it makes me sick everytime i wanna download a song and its 192kbps.. theres hardly any noticeable diff in quality.. and theres a 50%increase in size which makes a big diff to me stuck on a dialup connection! wat do u guys think about this?
192kbps is supposed to be comparable to CD quality, but I guess it really depends on what you hear. If you can't hear the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps, then just go with the lower bitrate and save yourself some download time.
I think 128 is fine as background music(party, etc) or in a noisy environment, but in a quiet room and through a good set of speakers or headphones 128 doesn't sound as good as 256 or 320(snares and cymbols don't sound right to me).
It all depends on the source of the MP3, if it came straight off a cd with an encoder then 128 can sound half way decent, but people who care about sound quality(me) dont mess with 128, simply because the sound is noticebly worse to anyone with a good ear.
Well, i personally like 192kbps, but some 128kbps sound just as good. There's lots of garbage mp3s on the net that sound like sh*t. I use this utility EncSpot , shows which encoder the mp3 was encoded with and quality rating. Some of the results with the mp3 is complete or not is not really accurate tho.
I can hear the artifacts of most music recorded at 128kbps. The "swooshing" of cymbals and other high frequency instruments, sibilance of vocals sometimes turns into pitches, and a general feeling of a loss of "depth" of the recording. I don't hear nearly as much at 160kbps, and 192 sounds pretty good. I compress my songs at 192.
Hey, but if you don't here it then it ain't there!
I can most certainly tell the quality difference. 128 just sounds like crap to my ears. 160 sounds better, but I prefer 192. Past 192 though I can't really tell much difference. If you got sh*t speakers though, it probably all sounds like crap.
I agree bitrate is not the primary problem which is bad ripping and bad encoding. If everyone used EAC secure mode ripping and LAME or equivalent VBR encoding then all would be good. I suppose if you are going to download a file via dialup only to find it is craptastic then better it be the smaller 128 and not 192 so you wasted less time.
<< it makes me sick everytime i wanna download a song and its 192kbps.. theres hardly any noticeable diff in quality.. and theres a 50%increase in size which makes a big diff to me stuck on a dialup connection! wat do u guys think about this? >>
It really depends on your system. The difference maybe less noticable with most computer speakers. But if you listen with high quality headphones, its especially noticable, its amazing what they expose. Its so distracting I'm constantly in the process of weeding out 128kbps songs from my collection and replacing them with higer bitrate version.
A slow connection should be the only reason for downloading a 128kbit mp3. I have dsl, and I do have to admit that most of my songs are at 128bit, but i have a yamaha sound card and some cheap aopen speakers. But if I plan to burn mp3's into cd format to play in my cd player, I try to make sure it's at least 192kbit.
If you use LAME to encode MP3's (which you should), just use the command-line parameters "--r3mix" or "--alt-preset standard". That's all you need to know.
Seriously though, I transcode down to 64 to get more on my Jornada. The quality is that of FM stereo which is fine for at the gym. For my desktop I generally stick with 128. It's not perfect, but I do have the original CDs.
I always get 192, unless I absolutely can't, because for me there is really a very big difference between, say, 192 and 128...128 just sounds to muddy and unclean. I used to get all 128s and then when I switched to 192s I was amazed at how it sounded like a new expensive pair of speakers
For simplicity's sake, I encode everything now in iTunes 2 (Mac).
Settings: Fraunhofer stereo (not joint stereo) 256 CBR. Fortunately my iBook's drive does very good rips. No need for EAC. I'd use LAME if there was better software available but there isn't.
128 is not great.
192 is very good.
But then again, who cares what other people have? You are encoding everything yourself right?
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