07-20-2023, 04:41 AM
MP3 is really not a very good music format for sound quality. We're being cheated by the sites offering entire albums at 320kbps variable bit-rate of the things... better are the sites offering the songs in FLAC but that's only smaller than WAV although all quality is preserved.
What bit rate do you use with MP3? Do you use constant bit-rate (CBR) or variable bit-rate (VBR)? These are crucial factors.
CBR gives larger file sizes because the whole music file is set to the same bitrate. Meanwhile VBR tries to maximize things in parts that are almost quiet, when compared with parts that could have a large frequency range.
Start with 128kbps within the range offered by a converter such as the one in Audacity, which is barely acceptable for music played through a Chinese rechargeable portable speaker, but not acceptable for playing back from a boom box which is not audiophile quality. Audiophile quality is marginal at 256kbps or better. Any better and use OGG Vorbis instead, or FLAC.
OGG files consistently play at better quality than MP3 at the same bitrates but with slightly larger file sizes. Note there is another file format from the creators of OGG Vorbis, which is called Opus, which I haven't found better or worse than the other two. But more encoders are supporting that.
One thing to watch out for with OGG files: must use "quality" setting as suggested by "oggenc" tool from the OGG Vorbis utilities. Because CBR mode is very slow, wherever it is offered. My first OGG Vorbis encoder was from an early version of MAGIX Music Maker but it only encoded in CBR, it sucked. It might have been faster to play back the song than to have it exported to OGG. There used to be devices that supported OGG format like a Sandisk portable player that had bad battery life unfortunately. But MP3 and WMA are still more widely supported. Some of those Chinese speakers only support WAV and WMA besides MP3.
The WMA on the first iteration of Windows Media Player on WindowsXP was pretty good too, and it had lossy and lossless modes but of course M$ could change the format of it. M4A is also proprietary, it's surprising those could be created away from iTunes program.
What bit rate do you use with MP3? Do you use constant bit-rate (CBR) or variable bit-rate (VBR)? These are crucial factors.
CBR gives larger file sizes because the whole music file is set to the same bitrate. Meanwhile VBR tries to maximize things in parts that are almost quiet, when compared with parts that could have a large frequency range.
Start with 128kbps within the range offered by a converter such as the one in Audacity, which is barely acceptable for music played through a Chinese rechargeable portable speaker, but not acceptable for playing back from a boom box which is not audiophile quality. Audiophile quality is marginal at 256kbps or better. Any better and use OGG Vorbis instead, or FLAC.
OGG files consistently play at better quality than MP3 at the same bitrates but with slightly larger file sizes. Note there is another file format from the creators of OGG Vorbis, which is called Opus, which I haven't found better or worse than the other two. But more encoders are supporting that.
One thing to watch out for with OGG files: must use "quality" setting as suggested by "oggenc" tool from the OGG Vorbis utilities. Because CBR mode is very slow, wherever it is offered. My first OGG Vorbis encoder was from an early version of MAGIX Music Maker but it only encoded in CBR, it sucked. It might have been faster to play back the song than to have it exported to OGG. There used to be devices that supported OGG format like a Sandisk portable player that had bad battery life unfortunately. But MP3 and WMA are still more widely supported. Some of those Chinese speakers only support WAV and WMA besides MP3.
The WMA on the first iteration of Windows Media Player on WindowsXP was pretty good too, and it had lossy and lossless modes but of course M$ could change the format of it. M4A is also proprietary, it's surprising those could be created away from iTunes program.