Registered: Nov-04 | Trevor, if you want better sound quality in mp3 format, then raise the bit rate from 128 to 256 or higher. It'll make the file much bigger in size too. Normally it's 1mb per minute. At higher rate, it'll be almost 2mb per minute. Think of mp3 as jpeg files. You know that once a picture gets converted to jpeg, it loses some fine details. Same analogy. |
|
Silver Member Username: Tdeaton1021Near Tampa, Florida USA Post Number: 279 Registered: Sep-04 | yeah, alright... except it seems like ur contradicting yourself in one point. if its already compressed to 128 then how can you bring it to 256? hasnt it alread lost what is cut to compact it? |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2586 Registered: Nov-04 | No, you read it wrong. I said raise the bit rate (that's before you rip a song from a cd). The default on most mp3 burning software is at 128. |
|
Silver Member Username: Tdeaton1021Near Tampa, Florida USA Post Number: 280 Registered: Sep-04 | oh okay i understand.... but im just talking about songs that i downloaded from P2P not from a cd |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2587 Registered: Nov-04 | Same thing, you just look for the highest bit rate. That is what I do. Lot of the users feel the same way as you. They want the highest sound quality. So very often, you will see some as high as 320 and as low as 48. I always look for the "wav" format first, then 320 and so on. |
|
Gold Member Username: GlasswolfNorthWest, Michigan USA Post Number: 7791 Registered: Dec-03 | close. I'm saying if you rip from original CD to WAV format it'll be superior. any time it becomes, or has been an MP3, you've permanently lost quality. making an MP3 into a WAV or CDA format is like giving a person who's bleeding out a few bags of lactated ringers or plasma. It'll replace volume (empty space) but no content (no nutrients in the blood, and none of the missing data in the audio file) mp3 is a lossy compression. once the data is gone, it doesn't come back. |
|
Silver Member Username: KklaggePost Number: 115 Registered: Dec-04 | So going from CD to WAV makes it sound better than the original? Or are you just saying that WAV is better than MP3? Also...if my deck will play MP3, WMA & AAC files which would be the better format to rip the original CD's to? (if you know) |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2605 Registered: Nov-04 | No kklagge, going from CD to wav makes it as good as CD not better. Wav is better than mp3 cause it's not compressed. I'd pick mp3 with high bit rate for quality. |
|
Silver Member Username: Jwbulger79Florida Post Number: 500 Registered: Nov-04 | if you rip the CD to WAV files the quality will be the same as a CD b/c the files are not compressed. however, the files will be very large (like 10 times the size of an mp3) and you'll probably only fit about the same amount of songs on a disc as a regular CD. that's why they invented mp3's, which are compressed files. sound quality is lost in the compression, so the more compressed (lower the bitrate) the lower the sound quality. the advantage of compressed files is that you can fit a bunch on a disc. when downloading music, i always try to get files that are compressed at a bitrate of 256 or above, and i never download anything less than 192. even high bitrate songs can have bad sound quality though b/c someone may have ripped a song at 256 off of a burned cd that was burned with 128 songs, so in effect you can never add that SQ back once it's lost. i dont think Ares shows the bitrate when displaying search results, so i use www.winmx.com. it's not quite as fast but you can sort search results by bitrate. if you are ripping songs off of original CD's or burned CD's that were never compressed, the best program to use is EAC with Lame 3.9 encoding. this type of ripping is done at a variable bit rate, instead of a constant 128 or 256, etc. it compresses the musically complex parts of the song at a higher bit rate (as high as 320+) and the simple parts at a lower bitrate. this results in very high quality mp3's while also keeping the file size rather small. here's a link to a guide on where and how to do it. http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/article.php?sid=116 hope this helps clear things up. |
|
Gold Member Username: Jonathan_fGA USA Post Number: 3788 Registered: May-04 | For those that don't understand bitrate, I'll explain: A bit (binary digit) is smallest form of information in a digital format. It can be either 1 or 0. When you think of a bitrate, which defines the amount of material in a given second, think of it as the amount of music that is capable of being processed at one time. In the case of CD Audio, you have 16 bits of information, which means we have 16 bits of data to represent a value. Since binary works off of 1s and 0s, 0000 0000 0000 0000 would be a zero value for 16 bit data, and 1111 1111 1111 1111 would be a value of 65,535 (mathematics come into play). Remember that you are trying to replicate an analog waveform, which would be a smooth sinewave. When you use a digital format, you will have a choppy waveform since 1 and 0 represents on and off. This is run through a filter to smooth out the waveform (this is accomplished by the DAC). For an example of how this works, look at a digital picture vs. an analog picture. If you zoom in on the digital picture, you'll see that it contains a lot of pixels (blocks) that make the picture. This is the same way audio works. Think of digital audio like a staircase, one going up and one going down, the staircase represents what should be a sine wave. With CD Audio, you have 65,535 possible "steps" to the staircase. CD Audio has a bitrate of 705,600 bits (16 bits x 44,100, which is the sampling frequency), or 705.6 kbps, that would be multiplied by two since it's stereo, so your bitrate will be 1411.2 kbps. The bitrate for an MP3 file refers to the transfer bitrate for which the files are encoded - i.e. an MP3 file encoded "at a bitrate of 128 Kbps" is compressed such that it could be streamed continuously through a link providing a transfer rate of 128 thousand bits per second. But most of us don't really use MP3 as a streaming medium so really what the MP3 "bitrate" is a measure of is how severely the files is being compressed - the lower the bitrate, the more the file has been compressed... and the more you compress a file, the more of the original data is lost, and so the worse the playback sound quality will be. Go back to the staircase example. If you are trying to implicate a smooth, round waveform, you'd do so better with more stairs that are smaller (CD Audio), as opposed to fewer stairs that are larger (MP3). Same as if you had a JPEG file, if you want a better picture, use smaller pixels and more of them in order to get better picture quality. This will help you understand the drawback of MP3, it doesn't have as accurate of a waveform and when compressed much of the vital information is lost. |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2649 Registered: Nov-04 | Good info Jonathan. Some people might not like your lengthy posts, but I think between you, glasswolf and few others, creates a good balance on this forum. |
|
Silver Member Username: Jwbulger79Florida Post Number: 518 Registered: Nov-04 | posts like glasswolf's and jonathan's (a few others also) are what make this forum worth coming back to. thanks ya'll. |
|
Gold Member Username: CarguyPost Number: 2681 Registered: Nov-04 | Jonathan, just don't disappoint me by posting few lined answers from now on. Just kidding! |
|
Gold Member Username: Jonathan_fGA USA Post Number: 3791 Registered: May-04 | You didn't HAVE to read it  |
Main Forums
Today's Posts- Home Audio Forum
- Home Video Forum
- Home Theater Forum
- Car Audio Forum
- Accessories Forum
- All Forum Topics