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God I hate 128KBs MP3s

koiulpoi	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 1:30 PM Especially with rock music. Some electronic music and other genres sound fine. But DEAR LORD. When some music (like metal) gets encoded at a low bitrate, (I think this is what happens) the cymbal harmonics get distorted and it creates a disgusting halo around the music. Am I the only one who notices this?
wailingmiserere	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 2:06 PM I notice stuff like this too. I think they're known as artifacts, new frequencies that are created by the compression and are not present in the original recording. There's an interesting thing on Wikipedia about this, says that how much artifacts are noticed varies a huge amount between listeners: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Quality_of_MP3_audio
shadowself	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 2:26 PM What you're hearing is called "aliasing".
koiulpoi	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 3:23 PM I know what you mean, artifacts are noticed much by some people (me) and not at all by others. Good example, I'm sitting in a car with some friends, and we're listening to some music. I start hearing artifacts, and I go "Wow, you downloaded this off of Kazaa, didn't you?" Of course, they were shocked, but even after I pointed it out they still didn't notice anything. Grr.
hantu	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 3:25 PM hmmm interesting
Veracohr	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 3:26 PM How about: God I hate mp3s! They all sound like ass.
koiulpoi	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 3:41 PM Oh, I dunno. A good 320k VBR mp3 is pretty transparent. Come to find out that iTunes "Sound Enhancer" amplifies those certain artifacts that bug me the most.
BlackMage	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 4:18 PM I'm glad I'm tonedeaf.
hantu	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 4:26 PM hehe yeh!
shadowself	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 4:41 PM If the Sound Enhancer is anything like the fake 3D surround thing that some soundcards feature, it will really bring out the aliasing.
EtherEclectic	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 5:02 PM crap, i've made all my stuff 128k, what is the ideal bitrate then. so i can update or something.
shadowself	Date: November 29, 2005 @ 5:11 PM 192 is the minimum for me, that's what most (if not all) of my dmusic tunes are.
GeneHilbert	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 2:16 AM I use 160 on here....... It's OK and not a pain in the ass for dial-up users. As well there are a shit-load of downloads from my page - so someone likes them...... Hell....... Garageband drops everything to 64k RealAudio.... talk about sucking....
TameasDust	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 2:29 AM was wondering why 192 seems to be the standard lately ... 320 does sound clearer/fresher but only if the production is up to the task .... bad sounds bad no matter what you do to it
kingo	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 8:06 AM The higher the bit-rate, the larger the file. With limited file sizes, and especially limited overall space for tracks (more so for non-subscribers,) there's a trade off. 192 is pretty good and transparent for most listeners (I think.)
hantu	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 9:34 AM hmm yeh... there are still people that are running on 56k like for e.g. Mr Tucker i believe... so we have to keep a balance
koiulpoi	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 12:35 PM My songs are all ABR around 128, which for electronic sounds, works amazingly well. However, for ripped CDs, I have discovered FLAC/ALAC. Amazing.
azhazhellfire	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 2:04 PM What sickens me most is when these people tell the noobs that 128kbps mp3 is CD QUALITY (the most popular version of this lie seems to come from Kazaa). I tend to annihilate these people and set their victims straight.
T-Boi	Date: November 30, 2005 @ 2:35 PM maybe just - unlucky
zedsalt	Date: December 1, 2005 @ 11:46 AM I try to avoid using the term "CD quality". After all, if you can't say something nice... Of course, I really do appreciate digital's potential for giving a large number of people an idea of what certain musics sound like. This is especially important for a musician like me, because...let's face it...my material's not for everybody.
LiQuidMetamo...	Date: January 23, 2006 @ 3:08 AM It was a popular myth in the days of Napster that 128 kbps for mp3 was "equivalent to CD quality" - most opinions I've read now seems to indicate that 192 Kbps is the newer "standard" particularly using Frauenhofer's codec (which in some people's opinions is not as good as Lame's encoder). Real used to only allow 96 Kbps mp3 ripping on it's free version so I remember many 96 Kbps mp3's in 1997/98 which were frankly garbage. Also Apple sell 128 Kbps aac/mp4 as being CD equivalent, which again is debatable - whilst being a better 128 Kbps codec than mp3 this is probably not the case. Ogg vorbis at setting 5 is supposed to be CD standard. wma @ 128 is a wee micron better than mp3 if single pass, but some encoders (like CD-Tag) can also do double pass and that helps a bit, the 128 Kbps 2 pass sounds more like 160 Kbps. variable bit rates sound better but are less compatible and usually larger files. It is always about finding the righ t balance of downloading time and quality - as more people have DSL/Cable high speed the standards have increased. I typically find 160 Kbps mp3 w/ lame encoder works quite well, it does not reduce the bass as badly as 128 and maintains more high end clarity (ie cymbals) without being a humungous download. I have encoded mp3's @ 256kbps for home listening and found them to be very acceptable, "The Bends" album by Radiohead maintains approx. 95% of it's punch and subtlety of the CD and when I stepped it up to 320 Kbps did not notice any difference. I like ogg vorbis and flac as open source lossy/lossless formats. .ogg files are typically 15-20% smaller than equivalent mp3 (i.e. most observers feel setting 5 - approx 160 Kbps - is equivalent to 192 mps mp3). vorbis is a variable bit rate and needs codecs to be run on windows media player.
pog	Date: January 23, 2006 @ 3:20 AM 128k mp3 is actually half cd quality... or every second frame. The reason you are hearing artifacts isn't usually the format or even the quality, it's the encoder operator's fault. Most mp3's with artifacts are doing that because the user was surfing the net whilst encoding, thus making their cpu peak out and do the best that it can. Often they have the cd rom volume set too high and also add normalization which, as we all know makes expression sound pretty ordinary.
LiQuidMetamo...	Date: January 23, 2006 @ 3:21 AM make that vorbis needs extra codecs downloaded from their website to work with wmp. duh!
pmscpc	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 2:46 AM Isn't it just down to bandwidth ? If we had as much bandwidth as we could eat, we could all listen merrily to WAVs. DAB in the UK is irritating too for the same reasons.
TameasDust	Date: January 30, 2006 @ 2:47 AM think i will record everything in 64kps to save space for uploading

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