MP3 and iPod info.

MartinC

MartinC

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Happy new year to you all!

A friend of mine just asked me the following in an e-mail, but as I know fairly little about this I thought I'd see what some wiser heads had to say. Cheers.

pps - a serious question - How lossy is MP3 compression? Can audiophiles always hear the results? When downloading mp3's (or compressing your CDs), can you choose the degree of compression you would like for your files?

A friend of mine who would like to fake being an audiophile was wondering about iPods.
Click to expand...
 
In terms of downloading music files this will depend how 'legal' he is being.

In general the legal websites such as epitonic.com will really only offer what they offer, one or two kinds of file at whatever compression they have chosen.

In terms of the ipod and itunes, when importing CDs you can choose from a variety of formats and compression ratios, AIFF being basically as it was on the disk.

Yes you can very certainly hear the difference between compressed files and original disks, in some cases it quite awful all the way up to f**king awful. But if you just have a pair of headphones on with the ipod then it makes little difference, stick it through the hifi though and you will know all about it.

Thats not to say ipods arn't great, because they are. Great that is.

I also use mine for file storage which has come in very useful, he will need firewire realistically though.
 
Thanks Gary, you've confirmed roughly what I thought. For a large portable music collection iPods seem pretty unbeatable at the moment, but they're clearly not a substitute for a 'proper' music source.
 
The best possible results for MP3 can be attained by using Variable Bit Rate (VBR) files from say 128-320k in Joint Stereo, encoded by LAME 3.90.3 (IIRC). MP3 cannot be any better than that AFAIK.

If thats not good enough, then you'll need to use an alternate codec. Some folks I know you some pretty expensive headphone rigs with iPods, so perhaps they arent quite as bad you think, probably on a level with budget CD players.
 
Paul, tracks encoded in joint stereo are crap ;) :D !

320k - yes but joint stereo ?
AFAIK that's what the BBC uses on the majority of it's radio stations to save bandwith.
 
No it is not crap. That is a common misconception. In certain encoders it is crap, but not in LAME, where it saves space for other things... Here is some reading about joint stereo on MP3...

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=13726
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=15024
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=12590
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=12206

BUT ESPECIALLY READ THIS (Cuts to the chase)
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=995

:p
 

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