a question about mp3 bitrate.....

[Simon F]

I'm totally gonna rip all my CDs to WAV and then RAR the WAVs.

I know you are being facetious but standard lossless compressors are rarely very good with wavs. I would think something like Monkey's Audio or a similar, audio-specific, lossless compressor would do a much better job.

 

[mito]

Today it would probably have been better to take studio audio at 24bit 96Khz and encode it into the same space with some form of compression. That would have given us better quality and the additional hardware cost for CD players would have been small given that even cellphones can play mp3s with no problems these days and you can buy cheap players that hardly cost more than the flash memory inside it.

Of course, we're at a point where we don't "have to" compress audio, but it doesn't mean uncompressed is "better".

I don't understand how can encoding a source give you better quality. When you encode it, you are compressing it, thus there is loss. Right?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I don't understand how can encoding a source give you better quality. When you encode it, you are compressing it, thus there is loss. Right?

Lossless encoding. There are already several audio compression schemes that are designed not to degrade audio, but can still uncompress the audio data in a stream quickly enough to be listened to in real time. Plus if you read what Humus is suggesting, you'd be starting from a much higher quality audio than what we currently get on CDs.

There are also several lossy compression schemes that are designed to hit quality targets, rather than bitrate targets, and do a much better job at lossy compression while keeping up the audio quality far better than the bog-standard MP3.

Don't forget, wavs are also a form of encoding that is removing information from the original studio encoding. Just because they're really big and inefficient, doesn't mean they are not processing the sound and distorting what you hear. That's even before you get to some of the shocking post production mangling that publishers are doing to CD audio eg unnecessarily ramping up frequency to make audio "louder" while degrading sound quality.

 

[Bludd]

I know you are being facetious but standard lossless compressors are rarely very good with wavs. I would think something like Monkey's Audio or a similar, audio-specific, lossless compressor would do a much better job.

I know, but RAR actually has received some tuning for WAVs. There should be something about it in the options.

 

[Simon F]

I know, but RAR actually has received some tuning for WAVs. There should be something about it in the options.

Unless this comparison is out of date it still trails behind. Is there a, say, winamp plugin for wav+rar?

 

[Npl]

I know, but RAR actually has received some tuning for WAVs. There should be something about it in the options.

lossless audio codecs have the advantage that you can seek in them and generally handle them like other audio-files. Rars suck for playing back directly.

 

[Humus]

I don't understand how can encoding a source give you better quality. When you encode it, you are compressing it, thus there is loss. Right?

Well, CDs may not be "compressed", but they are instead downsampled. It was probably not recorded at 44.1Kz, 16bit. I believe 96KHz, 24bit is popular for studio recording. They likely use more channels than stereo too. So you can take that source audio and downsample to the CD rate, or you can use a high quality encoding that preserves more of the original signal in the same bitspace than plain downsampling does. It's a bit like how that compressed S3TC texture pack for original UT improved quality, because they could be made higher-res than plain RGBA8 textures.

 

[Bludd]

Unless this comparison is out of date it still trails behind. Is there a, say, winamp plugin for wav+rar?

WinRAR 3.7x is the latest version, so that is pretty old, but I don't know if the WAV handling has been improved since 2.7. I don't know if there is a WAV+RAR plugin for Winamp, but VLC should be able to handle it.

lossless audio codecs have the advantage that you can seek in them and generally handle them like other audio-files. Rars suck for playing back directly.

Sure, but I was only interested in mentioning that RAR does handle WAV in a special way.

 

[ballsweat]

Well, CDs may not be "compressed", but they are instead downsampled. It was probably not recorded at 44.1Kz, 16bit. I believe 96KHz, 24bit is popular for studio recording. They likely use more channels than stereo too. So you can take that source audio and downsample to the CD rate, or you can use a high quality encoding that preserves more of the original signal in the same bitspace than plain downsampling does. It's a bit like how that compressed S3TC texture pack for original UT improved quality, because they could be made higher-res than plain RGBA8 textures.

i personally think the technology should exist to not have to compromise.

or it is available actually, so why the hell not have the option.

something i dream of is a game with the audio setup is kind of like this:

internal sound res: 16 bit, 20 bit, 24 bit
internal sampling rate: 44 khz, 48 khz, 96 khz
audio channels: stereo, 6 channel, 7 channel.
number of audio samples: low, medium, high
bit-rate: 128kbps, 256kbps, ..., uncompressed
OpenAL on/off

we've been at a 128 kbps bit rate for too damn long, and we've been at 16/44 or 48 too damn long.

 

[Bludd]

we've been at a 128 kbps bit rate for too damn long

It's only that MP3 was designed to sound good at that bit rate. Who prohibits you from going higher?