Does Portable Music Have to be Compressed? 540
FunkeyMonk writes "The Christian Science monitor has an article discussing the gap between music fans and audiophiles when it comes to portable music. Would you pay a few cents more to have lossless downloads from iTunes and other online music retailers? As a classical musician myself, I choose not to download most of my music, but rather rip it myself in lossless format."
Lossless is compressed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:5, Informative)
Ahem, http://flac.sf.net/ [sf.net]
A used for Magnatune downloads (among others), and supported by decent media player software and a handful of MP3 players
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My original post did say "show me non-lossy, non-PCM".
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I suppose you could use magnetic tape and use analogue recording (but even then magnetism is quantised
I guess the moral is there's no such thing as a perfect recording.
Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:4, Interesting)
What you will end up with is some set on N systems, which will be large amounts of noise with small amounts of useful sound in them, which when superimposed with each other AND a filter function produce the original sound and which when taken individually are highly compressable. (The noise is simply there to create fake patterns that we can compress. It won't be random noise, because that doesn't compress, but is noise in the sense that it has no meaning or purpose other than to produce nice mathematical functions. The filter is simply something that's used to extract this deliberately injected deluge, so that the output is valid.)
Is this a valid technique? Well, yes - it's not that unusual to add noise to simplify compression, then subtract the noise afterwards. That's fairly standard. Splitting the data up to simplify the noise is merely a variant on the idea, and is used in plenty of compression methods. Compressing individually seems to be the customary method, but computing power is more than adequate these days to use fancier techniques IF justified. (Since you can encode the decoding method at the start of any track, it should be wholly irrelevant as to what method is used, provided the computing power is there to run it in real-time.)
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But last time I checked, all sampled music was PCM, and that's lossy by definition. You're limited in the sampling rate and the bit resolution, which makes is lossy when comparing with the original (i.e. "real-life") source.
Then again, like my original post says, audio CDs are what most of us have to use as the "original lossless" source.
So no, FLAC isn't "lossy" in the MP3/AAC/VQF/WMA sense, but it is PCM, which my original post clearly
Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:5, Insightful)
Your ears are pretty lossy too. Anything recorded using 192kHz/24bit has more dynamic range and a lower noise floor than your ears do... not to mention the fact that no equipment exists that can do better than ~100dB of dynamic range, and SNR of <0.1%
Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:5, Insightful)
But yeah, from a digital perspective, things can be compressed such that the original is reproducible ("lossless") or an approximation is reproducible ("lossy").
Layne
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To convert sound into a digital format, you must sample it. No matter how small your sample, there are gaps between them. The gaps are lost when you digitize the music.
This is not entirely true. The Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem states that a band-limited signal can be reconstructed perfectly if you sample it at minimally twice the bandwidth. The intuitive understanding is that because of the limited frequency content, the signal cannot make very fast jumps in between the sampling points and is not jus
Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not arguing that a lossy encoding of CDDA is as good as CDDA; it isn't. Just that there's no law of nature establishing CDDA as the gold standard in the first place.
Re:Lossless is compressed (Score:4, Interesting)
Speaking without detail is useless. (Score:3, Informative)
Taking an analog signal and representing it digitally is an application of Nyquist-Shannon sampling [wikipedia.org]. The important bit to understand (for those of you who've never heard of it), is that the Nyquist rate [wikipedia.org] is twice that of the sampling rate you want to record.
A 44.1Khz sampling rate perfectly records a 22.05Khz signal, 48 Khz does 24Khz, etc. Human hearing peaks out at 20Khz for most people, and many
Re:Speaking without detail is useless. (Score:5, Informative)
It's funny, I have an audiophile acquaintance who swears that records are superior in every way to "digital," and for the same reasons described above. The funny thing is, because of the large number of quantization levels used in a CD, the CD's dynamic range far surpasses that of any record player. More info here [georgegraham.com]
Theoretically, yes, analog would always be superior. But in reality, physical limitations of the stylus on a record player limit that medium far more than quantization limits the CD. Those same physical limits exist in the human ear, too.
So, while digital might not be "perfect" theoretically, it's "perfect enough" allowing for the limitations of the human ear.
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He's not talking about formats, he's talking about the way samples are recorded. Each sample is a number from 0 to 2^16-1. He's saying that human ears can't hear the difference between 2^16-1 and 2^16-2 (and so on, down to 0). This means that there's no point in adding more bits to each sample, since you can't hear the difference anyway. (The only reason to add more bits is if you have a really small signal and you're goi
more for non-DRM (Score:5, Informative)
Actually I'd like to be able to get an "original" image a la the CDs you buy, but allow single CD tracks. Would I pay more for that? I don't know. I've never bought any of the DRM'ed crap because it's DRM'ed, so I don't know how badly (or well) compressed they are.
If there are audible compression artifacts anywhere in today's downloadable DRM'ed music I'd probably insist the compression be less or not at all, after all I'm paying for music, and a compression artifact (to me) is analogous to stuck pixels in a monitor or camera... my threshold of tolerance is zero for that.
(I had one of the very original SONY Mini-disk recorders, and remember a passage of a Doobie Brothers track where some high pitched bells instead of sounding like high pitched bells sounded like someone sneezing... unacceptable... completely altered my experience of MD (along with numerous other things about SONY).)
So, bottom line, DRM aside, I consider it the responsibility of the music industry to deliver what they claim they are delivering... music (usually). I'm willing to bet what they are delivering has artifacts... I wouldn't pay more to get rid of that, I'd demand they replace the defective product.
The nice thing about my CDs and my derivative mp3 collection (recorded at 320 VBR) is if I hear an artifact in my track, I have the unedited original, I rip it at higher quality until the artifact isn't there.
(As an aside, I think the article makes an exceptionally great point not directly related to the users:
So, in addition to short-shrifting consumers with less-than-perfect (to the ear) product, the movers of downloadable music thumb their noses at the collective profession of sound engineers and engineering... pretty rude.
Granted, a lot of the music out there is crap -- it's no justification for compromise on the medium.
Oh, and re the subject line of my post... I'd pay a little more for non-DRMed music, not uncompressed music.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Probably because that is what the consumer want. Therefore, they are going to provide it. While some people are self-proclaimed audiophiles and spend ungodly amounts of money on gold-plated speakers, or some such crap, most people do not. Should they cater to the audiophiles taste? Or
Observation on music quality (Score:5, Informative)
it depends (Score:5, Insightful)
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Would I pay more? No. Downloads are already overpriced.
KFG
depends on how you get and store music, too (Score:2)
I myself, have about 40 - 50 gig of mp3s, the biggest majority legal, since I have about 400 to 500 cds, and I usually rip to 128 kbps. I usually listen
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Amen, brother!
I had a cheezeball, thrift-store stereo setup - big, cheap-ass speakers with "lotza wattz-a" that kicked pretty good and was quite loud but I knew it was out of whack. I have a great big collection of MP3 files gleaned from
What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Whenever I buy a new MP3 player I spend a few minutes to find the sweet spot where I simply can't hear any difference with a higher bit rate let alone lossless audio. This is almost always 128 kbps, even with quite good head phones.
I would pay a few cents less (Score:5, Interesting)
GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Insightful)
How much longer before we consider 128-kpbs MP3's to be the "standard" for quality music, especially as we're moving to more and more of a "download on demand" compression crazed society?
Won't anyone think of the children!
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What you really should get all in a knot about is the continously low quality of shite music being promotoed. Payola's a bitch.
Tom
Re:GIGO -- Garbage In, Garbage Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Both the sattelite radio services have incredibly horrid sound. anythign with high frequencies has twinkle and other nasty artifacts that are so prevalent it renders it unlistenable to most people who like clear music. I have went back to FM at times because Sirius and XM suck so bad.
Now we have robot radio stations around here that are mp3 based and LOW bitrate mp3 based at that. My daughter was listening to one of them and I asked, "when did you get a XM raio in your room?" she let me know she was listening to the new Rock FM station.
Current state of music is swirling the toilet. I havent heard a decently mastered CD in decades, radio and supposed "CD QUALITY" Digital FM and Sattelite all sounds worse than 128kbps mp3's on a $6.00 mp3 player.
All around the music quality stinks. Even if I could buy a uncompressed high bitrate version, the mastering at the studios is so sub par it wouldn matter.
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Who the hell uses 128 kbps MP3 anymore? If you use iTunes, like a sizeable group of mainstream consumers, then you're getting 128 kbps AAC, which is indistinguishable from the source when it comes to loud, over-compressed pop music. When it comes to something like classical, that's when you probably need to move up to 160 or 192 (which iTunes doesn't offer, unfortunately). I don't have a clear idea of wma's quality, which is the other mainstream consumer digital music format. My point is that you probably h
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I guess you don't dig too deep into menus and options, because iTunes offers, in the preferences-advanced-importing menu, a custom setting which allows you to set the bitrate from 16kbps to 320kbps for both MP3 and AAC, along with other options such as sampling rates (8K to 48KHz for MP3, 44.1KHz and 48KHz for AAC), stereo/mono options, VBR and even normal/joint stere
No, I wouldn't pay more (Score:2)
And it should be DRM-free, naturally, but you can't have everything.
Getting there (Score:2)
Until everybody can put their entire collection onto at least a laptop hard drive, and still have room to put other things on there, we'll still want compressed music.
I say "laptop hard drive" because CPUs are pretty much at the point where we could read in FLAC and spew out a customized MP3 for a smaller portable player, so I don't think th
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Notebook space (Score:2)
Please note that a few people need the occassional Word file and Excel spreadsheet as well. Most can't waste all of the space on their notebook on music...
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Doubt it will happen (Score:5, Funny)
We need a new Hi-Def Audio format (Score:2)
Re:We need a new Hi-Def Audio format (Score:5, Insightful)
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My reasons for recommending lossless. (Score:2)
Today mp3 is the reigning format but what about 10 or 20 years? Will any new formats come and replace it or will there be significantly better equipment that will easily expose the quality difference between mp3 and lossless? And if new lossy formats come along you risk getting audible artifac
Why Wouldn't You Compress It? (Score:4, Insightful)
So yes, some people out there would pay extra for a digital file that is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, but as most people use crap cans or speakers, most of those people would be wasting their money. If you want maximum fidelity, stick with the physical CD or vinyl.
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The Nano can not drive such low impedance phones w/o significant bass rolloff and quite a bit of distortion.
http://prohost.org/~hackie/audio/DAPS_16ohm.htm [prohost.org]
The AKG 240S, on the other hand, are about perfect at 55 ohms, starting to get into the hard to drive category for iPods, but should respond very well and flat.
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Classical fans tend to have better ears and better hifi equipment than fans of other genres. Believe it or not, but some people can tell the difference between 320kbps and lossless.
The type of sound makes a huge difference. Audio CODECs work in two ways:
If a CODEC is heavily tested with one kind of music, it may well not achieve the same bit-rate/quality ratio with a different kind. Early versions of Vorbis, for example, choked horribly on harpsichord music; even at the highest quality VBR settings there were obvious
What is the quanta of sound? (Score:2, Interesting)
Double blind test (Score:5, Informative)
"Audiophiles" like to make all sorts or ridiculous claims that lead to things like $2000 speaker cables, gold CDs and just a general proliferation of nonsensical technobabble.
Psychology simply has too strong of an effect on questions like this to get an actual answer from a forum like this.
What you'd really find is that as the bitrate of an mp3 goes up, the number of people who can tell the difference goes down. At some point the number of people who can tell the difference becomes a statistically insignificant sample. This would be a good project for some grad student.
Re:Double blind test (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Double blind test (Score:5, Informative)
Using up to date encoders, for the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of tracks, 128 kbps is indistinguishable from source.
Link. [maresweb.de]
Everyone should try to ABX at least once. You'll be shocked how much worse your ears are that you'd believe them to be... ABX Just Destroyed My Ego [hydrogenaudio.org] is a very informative read for any would be audiophiles:
Hmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Particularly when listening on cheap speakers that are connected to a PC.
I mean, I wish I could listen to 64kb/s encoded music and say "sounds just like source" because it would be cheaper all around and I would be happy.
A perfect example (to me) is Sirius satellite. I like their programming. But their bit rates are so low that it sounds like shortwave radio. I have the
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http://mtsu.edu/~record/ [mtsu.edu]
why you should download (Score:2)
And risk getting another rootkit from Sony?
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why iTunes isn't lossless (Score:2)
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The real reason is because these songs are meant to be uploaded to an iPod, and their memory space (even the 60 gig models) is limited.
Close, but no banana. It's not about disk space; Apple would love for you to fill up your iPod's disk, because by the time you'd done that, they will have released a model with a bigger disk for you to buy. It's about battery life. If you have a 128Kb/s AAC file, and a 512Kb/s Apple Lossless file, you will need to spin up the disk four times as often to play the lossless file, causing a big battery drain. Lossless CODECs are often cheaper in CPU terms to decode, but this doesn't safe you much.
Of cours
Mr. Goddard need to get with the program (Score:4, Informative)
Lossless is coming soon to most of us. With the 5.5g iPod at 80GB and the Zune hackable to 80GB as well, all but the top 3-4% of all consumers can fit their entire (legal) collection on a single portable device in lossless compression. I've got about 6500 tracks, most as FLAC rips, and I'm right about 81GB (plus about 40GB in books, but those are all low-bitrate). If I jettisoned the extra downloded stuff I have that I didn't like (but didn't get around to deleting), I'd probably drop to 75GB or so. I suspect that my entire family (three of us) buys less than 5GB worth of content each year. There's no reason to expect that the size of the players, in capacity, will not continue to decrease. As for those with bigger collections...well, just get more portables, or learn to live with a smaller subset on your player (or a higher compression).
As long as the high-qualtiy masters are available, portables can become a calculated compromise. Since my threshhold for accuracy happens to be at about 256kb/s LAME, that's where I transcode my FLAC library for my portable. If I had a car player, it would probably be more like 160kb. Heck, it's practically impossible to hear artifacts at 128kb in my Pilot at 70mph at a normal volume. My wife's 8GB flash player will be encoded in the 160-192 range, becuase I know she doesn't have the gear to hear much more, and she's just not that picky. With good music managers, you can automagically sync and transcode at the same time (I use mediamonkey). Transodeing is a bit slow right now, but as PCs get faster, the sync/transcode process will get better and better.
I do agree that it is a travesty that the online services will not offer home-archival-quality tracks, but I'm probably a top-10% listening geek. I buy all my music on CD, and rip to FLAC. Okay, okay - I've bought some at AllOfMp3.com, too, but I can get lossless there. The key is that the studios will continue to have qualtiy masters - but will they be willing to sell that quality to the public?
Intervieww is an ***HAT? (Score:5, Insightful)
The sheer number of variations in compression technology. The array of audio file formats includes Apple's AAC and Dolby's AC3, as well as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AVI, and others.
AAC is not "Apple's". WMA is a container, not a compression codec. OGG is a container (usually used for Vorbis and FLAC), not a compression codec. FLAC is both a container and lossless compression codec. AVI is a container and not a compression codec. The man complains about audio quality, yet 4 out of 5 things that he discusses have "nothing" to do with audio quality.
For his own use, Mr. Goddard, like Willens, favors WAV, a "lossless" compression format that renders sound accurately but has some drawbacks - notably the tremendous amount of storage space it requires: some 50 to 60 megabytes per song, versus about two for an MP3.
Wav is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, raw wav/pcm data loses a lot of the sound. FLAC and other lossless codecs produce identical byte-to-byte output when compared to wav/pcm.
I believe that this guys priorities are a little messed up. We should be focusing on lowering the noise floor, increasing the dynamic range, increasing the sampling rate, and getting the music industry to stop producing albums that are ultra compressed and "loud". You're not going to get decent fidelity out of an iPod when it is limited to 16 bit output and a 44.1/48khz sampling rate with a -90db noise floor. We need 24/96 players with a -110db noise floor, and a decent set of ear buds. Not that it would matter for consumers that listen to the typical tizz and boom being produced today.
BBH
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CODEC is short for compressor/decompressor, so 'compression codec' has no meaning. WMA is Microsoft's audio CODEC. The standard container for WMA is ASF [wikipedia.org].
Re:Intervieww is an ***HAT? (-1 Pedantic) (Score:4, Informative)
No it isn't, but perhaps he is SPECIFICALLY talking about Apple's implimentation.
Completely wrong. ASF is the container used by WMA and WMV files.
WMA is indeed the name of the audio codec, and WMV is a video codec.
He didn't say these were codecs. Included in your own quotation, he said: "audio file formats."
Yes it is. You'll get exactly the bits out that you put in. Your complaints are about DIGITAL SAMPLING OF ANALOG AUDIO AND HAVE NO SPECIFIC RELEVANCE TO WAV.
FLAC is not a lossless format. It is limited by in it's dynamic range (bits per sample) and sample rate. Compared to analog or a raw sound source, FLAC loses a lot of the sound.
Yes...and no. (Score:2)
I think this isn't so much of an issue as it was 5 years ago. When you have a 5gb iPod, that's only 8 CDs...when you have a 80GB one, that's over 100. Big difference. I STILL only load 5-6 at a time on my iPod, because I don't feel I need to carry my entire collection around with me everywhere I go. I don't listen to 1/8 of my coll
I work with a radio station... (Score:2)
and I've got to say - 128k mp3's are the absolute minimum we can play on the air. You run into some wierd problems playing compressed audio over FM - due to the way stereo channels are transmitted, you can get some bizzare stereo artifacts.
Biggest problem with lossless compressed codecs is that there's shit for support for 'em. Most semi-pro or pro audio software won't recognize anything but WAV and MP3, and AAC and WMA if you're lucky. Most of 'em won't support OGG, either...
And please don't get me st
Dynamics (Score:2)
In the late 70s I was a college dj with a rock 'n' roll show. A handful of cassette recordings of my shows have survived and on the stuff I'm still listening to on cd, like Beatles records, one can hear (on nearly 30 year old cassettes) that vinyl was warmer or better sounding. I was working professionally at a classical music station when the first, imported, compact discs arrived and I found the high strings and high horns to be funny sounding (I think the phenomenon was called aliasing and arose from the
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In order to avoid aliasing, they're supposed to start out sampling at a much higher frequency and use a low-pass filter to retain only what the encoding scheme can represent. It's not hard to imagine an early CD having that problem, but it should have been reduced or eliminated in CDs mastered later on. (Just as digital camera makers continu
This is a fairly ridiculous argument (Score:2, Funny)
Sampling (Score:2)
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Well given that the range of frequencies that are audible is between ~20Hz to around 18-20KHz, you don't really need 96KHz for anything but mixing.
Nyquist theorem much?
Tom
pretentious snobbery (Score:2)
MP3's at 160kbps are more than good enough for anybody. And they are way overkill f
I have a simple, personal, solution: Buy & Rip (Score:2)
As it happened, I had never heard Peyroux (she is fantastic and appears to channel Billie Holiday on a couple of cuts) until she was showcased on Bill Shapiro's Cypress Avenue show on NPR. I bought the iTunes copy the same day.
After a week, I bought the CD.
Within a month I bought the MFSL Master on Vinyl.
I
Lossless vs. Good Lossy -- We've Tested It (Score:5, Informative)
I became curious about just how the various compressions stacked up against each other. I knew Vorbis was better than "normal" MP3 by a long shot, but newer MP3 variations have definitely gotten better. Here are the formats tested: WAV (straight from the CD), FLAC, Vorbis, and about 15 different MP3 variations (VBR, CBR/ABR, 32k to 320K). I tried both down-convert from FLAC and ripped-direct-from-CD (there should be no difference, and I certainly couldn't hear any). This was done on a variety of material, choosing particularly demanding/revealing passages from acoustic guitar, cafe jazz trios, brass ensembles, Beethoven's 6th, piano (jazz and classical), rock and vocalists (Streisand, Baez, Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody).
I did a few tests and verified that I could not distinguish between WAV and FLAC -- no surprise there -- so for convenience the other formats were compared to FLAC as the baseline.
I did extensive A-B, B-C, A-C, etc., etc. comparisons using my main system (Marantz A/V amp with Magneplanar MG-IIIa speakers) and also with Sennheiser HD595 headphones. Below 128k, MP3 is complete crap. Starting at 128-CBR, it got more difficult to hear the difference. At CBR/192 or VBR/medium, I could rarely distinguish MP3 from FLAC, although sometimes the high-hat cymbals sounded like they lost a little bit of brilliance.
Although I'm a fairly discerning listener, I do have high-frequency hearing damage in my right ear. So I brought in a friend who is a serious audiophile. We did a lot of listening and comparing (many hours over several days because your ears get "tired"), both on my system and back at his house.
The Verdict: Vorbis is good, really good. But MP3's produced by Lame at VBR/Medium to VBR/High are also really, really good, maybe even better. MP3/VBR/Medium is approximately the same size as Vorbis/Normal (-q 4.99) at about 1MB/minute -- 1/5 the size of the FLAC files. Although there are players out there that can handle Vorbis, there are many more that don't.
Ps. We're not going to throw out the FLACs, because something better *will* come along. By that I mean 'smaller than' MP3/VBR/HIGH.
Main problem with lossless is battery life. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, lossless content can be compressed, but it's not compressed as well as it would be with lossy compression. So, on my iPod, the hard drive spends a lot more time working when I listen to lossless content. The result is a significantly lowered battery life. Go ahead and test this yourself if you have an iPod, or other drive-based MP3 player.
It's not as bad as it is with completely uncompressed content, but it's a good deal worse than it is with AAC and MP3 content.
IMO, lossless is the right choice for media centers and other applications that are able to draw power externally, and lossy is the right choice for battery-powered playback.
Do we have to have this discussion *again*?!? (Score:3, Interesting)
A better question: are audiophiles *ever* happy? I think the answer is "no." Gamers are never happy with how fast their rigs are, hot rodders want better cars, horny teens want more sex, hippies want more wood chips in their granola, etc etc etc. Basically, most people are never happy with what's most important to them.
And this particular question is as dumb as they come. A 6-GB MP3 player held a certain number of 128k MP3s. A 60 GB player today holds the same number of WAVs or AIFFs. So the answer, OBVIOUSLY, is "Yes, you can carry around perfect CD-quality songs." The only question is how many. Not enough? Wait a couple years.
Next?
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I categorize myself as an "audiophile", but not as one who believes in any of the audio-voodoo out there. I've done blind ABX testing to see how low my threshold is, and it really hurts to admit this - But when a track (Using music I normally listen to) is encoded with LAME, I cant hear the difference between 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC. That threshold is around the -V5 LAME preset with problem samples.
However, I firmly insist that music downloads should not only be provided free of
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Personally I can't normally hear the diff between 128 and the CD but there are some tracks where I can, so I univerally use 192kbit with q=0 [q=0 because I have a fast CPU and I don't care if it gives me 0.000000001% better quality]. It also means that if I have to recompress to say OGG or something in the future I stand to have fewer encoding artifacts.
I don't think downloads should be at anything less than 192kbit/sec MP3
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Well without DRM you'd be free to decode the high bitrate MP3 and then re-encode it.
Most codecs butcher the quality too much for re-encoding. If you have a high quality file you wont be able to tell the difference between that and the original when listening. If you re-encode it, though, the artifacts become more obvious. Even when re-encoding at a high bitrate. One thing that always stands out to me are the cymbals. On a re-encode they always sound like they're under water. Many other things sound distorted, or get the underwater sound to them. Also various ringing sounds appear.
Personally I can't normally hear the diff between 128 and the CD but there are some tracks where I can, so I univerally use 192kbit with q=0 [q=0 because I have a fast CPU and I don't care if it gives me 0.000000001% better quality]. It also means that if I have to recompress to say OGG or something in the future I stand to have fewer encoding artifacts.
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Think about it
1. Play the CD, hey that sounds great
2. Encode to MP3, hey that still sounds just as great
3. ???
4. Reencode to new codec, hey OMG IT SOUNDS HORRIBLE!!!!!
What the hell is step #3 (and it's not profit...)?
Yes, there will be a quality diff between #4 and #1, but it'll be the same miniscule PSNR loss as from #1 to #2. So unless you transcod
Re:FFS shut up already (Score:5, Informative)
Every encoder will generate ringing and other artifacts. Every good encoder tries to put those artifacts just a bit below the hearing threshold according to an algorithm that has been tested extensively with normal music. However, encoders are generally not fine-tuned to deal with the unnatural type of noise that results from another encoding process, resulting in the noise ending up above the hearing threshold after the second time.
You might wish to check some double-blind test results on HydrogenAudio [hydrogenaudio.org]. Short version: reencoding 256 kbps MP3 to 128 kbps MP3 sounds horrible compared to 128 kbps MP3 straight from the lossless source.
Re:FFS shut up already (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, they are based on psychoacoustic modelling. But I believe that it is mostly a few curves that define the hearing threshold for certain frequencies in the presence of a loud masking tone. The rest is trial and error, with lots of fine-tuning of a zillion parameters in the algorithm while listening to compressed music and asking the golden ears at hydrogenaudio to compare different versions of a codec (at least for the OSS ones). There is no algorithm that will give you the degree of transparency of an encoding as a number that realiably matches the results of double-blind trials.
Regarding generative losses of enoding: masking can for example be done by using the fact that a listener doesn't hear pre-echoes before sharp attacks as long as they don't come earlier than X milliseconds before. The encoder uses this fact to get the bitrate of sharp attacks down. But on the second encoding, the pre-echo might become 2X milliseconds rather than X milliseconds, and be audible.
I've seen reports on hydrogenaudio that codecs such as LAME that use complex psya modelling extensively do a worse job as a source for transcoding than fast high-bitrate codecs that have much simpler algorithms for throwing away information.
I suppose you are talking about transcoding to the same bitrate MP3 with the same psychoacoustic model. That could be useful if you want to get rid of DRM by burning to CD and then re-ripping. But the question is whether transcoding to a lower bitrate or even different codec will give audibly different results from encoding directly from the source.
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iPod to Head (Score:2)
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My friend who is the audiophile claims that "I have a lot of storage so who cares" except now his 2TiB RAID is getting more and more full. I imagine within a year he'll be hosed for space. He could cram ~5x more audio if he just compressed them but whatever, to each their own.
Oddly enough compressed videos (that he gets off P2P) is "j
Re:FFS shut up already (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, if you wish to sell stuff to audiophiles, then players supporting lossless compression are excellent - they will buy it (along with anything you claim, on whatever grounds, will improve the playback quality).
If you however want to bring better music quality to the general population - make them get better headphones.
Ambient noise (Score:2)
IF you're recording for use on your home stero system and IF you have decent speakers and IF you've got the storage space to burn and IF the kind of music you listen to hasn't already been under the sound engineer's knife... T
Re:FFS shut up already (Score:5, Funny)
Your Sound Squid kit comes with:
1 (One) 10 gallon aquarium
1 (One) squid, family Loliginidae
8 (Eight) water-proofed high quality tentacle clips
1 (One) computer-controlled Sound Squid->digital interface
1 (One) instruction manual in English, Japanese and French
All for the low, low price of only $7,500!
You may also be interested in the following accessories:
Gold-plated Monster brand tentacle clips ($1500)
1 week worth of squid food ($350)
Can you afford NOT to buy a Sound Squid?
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It feels like sacrilege, but I have all of my music at 128kbps AAC (saves storage space and battery power on the iPod). Doesn't sound too bad, and if I really want to hear my music losslessly I can just go to the CDs on my shelf. Done.
Gotta say though, if you really want high quality you can't go wrong with Musepack...nothing really plays it, but the quality is fantastic in a fairly small file size.
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Yes [since I know someone will bring it up], if you plan to remix it ... use flac
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I'm sure there is a contrived test out there that shows a difference. The trick is, to encode a track at 64, 96, 128, 160 and 192bkit/sec with the high quality setting in LAME. Then sit in front of your stereo, put a blindfold on and listen to the tracks [and the original] in a random order.
Chances are for 99% of your music you can easily tell 64 through 128 from the CD but can't tell the diff between 160 and 192 and the CD, and chances are most of the remainin
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What I found is that it all depends on the system your playing it through.
On my computer speakers it all sopunded the same after about 128, on headphone it was more nociteable (around 198). But if hooked it up to my home stereo I could easily tell the difference even at 256 to 320.
So it all dipends on your equipment (and your listening environment of course).
Needless to say the CD's played on my home stereo also sounded better than CD's pla
Re:FFS shut up already (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FFS shut up already[FORMATTED] (Score:4, Insightful)
About lossyness:
I agree with you that ears can be trained, and that you won't miss stuff if you don't know it should be there in the first place, or don't care whether it is. When I decided how I want to encode my music I did a quite extensive test and I found that to me even high-bitrate mp3 encodings made by lame can sound noticeably different from the CD. For example, I encoded the first track of Mike Watt's Contemplating the Engine Room [amazon.com] CD. It starts with an e-bass solo, and using reasonable lame presets there were no artifacts and I certainly could hear the notes played. Somebody expecting nothing more will probably be happy with the compressed sound. However when you know how a bass can sound and listen to the CD, you realize that there is so much more in Watt's bass sound: it is full of harmonics that make the bass come alive and turn it into the recognizable Watt bass in the first place. And these harmonics are gone even in the highest lame preset. (And oggenc adds a nasty hiss which makes the song completely unlistenable.)
About equipment:
You said "All of the high end audio products generally have no benifit for the average consumer, but in a studio setting, when trained ears are listening, that expensive gear tends to be more valued", and that's where I disagree a bit because you make it sound as if only a professional sound person could appreciate good gear. I's agree that someone who is not particularly interested in music has no need for good gear. That's pretty obvious. If you're going to listen to music only as background noise while cooking, go with the cheap stuff by all means.
However I would argue that everyone who likes music and spends time actually listening to it will profit from good gear. To everyone who doubts that I can just recommend to grab a few favorite CDs and make an appointment at a good hifi shop for a listening session. "Good" means "a shop that has solid equipment from the lower to very high price ranges, but that will not rip you off by trying to sell you air conditioners."
Not directed at you, but I need to say this once on
To those discussion contributors who lose all ability to differentiate when they hear the word "audiophile": one cannot deny that wackos exist in this field. On the other hand, since when is being an analog geek not allowed on