Thread: Music Codecs, And Bitrates

The difference is small, but differnet types of music are effected differently.
I found that symphonic classical music is the most sensitive. However nowdays I suffer from quite a sever hearing loss, and I doubt I can tell the difference :-|

if you use better than decent studio monitor headphones you'll be sure to hear a difference.
Beyerdynamic DT 880

The difference is bigger in classical music as said. AAC is the best codec, it's become the standard. Use iTunes.

for personal use, 128 - 192 is all you really need (depending on the type of music, as already mentioned)
step outside of personal use though, and you're going to need higher quality

btw, if this is for a portable player, stick to mp3 if you can
any of the more advanced codecs will zap your battery life in no time

Originally Posted by SolSkye

if you use better than decent studio monitor headphones you'll be sure to hear a difference.
Beyerdynamic DT 880
[/b]

That might be it as well - I use these Sony in-ear conic ear bud things. Not the greatest, but certainly better the average iPod earbuds.

Originally Posted by SolSkye

The difference is bigger in classical music as said. AAC is the best codec, it's become the standard. Use iTunes.[/b]

Actually I just rid myself of iTunes today - I was sick of the library, the slow and crashy program itself, and the iPod's generic firmware. I now use Rockbox.

Originally Posted by SolSkye

for personal use, 128 - 192 is all you really need (depending on the type of music, as already mentioned)
step outside of personal use though, and you're going to need higher quality

btw, if this is for a portable player, stick to mp3 if you can
any of the more advanced codecs will zap your battery life in no time[/b]

Yeah, I've always stayed loyal to mp3. A few years ago I had an episode in which I ripped everything in .wma, but luckily I'm over that

Originally Posted by ninja9578

The difference is bigger in classical music as said. AAC is the best codec, it's become the standard. Use iTunes.[/b]

Best? In what sense? Size? Quality? Quality / size? Then how do you measure the quality? ("best" is subjective in this case.)

And yes, the difference between MP3@192kbps and FLAC is probably as good as always eaten up by the headphones. (If you haven't spent more on the headphones than on the storage for the files then either you have a really big storage-setup or too cheap headphones.)

Size and quality. They are about the same size but offer much higher quality (espeically at low bitrates) and they are scalable up to lossless (not sure how size compares to FLAC or Apple Lossless though) I had a small hard drive so use lossy encodings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audi...ements_over_MP3

If iTunes is buggy then I guess I wouldn't use it either. Apple and Microsoft have pretty bad reps at macing software ofr each other. When I used a PC I remembered that iTunes ran fine, but Quicktime kept crashing. But it's not all Apple's fault, MS Office crashes all the time too.

I think people make bitrates more important than they seem. I can't tell the difference between a lossless rip and a 128 bit mp4, but then again I have those plugs that came with my ipod.

I notice the biggest differences when listening to my own music. The reason for that is I'm so intimately familiar with every tiny production detail.

The bitrate difference seems to me to squash out a lot of the dynamic changes - compresses the music. If you are used to hearing your music on the radio, they do that as a matter of course anyway, so you're hearing what you expect.

The other thing are the really subtle details, which ironically are the things I end up spending the vast majority of time on. One of these is working to carve out a sonic "space" for each thing, where the frequency ranges of each of the elements are not overlapping too much - in other words, letting each element clearly dominate one area. Lower bitrates seem to even things back out again, changing the EQ and kind of mushing things together.

Listen to the uncompressed song and then the compressed song, on the same speakers or headphones or whatever. Notice how easy it is to pick out the individual elements in the original, then try doing the same with lower and lower bitrates. You'll see what I'm talking about. (This quality is often referred to as "transparency".)

It all depends on what you expect, really. I'll often do a low bitrate "free release" version of a song, that to me sounds truly crippled... but others can't tell the difference between it and the wonderful, open, rich and subtle original.

HTH

Actually I've never heard a difference, I mostly get whatever I can find (as long as it's not WMA/WAV, durr) and it's usually perfect.