Download Blur Song 2 320 Kbps Converter
Contents • • Better Sound, Vinyl, and FLAC More Data Means Better Sound Quality Okay, so bigger files sound better, but what does that really mean? Young said in the interview that when an artist creates something, the master could be 100 percent great, but the consumer is only getting 5 percent of it with an MP3 file. That's mostly true in absolute terms—a 128Kbps MP3 file can take anywhere from one-tenth to one-twentieth the space of an average raw, uncompressed CD track.
May 25, 2017. Before downloading you can preview michaela. Click to DOWNLOAD button to generate hd quality. If conversion takes too long time then simply click on refresh button. Blur (11:06) - file type: mp3 - download. Duration: 11:06 - Source: youtube - FileType: mp3 - Bitrate: 320 Kbps. Song 2 ( DJ BL3ND, MR. Download original 320Kbps, 4.65 Mb, 02:01. Artist: Blur. Generated MP3. Download MP3 320Kbps, 4.65 Mb, 02:01. Download MP3 160Kbps, 2.31 Mb, 02:01. Download MP3 128Kbps, 1.85 Mb, 02:01. Download MP3 64Kbps, 945.31 Kb, 02:01. Download MP3 48Kbps, 708.98 Kb, 02:01. Show song lyrics.
Professors in professional audio programs have a trick lately of showing students what happens when you take an original waveform, overlay an MP3 version, and then strip the MP3 data away; you still see a lot of audible data left: This is how much you're losing with MP3 files! In reality, most of the crucial data is there—enough to give a convincing, if not particularly pleasant sounding, representation of a recording. For most listeners most of the time, especially when they're listening while doing other things, this is plenty. The MP3 codec's impressive compression was shocking enough in the mid 1990s to eventually become the standard, as it far surpassed the sound quality of anything available up until that point. But with a decent set of speakers or headphones that you're familiar with, if you listen closely, you'll hear the problem—especially if you compare it back to back with the identical CD recording. There are real differences in an MP3 file that mar the sound quality: Slightly softer bass response that veils some of the detail between a kick drum and bass guitar playing together; washy-sounding drum cymbals that, at the lower bit rates, sound almost like a phaser or chorus effect is applied; smeared transients that blur an instrument's attack, sustain, and decay.
It gets more noticeable as you go from the low end to the high end of the frequency spectrum, too. A lot of the subtle details the artists and mixing engineer puts into a recording are diminished or disappear entirely in an MP3 file.
Even 256Kbps (and yes, 320Kbps) files are still audibly different than what you hear on a CD, although at least those are somewhat closer to the mark. As you can imagine, this dumbing-down of sound quality drives everyone on the creation end nuts, but it also diminishes the listening experience on your end. Switch to a FLAC file, and all of the above flaws go away. Sure, on a $50 set of computer speakers or the ones built into, say, an iMac, you're not going to hear this. Stock iPod earbuds won't do a lot for uncompressed audio either.
But upgrade to Shure or Etymotic earbuds, or Bowers & Wilkins or Paradigm speakers (to pick just a few brands as an example—there are many more), and you'll begin to hear details you may never have heard before, even on familiar recordings. Stereo sound fields become three dimensional, with a sense of depth and space. It sounds as if a veil has been lifted; everything has more definition and natural sound.
Cymbals decay properly after being struck with a drum stick. You don't just hear the finger plucks on an acoustic guitar—those come through over just about any speaker—but also the individual string and sliding finger noises too, as well as the warmth of the guitar's hollow wooden body. Vinyl and the 'Old High-End' So how does vinyl fit into all this? Things get a little tricky at this point, as there's plenty of vitriol between vinyl and CD listeners to go around. It's enough to set rabid fans of either format at each other's throats in Internet forums. So at the risk of someone in the comments telling me I couldn't hear a guitar solo if Mark Knopfler hit me over the head with a Stratocaster, I'll try and explain what's going on. Vinyl is a conundrum.
On the one hand, it's an imperfect, distorted medium with limited dynamic range, and it requires constant maintenance (cleaning, new cartridges on the turntable, and so on). It's also not portable in the slightest, unless you're a DJ with a bunch of crates and a big van. On the other hand, vinyl is tangible. You can hold it. It has large artwork.
Most importantly, it has a beautiful sound that, with the right turntable, cartridge, amplifier, and speakers, can convert just about anyone who hears it into a believer. The thing is, vinyl's various playback distortions are what make it sound great, from the more limited dynamic range, to the warm-sounding frequency response curve, and even in the way music was mastered to take maximum advantage of the pressing process. The age-old argument for vinyl fans against the CD (and, by extension, uncompressed data files) is that a CD contains the data representing a waveform sampled 44,100 times per second, in 'steps,' and that the rigidness of this algorithm could only approximate a smooth analog waveform without ever equaling it. That's not how CD works, though; instead, the D/A converter (digital to analog) interpolates the spaces between the steps and makes a smooth curve. Old CD players and PC audio cards sounded brittle, 'clinical,' and harsh because of early, imprecise D/A converters. Even today, high-end audio fans debate the sound quality of CD players, external D/A converters, and even the cables, all in an effort to get as smooth and detailed sounding a presentation as possible.
FLAC and the 'New High-End' Several services have cropped up that sell uncompressed FLAC files directly, including,,, and, albeit at a premium in some cases. Some artists have also made uncompressed versions of the music available direct from their Web sites.
The Beatles are selling a with a USB drive containing 24-bit FLAC files for all 14 albums. Trent Reznor released uncompressed versions of his four-part album 'Ghost' on BitTorrent (which is an awesome distribution mechanism for huge piles of data). Despite all of this, uncompressed audio has yet to hit the mainstream. The way things are going with mobile devices and digital sales, a lot of mixing engineers, musicians, and audiophiles worry that people don't realize what they're missing, and that true high-end sound will be lost forever.
I doubt it will ever come to that. Too many people are interested in quality audio, and emerging technology will only make it easier to access it as time goes on. In most respects, the MP3 and Internet radio revolution has been wonderful for music; it makes it dead easy to listen to as much music as possible at all times.
I'd love an easy, integrated way of purchasing and listening to uncompressed digital music again. But now that I've largely moved away from CDs, I no longer want to buy one, bring it home, rip open the plastic, and spend 20 minutes importing it only to end up with wasted plastic just to get the top-quality sound files.
It's a huge waste of both time and materials. At the same time, the 'music listening experience,' such as it was, has changed a lot recently. For music fans, it used to be a lot about assembling just the right group of stereo components and speakers, having everything set up the correct way, and listening in the 'sweet spot' right in the center, often to entire albums from start to finish. Not everyone did all that even years ago, obviously, but this is one of the things today's new vinyl enthusiasts have stumbled on and enjoy as part of the experience. Uncompressed audio can deliver that same awesome experience. President Obama Speech Mp3 Download.
It's not about money, either. A Samsung Galaxy Nexus or iPhone 4S with a $150 pair of earphones can sound amazing.
The Harman/Kardon SoundSticks III 2.1 speakers deliver unbelievably clear sound, and they're routinely sold for less than $150 for the three-piece set. If you still have a component-based stereo or are thinking of setting one up, so much the better. But in all of these cases, you'll need uncompressed audio files for the full effect. Now that people are streaming 720p high-definition video over the Internet, we clearly have the bandwidth for uncompressed audio as well. Here's hoping Neil Young isn't alone in what he wants out of digital music. Be sure to check out our guide on, as well as our roundup of.
You can also read all of our latest reviews in the, plus and. Jamie Lendino is the Editor-in-Chief of ExtremeTech.com, and has written for PCMag.com and the print magazine since 2005. Recently, Jamie ran the consumer electronics and mobile teams at PCMag, and before that, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Smart Device Central, PCMag's dedicated smartphone site, for its entire three-year run from 2006 to 2009. Prior to PCMag, he was a contributing editor for Laptop and mediabistro.com. His writing has also been published in Popular Science, Consumer Reports, Electronic Musician, and Sound and Vision, as well as.
A while ago, I decided to switch to MP3 music instead of CD’s, so I painstakingly ripped all my CD’s (500+) onto my computer. It’s much easier finding albums on a computer than it is sifting through piles of CD’s only to find out that I put the wrong CD in the case that I was looking for. Plus, I really love “super random” play. Anyways, I did all my encoding at 128kbps. After I finished (a week later!), I was talking to a friend of mine who had just finished doing the same thing with all of his CD’s, except he did then at 320kbps. He and everyone I spoke with told me that at 128kbps the audio is pretty much garbage and that I needed to do it all over again. I thought to myself: Why didn’t I rip them at 320kbps?
Now I have to deal with inferior quality music or go through the entire ripping process again!”. Can you hear the difference? In any case, I have a fun test for everyone: Listen to these 2 clips.
One is encoded at 128kbps and the other is encoded at 320kbps (over twice the bit rate). Can you tell the difference? I picked the 320, but it was not way better than the 128 which has more votes! The more sound sources you have in a song the more bitrate is better. Your typical song is vocals, percussion (drums), strings (lead / rhythm guitar & bass) & piano/keyboard. So 5/6 sources & 128kb/s is enough even 112kb/s, with less sources say just vocals & guitar it’s fine at 96 or 80 be cause it actually has more bitrate allocated to it’s sources than the 5/6 at 128. It’s when you get to music played by orchestras with dozens of sources that more bitrate doesn’t downgrade it.
Usually 256 is enough, people go on about 320 just because it’s the highest setting. If there was 480 they’d say that was best rate. 320 kbps makes sense only in metal & hard rock. This clip here was blues.
Which do involve less sound from instruments hence even on a lower bitrate they sound almost same. But u can tell the difference in rock which make heavy use of distortion & drumming i too like u had all my songs in 128 kbps. Then had to convert to 320 kbps & then to FLAC format to gain a richer music experience FLAC & APE although having bigger file-size are a treat to the ears & sometimes u can also hear some background sounds unnoticed before!!! This whole MP3 thing was initially about storage space, and the fact that this was the format chosen to sell songs online.
Realize that the original CD you have there at home plays at 400-900 kbs, or 5-7 megs per minute of music. Compressing these files made downloading viable, although sound quality is thrown out the window. It’s one thing to use desktop speakers for playback, but if you have real Hi-Fi equipment and are routing music through an external D/A converter, then you must use the Lossless or Wave format or the sound difference will be extremely different.in a bad way.
Don’t worry about loading your Ipod with musicit will do the formatting for you and the originals in the computer will stay intact. Where you will hear the difference between a 128kbp track and a 320kbp is on a PA sound system. 128 is unplayable pretty much on a larger system as it exposes the compression. On cheaper smaller lower quality hi-fi it is hard to tell the difference. I ended up binning all my earlier purchased 128 tracks once I realised this. Call me a music snob but I prefer to buy recordings that resemble how the artist would want you to heart them.
These days I buy WAVS only. Compression is only necessary if you don’t have the bandwidth or diskspace – for that reason compressing audio tracks will soon be a thing of the past as disk space and internet usage becomes cheaper.
I could not tell which was better (at simple netbook with low fi audio). I felt like there was a slight hint of difference, but not big enough to pick a winner. I just guessed and got it wrong. Normally, when listening to something like trance, with lots of high frequencies, the difference is beyond obvious. I feel like this audio didn’t come from a master with very good highs in it.
The muffled cymbals in both tracks – which usually are THE dead give away (when one is muffled and the other isn’t). It simply means that the original didn’t have much high in it.
To compare 320k to 128k, the song should have at least 320k worth of frequency to it. Otherwise it’s not a real comparison. I would re-do the test with something that has loud and clear high frequencies that go well beyond what 128k can reproduce. I bet the results will be different. Ya you can tell the difference if you are a sound nut. Its small but different. You just have to learn how to listen better.
For a second when i was switching back and forth between the two sounds i thought, i dont tell the difference, but then i payed attention and realized i was trying to “look” at the music with my eyes, and not listen with my ears. It takes practice to exercise that “muscle”. But once you do, you will ‘see’>hear the 320 as “warmer” and less forced/grainy. If you dont hear a difference it is because you dont have a sick obsession with sound. I didnt read the whole thread so sorry if some one has already said this. It depends what you are using the music for, if its for a home stereo 100-200watt then the drop in quality should be barely noticeable and nothing really to worry about (unless you are a purest then 320 should sound virtually like cd to the naked ear). If you are going into larger out puts on your systems then you will notice.
If you are using for professional use i would say anything above 1000 watts and you will start to notice a lack of clarity and slight faded sound. If you use 5000 watt or above it will sound absolutely horrible. Imagine a Jpeg reduced to a photograph size and then printed on to a large poster, will look crystal clear if kept at its compressed size but all pixelly and weird if it is expanded. I got this right but have to admit it was not obvious.
The first clip sounded smoother which is not a difference I expected. I have heard 128K files which sound worse than this. I know different passages in the same song will reveal more or fewer compression artifacts so were these clips randomly selected or were they picked after they were checked out?
I think a good way to check if your conversion process is too lossy is to re-compress the same section to create 2nd and 3rd generation copies. Also try this from one encoder to another to see how much the first codec damages the sound. Finally, one sure-fire way to check for loss is to take the compressed clip and subtract it from the original clip. This will lay the distortion completely bare. I know the tell tail signs of low quality 128 and picked it straight way. There’s usually a quite obvious swishing/phasing sound in 128 that get’s quite uncomfortable to listen to after a while.
Only on a very old hard to get song would I ever except 128 mainly because something is better than nothing in these circumstances. Your average listeners however would have trouble telling the difference and if you don’t listen too carefully 128 is usually fine for the “average” listener. I started encoded my CD’s back in 2001 when large storage was more expensive. So at the time I decided to go half way and picked 192. My thinking was that this way you get the best balance of file size and quality.
At 192 it starts to get extremely hard to tell the difference anyway. I have however gone back and re-done my absolute favourite CD’s at 320, but for the majority I’ve just kept the original 192 versions and they’re good enough for me. In all of this discussion, why is it that NOBODY mentioned the technologies available at the time the music was first RECORDED?
No matter what bitrate you choose, the vast majority of music recorded prior to about 1965 will sound the same because of the limitations of the then current technology. It doesn’t matter if you ripped the tune from an AAD or ADD CD, because the original recording was done with analog equipment available at the time the recording was made, and you can’t really “improve” it to bring it up to the “standards” of the 21st Century. My personal preferences are for these older types of recordings (early vocal groups, big bands, REAL Rock ‘N’ Roll [pre-1965]} and find 128 kbs to be perfectly suitable for my listening pleasure. If you buy a CD that was recorded from cylinders made between say 1898 and 1910, the quality will be the same as that of the original cylinder, and a 128 bitrate will work fine if you make an mp3 of it because the original recording equipment couldn’t capture the nuances.
SO, if you have perfect ears, AND top-of-the-line equipment, AND listen to music that was recorded after, say, 1965, it MAY be advantageous to create high-bitrate mp3s. Otherwise you’re just wasting disc space. I agree with Kubrick on well chosen term Sound-snob. I have a friend who thinks he is an expert on music. And of course he prefers 320 to 128.
The other night he told me that I really lose much when I convert mp3’s from 320 down to 128. And he is the guy who 20 years ago when we were teenagers couldn’t tell the difference between the “keyboard trumpet” (he thought it was the real thing) and real saxophone (he thought it was keyboard). I kept correcting him. And ever since we were little he always boasted with his good ear, his “profound” knowledge of music. And when we were kids he listened to Disco and made fun of me because I used to listen to Frank Sinatra, jazz, classical music etc. Some connoisseur of music!
To cut a long story short he is a snob and he only likes singers who are critics’ favourites. So before deciding whether he likes some new single or not, he waits to read a good review and then shoots his mouth. Band that he thought to be lousy soon becomes a great piece of art after his reading of a good review in music magazines. I think that people who “prefer” 320 to 128 can’t tell the difference between the two and are like my snobish friend.
Whoever sayed that lossless is overrated as there is no noticable difference is quite stupid I mean come on, just listen to the sound of the drums that sound so flat on the second one 🙂 And i listen to it with my vintage “AKG K140” plugged directly into an pretty normal soundcard (asus xonar d1) without an Headphone-Amp (note those Headphones have an Impendance of 600ohm). And still the difference for me was quite obvious, even if there are quite better examples for the loss of quality due to mp3 compression (Check some good “Bach” Songs, and you’ll see what i mean) Maybe its due to my pretty good hearing, as i can hear up to 22khz with 25years And an “Ipod” is an lifestyle-product, no way to enjoy high-fidelity music I rather grab an Cowon, than an Apple.
Though i once were an Apple-fan:S. What I think this demonstrates best is that for most real world applications, the MP3 encoding method is really excellent at pulling out what people really can hear, focus on, and prefer. The idea of ANY compressed audio format is not how perfect you can make the music, but how much you can preserve whilst saving as much space as possible. Most peoples’ equipment won’t expose a serious difference between 128 kbps and 320 kbps. As audiophiles, instead of fussing at what compressed formats vendors offer, you should be demanding a lossless form and determining what quality you need to compress it to to suit your equipment.
First of all, isn’t that a drum machine? The instruments are electric guitar and electric bass. You aren’t hearing instruments, you are hearing music amplifiers. The transients are coming through 10-12″ speakers made for durability, not attack. The only thing that ain’t fake in the track is the vocals.
And with them, you can hear better separation among the background vocals in #1. If you want a real test, go acoustic.
Say, something old, before synth, like remastered stan getz, pick your poison. On this clip the difference is less obvious, but on some songs I do notice a HUGE difference, like night and day. 2 songs come to mind and it was like hearing them for the first time when I re-encoded at 320. However it depends on the speakers/headphones you’re using as well and I admit that I never noticed that difference until I got a set of quality headphones. And I did pick the 320 clip(yay). Not surprised that more people picked the low bit rate one, as like I said on this clip it’s not as obvious as some others. I don’t hear a difference.
I’m pretty familiar with what compression artifacts sound like, and am using a MacBook with some Yuin PK3 earbuds. I’ve tried these tests a number of times over the years, first when deciding if MiniDiscs sounded different than CDs. 10-12 years ago, I almost thought MP3 was a lost cause since 128K sounded awful.
Last five or so, though, 128 sounds perfect to me. I rip to 160 to leave a safety margin, and really hate large FLAC filesizes. Anything I get over 256k gets transcoded down to 160. Bullsh*t, man. If anyone, and I mean ANYONE tells you that he/she cannot enjoy a song, because it is at 128 kbps and not 320, I am not sure whether the term exists, but I would use the word: sound-snob. Describing it would go like this: you don’t have a clue about what the f**k quality sound is about, but you’re bragging with your 320kbps music cause it isI don’t know rare/better technology/you name it. I would agree with “Matt March 14th, 2010 @6:47 pm”, for one: he is a sound-engineer, which is not about trends/bragging but science, and two: because he is actually right.
I really doubt your friend enjoys his 320kbps music on an equipment like Matt here is talking about. There is also another thing that is too important to be left out: one’s ears and mind. One may as very well have equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if he/she doesn’t know what to listen to (what are the “bad” things in 128kbps that 320 kbps doesn’t have). There is also a third part of this issue: artistic beauty. It would be a crime against art (and when we talk about music, we HAVE to talk about art, whether people like it or not) to say that a violin sounds better just because it’s 320kbps and not 128. This issue, however, is quite subjective, but important nonetheless. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Well, in our case ear of the beholder. And it’s true. There might be some certain sounds that I like to hear during a Brahms Symphony recording, because I can imagine I am actually standing in front of the orchestra, and they are playing it to me. And those very sounds may be quite disturbing for your ears, because “with today’s technology, unnecessary sounds should be deleted by sound-engineers after a recording”. Bottom line, 320kbps mp3 files sound better to a few people. The overwhelming majority can’t make the difference between 128kbps and 320 kbps, which is natural.
Hello all, Matt here. I am an audio engineer by trade, and listening in a well treated control room with a set of 3000$ JBL Monitors. The consensus amongst everyone here is correct – the signature of lower encoding mp3s is most definitive in the high end. There is also low end loss, however that loss is extremely difficult to hear without speakers capable of accurate reproduction in the sub frequencies. Mp3s save space by getting rid of frequencies we are less likely to hear – filtering out over 16khz, and under 20hz.
Lower encodings then start selecting very thin frequency bands and removing that information. The frequency bands are stratified – meaning you might hear 40hz and 42hz, but not 41hz. It leaves our very capable minds to fill in the sonic gaps. Different encoding algorithms utilize different systems of doing this, based on what is called “perceptual coding theory.” This has two effects. One is a perceived loss of nothing is specific, but an overall “thinning” of the sound.
The second is audible distortion in the high end, as steeper filter mechanisms cause “phase distortion” or sometimes called “space monkeys” (yes, audio engineers use that as a term). This creates a strange texture, as well as a lack in perceived depth. However, for the end user listening on something like earbuds, cheap computer speakers, laptop speakers, or cheap headphones, you will most likely notice no difference.
This is because those speakers do not really play back those targetted frequencies with accuracy. Earbuds in particular actually use the proximity to the ear drum to create an artifical sense of low and high frequency content. 320 kbs is by far better. I could never go back to anything lower. I have Shure earbuds (ran me 100 dollars) that allow me to hear every little detail in dense music. Your audio comparison for this one song may fool people into believing it has little difference, but if we start comparing post-rock or wall-of-sound songs (intricate, like the minimalist album titled “Music for 18 Musicians”) then we would easily tell the difference.
If I had all of my extreme metal/intricate bands in 128 kbs then guitars would have a horrible ear-piercing screech, bass would be inaudible, and half of the high notes would be smothered in big static mess of sound. Bands like Isis and Opeth are 50% less enjoyable if I can’t hear the details in their dense, otherworldly (atmospheric) wall of sound. In the end it depends on the quality of your mp3 player, the quality of earbuds, and of course the style of music. If you can’t distinguish between 128 and 320, then you don’t need anything above 128.
You don’t need to have a good trained ear to notice the difference, probably it is the system that you are playing the songs with. Get some good headphones (audiotechnica, grado, denon, sennheiser, etc) or good speakers, remember that speakers are always the most important part in an audio system. And for Korn, yor rear speakers are not playing with bad quality, they are reproducing the content of the audio that is not common between channels. If you select hall, or simlar preset in your home theater, it should sound similar. Don’t worry, this is normal.
If you want to have the same output in all speakers, select MONO or ALL CHANNEL STEREO in your receiver/home theater. This is kind of a set-up. The original presumably didn’t have much high end, judging from these files. I use the built in ABX testing utility in the geeky media player Foobar to do true double blind testing (it has an integrated ABX comparator utility that takes care of all the accounting and statistical calculations for you) and, for sure, it can be difficult to tell the difference between, say, 192 kbps signals and 320 kbps signals — but it totally depends on the content. If the source material here had had more high frequency content to start with (it sounded very dull and flat in both files; listen to the cymbals), it would presumably have been considerably easier for those who know what to listen for to identify which was which. Like most poorly thought out media pseudo-science, this demonstrates little and proves nothing. There is, however, plenty of good perceptual testing data regarding the general population and differing perceptual encoding data compression schema, maybe it would be better if the author were to point his readers in the direction of something, you know, real.
I got it right, the first one sounded better. Great tune selection, btw, with the Cyamande.
What brought me to the site, however, was a search for how to record mp3’s in 320 kbps format. After reading this board it’s obvious to me now that 320 kb is not the cats meow I thought it was supposed to be.
But, to satify my curiosity at least, can someone tell me how to save wave files in 320 format? I have been using Audacity to convert, and it automatically converts to 128.
One second thing, does I-tunes autmatically compress wave files that are imported into the library, or just leave them as large waves. I did not select the correct choice and I am not surprised. Your test is not properly randomized and I have virtually no experience with MP3. If I wanted to bias a test I would set the 320bps rate as the 1st selection as people will sub-consciously expect the lower rate to be 1st. I suspected this is what was dome before I made the selection. Secondly we naturally hear more detail on the second listen. If you wanted to really do a correct comparison there would be 3 sample, 2 mp3 at different rates and one the actual.wav selection.
These would be randomized on each iteration of the test and only the test program in the back ground would know which was which. Well, if it is a calm song there is not much to encode due to low entropy.
If you listen to a rock song at 128 kbps you should here a clear difference due to the high entropy ( much sound at the same time to encode ). Besides mp3 is obsolete, you should use ogg vorbis or AAC (.mp4). All mp3 files sounds bad regardless the bitrate thus its hard to tell the difference of the two songs above, plus its a very low entropy song.
If you compare ogg vorbis (128kpbs) and mp3 (128kpbs), same song, you should here a difference. Wow a majority of people are deaf haha More people thought 128 sounded better.
Most people probably expected the 2nd to be the 320. Thing is with good headphones. I have Sennheiser HD555’s its not hard at all to tell the difference. Also I reckon people could like the muffled blended together smoothed out sound that lower quality encoding brings out. Imagine it like the sustain pedal on a piano. Most novice pianists over use the sustain pedal because they think it sounds good.
320kb vs 128kb sounds a lot more Crisp. To say it a differnet way imagine a picture thats sharp and has some jaggies and you blur it a bit. It may look more appealing to some which is what in effect happens at lower quality encoding it audibly blurs it a bit which to some sounds better. Im a musician and I prefer 320 because everything comes off more clear, crisp, and realistic.
I could tell. Until portable flac players become a reality, last longer than 20 mins with playback, and youre not obsessed with backing up your entire mp3 collection to premium quality, stick with mp3! Ps if you intend to backup your collection for portable players on the move, dont go any higher than 192 kbps. If its for pc listening on good speakers, go with mp3 320 kbps constant or a high variable bitrate. Variable will save you alot of space, but despite what some people will tell you, variable can often give you a clearer sound if you listen hard enough. Its because variable can give a wider/higher range of sound frequencies for your music. Hard to really tell, but for the nerds its true.
So sometimes a lower bitrate vbr can sound better than a 320 kbps cbr. At a lower bitrate, rock music can sound a bit gargled, but if you prefer other styles then variable or constant around 192kbps may be enough for you, for both pc and portable player use. Better yet, you wont have to convert your collection twice! 😉 Another thing to note that a high bitrate on a portable player will eat up those batteries, and some portable players wont work properly with variable bitrate mp3s (vbr) and will only prefer constant (cbr) mp3s, so try your player first with some tracks to make sure they will work ok with the method you choose to use. If youre not sure, try converting your music to different bitrates to decide what sounds best to you whilst not using up too much space on your portable mp3 player (as an example). Just dont play your music too loud whatever you choose to use!
Lossless is overrated. I chose 1; it sounded better than 2, which had some weird choppiness with the high hats, but other than that they sound almost exactly the same — and I had to use my ATH-M50’s and strain my head to hear it. Also had to turn off the Crystallizer on my Auzentech Prelude to be safe. Long story short it DOESN’T MATTER even with studio-grade equipment the difference is barely noticeable unless you really look for it — and if you’re just listening to your MP3s to listen for impurities then you aren’t actually enjoying them now aren’t you? Surely when you bought an iPod or whatever you were actually thinking of enjoying your music and not listening for holes in it, right? This is also the reason why I say Lossless is Overrated.
Allo i got it wrong. After listening to it about 20 times. I used $700 dollar noise cancelling headphones quietcomfort 3s which were not the best for this test. Despite this you want to go with 320kbps mp3s for sure but there is no point doing that any more. The only way to make and save your music now is with Flac. I recommend everyone to go with Flac even if you can’t hear the difference.
If you need to put it on your ipod convert the FLAC to AAC 320kbps or put it on as apple lossless. It’s easy to convert out of Flac.
Flac is the way to go people for all future encoding of music. As for the difference. Well it doesn’t mean you need to throw out all your old MP3’s as if you can’t tell the difference then don’t worry, but if you get the chance slowly replace them all with FLAC. People who can tell the difference are welcome to just start using FLAC.
There is alot of very hard to get music, that is going to take a very long time, if ever to find its way into the Flac format. So we will be using Mp3’s and AAC for a while yet. The Future is flac tho! I just took this test and got it right. It was really easy to tell the difference between the two. Why do you keep talking about high frequencies? The low frequency distortion is much more noticeable with this one.
You don’t really need high quality phones or speakers to tell the difference between 128 and 320kbps. Cause really, the numbers itself has a huge difference, what more of the sound quality?
By the way, i took this test on my old laptop using made-in-china-earphones that i got for about 2 bucks. Most of the modern, variable bit rate encoders (MP3, AAC or OGG) have improved dramatically in the last few years. Under most circumstances a 128k vbr encoded file is “good enough.” Hard drive space is so cheap now, the best thing to do is rip you CDs to something lossless (like FLAC or ALAC) and then just transcode to whatever you need.
The best of both worlds. I’ve got over 13,000 songs encoded with FLAC that take up around 270GB of space. With 500GB hard drives only costing about $50, why compromise? After flipping between the clips twice it was easy for me to tell.
I’m glad my ears didn’t fail me since I picked the correct answer. The first thing that clues me in to low bitrate files is the distortion in the higher frequencies. Like somebody else described, it’s got a sort of “swishy” sound to the cymbals and other high frequency content. The attack of transients is where low bitrates really fail. This was a decent track to compare but there are many other clips that could be used that show far more dramatic differences.
Try doing some clips with some audiophile music with lots of dynamic range. Try something from the classic Thelma Houston cd from Sheffield Lab, even the nearly deaf could pick out the differences between 128k and 320k mp3s. This is an age old debate while the perception of audible distortion at lower bitrates is really dependent on the hearing of any given person, lower bit rates do in fact butcher singal quality especially with lower quality encoders. Having ripped my collection a number of times first at mp3 CBR, then mp3 VBR, then m4a and now FLAC, I can testify that even if your hearing isn’t superb, you can experience a form of hearing ‘fatigue’ over time if you listen to low bitrate mp3s. You don’t notice it first but after some months it tends to get a bit annoying. I find that its best to over-due it a little even if you can’t immediately hear the difference. For tips, check out.
Backing up your music collectiong (archiving) in mp3 is a bad idea, because you lose flexibility. The best thing would be do rip it to a some lossless format such as FLAC. It takes up a lot of space but it is CD quality and it allows you to do whatever you want with it. Want to transcode it to 128kbps mp3 to your portable player?
Want to listen to it on your high-end speakers without loss of information? Ripping to 320kbps mp3 robs you of that.
If you want to transcode an already lossy mp3 to a lower bitrate you are going to end up with a worse sounding file than if you ripped CD ->128kbps directly. First of all, this was on of the best executed of these comparisons I’ve heard. I did get the answer right, but the differences were subtle.
What always tips me off in these comparisons is the high-frequency percussion sounds (cymbals, shakers,etc). In this example, as in the others I’ve heard, cymbals sound “smeared” in the low bitrate file. There’s a lack of ambiance and detail that lossy compression inevitably brings. And overall, there less of a sense of “space” in the lower rate file. And now a request: how about adding two more files to the comparison? One should be a completely uncompressed.wav, and the other should be a losslessly compressed file, such as a flac or alac.
My guess is that very few people (including me) will be able to tell the difference between the 320K MP3 and the flac or.wav. But the comparison between the 128k file and the lossless/uncompressed files should be more dramatically obvious than the difference between the 128 and the 320. I took this test with a pair of Koss PortaPros ($40) plugged directly into my PC’s generic onboard soundcard.
Stand By Me Doraemon 1080p Downloads. Using better equipment (digital out from the PC, with outboard dac and amp, better phones) would probably throw the differences into bolder relief.