After 4 Years, HydrogenAudio Opens New 128kbps Listening Test 267
kwanbis writes "After more than four years, a new MP3@128kbps listening test is finally open at HydrogenAudio.org! The featured encoders are: LAME 3.97, LAME 3.98.2, iTunes 8.0.1.11, Fraunhofer IIS mp3surround CL v1.5, and Helix v5.1 2005.08.09. The low anchor is l3enc 0.99a. The purpose of this test is to find out which popular MP3 VBR encoder outputs the best quality on bitrates around 128 kbps. All encoders experienced major or minor updates that should improve audio quality or encoding speed, and we have a totally new encoder on board. Note that you do not have to test all samples — it is a great help even if you test one or two. The test is scheduled to end on November 22nd, 2008."
Re:What kind of music is involved (Score:5, Informative)
You are asserting MP3 has faults it does not have.
"Overtones" are not an issue, nor do I think you could point out a 'problem sample' which fails due to the presence (or lack) of "overtones."
Popular music, in fact, is often harder to encode efficiently as it tends to have the dynamics compressed out of it (see loudness war), full of distortion, and therefore be closer to random data.
Temporal smearing is clearly a problem with MP3, and is evident in music such as harpsichord, but that is not the claim you make.
Do you have any ABX tests to back your claim?
Re:ugh (Score:5, Informative)
Direct link (Score:3, Informative)
Only up half an hour and already slashdotted.
Here is a direct link to the download site: http://www.listening-tests.info/mp3-128-1/ [listening-tests.info]
Re:Outdated? (Score:2, Informative)
Other codecs have been tested previously. Blind testing codecs is very labour-intensive and these events do not happen frequently. This test is expressly centred around MP3. If you'd like, drop by Hydrogenaudio and come take a look at the other listening tests that have been co-ordinated. There have been many through the years.
Re:Outdated? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outdated? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, this should really be set up as a blind test, you get to listen to two clips, and have to choose which is better. The clips are randomized, of course...
Glad you took the time and checked how they do it.
The test is done using the ABC/HR blind listening utility, which does pretty much what you suggest.
Re:What's the point? (Score:3, Informative)
Must be a really small 'entire music collection'. 1/2 of a gig is 512MiB. Average FLAC encoded song I have are anywhere from 8MiB to 25MiB per song.
I hope you meant a half TB. That would make it much bigger... but again, you could still probably have your entire collection stored in WAV. I have about 1,300 songs.. all stored in various formats (MP3, OGG, FLAC) and it's under 10GiB.
Out of phase (Score:5, Informative)
is there anything else I should be aware of as someone who transcodes everything to mono before I copy it to my mp3 player ?
Some songs are recorded with parts out of phase between the stereo channels. This means that the left and right channels, instead of being up/up and down/down, are up/down and down/up, which creates directional effects in stereo (especially on a surround receiver) but cancels itself out in the conversion to mono. For instance, "Happiness in Slavery" on Broken by Nine Inch Nails loses the snare in mono, and the quality of the snare drum in the remix of Coburn's "We Interrupt This Program" used with the NEDM meme drifts back and forth between clap-like and snare-like.
Re:Outdated? (Score:1, Informative)
I see this listening test is unfortunately generating a lot of confusion. I'll try to explain some of the decisions in a new light.
First a history lesson. MP3 at 128 kbps has very bad name. I'm sure we all remember the 90s and first MP3s being passed around on 3.5" floppy-disks. Everybody was astonished by 12:1 compression ratio and whatnot, but as soon as people tried to use the free encoders for something serious, it became apparent how poor the quality was. (For nostalgia, find the (c) 1994 low anchor encode in one of the test samples provided for this test ;) So the bitrates started to go up.
But since then, people testing and finetuning the encoders have done a tremendous job. I used to dismiss low-rate MP3 (and even MP3 in general) as flawed, because they sounded to me awfully clipped of high frequencies and some ugly echo artifacts were audible on pretty mild parts of the music. But when I tried some double-blind tests with recent LAME versions, I had to admit they're transparent for me even on ~128 kbps, unless I'm testing some particular killer-sample. Does that make me ripp stuff to such bitrate files only? No. But I'm not scared about 128 kbps MP3 anymore and I don't have a reason to disrespect it.
Then why MP3? Because it's an ubiquitous format. You can play it on every OS, every portable DAP, every (data CD capable) car stereo, heck even on your toaster. I am aware there are many other audio encoders and containers around with many great improvements, but a shitty old MP3 is still the most portable choice.
I think nobody serious is criticizing using FLAC or other lossless format for local storage of CD rips. After all, you get a bit-perfect backup of the original CD that way and a guarantee you'll never have to go through the hassle again. And if your portable player supports some shiny AAC, fine. But for sending a recording to my mom, I'll use MP3, because I know it'll play safely anywhere.
And one usage where bitrate still counts a lot is streaming. If your internet radio has 2000 listeners, each kbit of bitrate costs you 2 Mbit of bandwidth and over 250 MB transferred per second. If it's possible to lower that while maintaining sound quality, I guess every streamer would like to know.
There are more reasons for chosing just 128 kbps. Like that the test is already using short, carefuly selected, problematic killer-samples rather than random music parts, so that people are able to notice at least something. Or that placebo is evil, evil, evil - I learned that the hard way myself.
All in all, I think such test will still provide a lot of interesting information even today and hope some more people will take it seriously and contribute.
It is a blind test; they've tested aac, ogg, etc (Score:3, Informative)
HydrogenAudio has done all kinds of listening tests [hydrogenaudio.org] over the years with various different codecs, including multiple encoders and rates for all of the major lossy formats. Their public tests are well designed blind tests-they give you the various samples but don't tell you which is from which encoder, and you're asked to use ABC/HR which is a program designed specifically for blind testing of audio.This one just happens to be 128 kbps MP3.
This is particularly of interest to a lot of people because
Re:use the cans, luke (Score:4, Informative)