The end of the CD era - 2013?

aaronk wrote: As a side note, I recently exchanged emails with mainrhythm about mp3 compression, and my conclusion is that LAME mp3 sounds better than Fraunhofer.

They do, I was susprised to find out. I thought a 320 mp3 is a 320 mp3 is a 320 mp3. Not so. I recently encoded the well-known "killer sample" of the song "Show Me Your Spine," and while I was able to differentiate between the .wav file and the MP3 100% of the time with Foobar's ABX fetaure on all the files, there were FAR fewer artifacts with LAME at 320 than there were with iTunes's MP3 encoer or the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder.

In fact, I would say the LAME MP3 was close to transparent, although once I idenitfied WHERE the artifact was, I could ID it every time.

One tip I found: if you're encoding at a flat bitrate rather than with LAME's variable bitrate encoder, do NOT use a quality setting in your command line (i.e., q7, q3, q0, etc.) It seems that these quality settings are ONLY designed to work with the variable bitrate feature and will actually make a straight-bitrate MP3 sound WORSE.

Apparently this is a bug that has been known about for some time, but I experienced it firsthand while experimenting with the "Show Me Your Spine" sample.

Another tip: If you want, you can set a minimum bitrate with LAME on the variable bitrate files. I use LAME V0, the highest VBR (variable bitrate) setting, but I want my mono files to be a flat 256kb so they will match any I bought online, such as some mono Digital 45s that have never been made available in lossless. (If you just use V0, mono files will be around 170kb.) Just enter BOTH settings in the commandline and it will give you V0 with the minimum bitrate specified. For example, my LAME commandline in Foobar is simply: -b256 -V 0 - %d

Edited by Brian W.

aaronk wrote: Sadly, though, most programmers and music directors can't hear the different between wav and mp3 (people on this board excluded), so even if they load the songs in as wav files, that doesn't mean the files they use are all lossless to begin with.

Don't even get me going! I had a PD once who pretty much built his on-air library from stuff he'd downloaded from the old Napster...lots of badly encoded 128K (or worse) mp3's. Ugh! In most cases he couldn't hear the difference, and on those he could his attitude was "it's better than not having the song". Sigh. He's out of the biz now.

crapfromthepast wrote: I'm usually a stickler for sound quality, but I think 320 kbps mp3s may work OK for radio. We have a 256 kbps live stream, so there won't be much of a difference between flac and 320 kbps for the stream listeners. And no one will notice over our FM signal.

Most of the stuff that's serviced to radio via download is 320k mp3 anyway, and you really can't tell the difference on an FM. Just beware of cascading codecs though as far as streams go...especially if there are digital processing devices in the airchain. Every time the audio goes thru a D-A (or A-D) conversion more crud creeps in.

Hykker wrote: Most of the stuff that's serviced to radio via download is 320k mp3 anyway, and you really can't tell the difference on an FM. Just beware of cascading codecs though as far as streams go...especially if there are digital processing devices in the airchain. Every time the audio goes thru a D-A (or A-D) conversion more crud creeps in.

I'm glad to see that many tracks are being serviced as wav files now, too.
TM Studios even requires the label to provide a wav file before they will
service it on their discs. The problem, though, is that they don't really
check to see if the wav file may have started as an mp3. After all, they
service hundreds of tracks each month, so it would be impossible to put
that kind of quality control in place. There are many songs on their discs,
as I've mentioned in other posts, that started out as lossy files.

As far as the mp3s go, they are probably also using the iTunes codec or
some other inferior codec. I've analyzed them with both my ears and the
spectral analysis on Cool Edit Pro, and they don't sound or look as good
as what I can create with the LAME codec.

NightAire wrote: iTunes isn't using mp3 at all; they're using some version of AAC or AAC+.

Which has better quality for digital downloads - iTunes or Amazon? (I think Amazon digital is sometimes referred to as Amazon-mp3? Is it really mp3 still or is it also this "AAC" thing?)

Edited by EdisonLite

NightAire wrote: iTunes isn't using mp3 at all; they're using some version of AAC or AAC+.

I think Aaron was referring to files that he encodes with iTunes MP3 encoder himself, which I've read is their custom version of the old Xing MP3 encoder. Whatever it is, it's shite compared to LAME. Didn't believe that until I compared them myself. But none of them are as good as AAC, which is the only compressed format I tried (MP3, AAC, and WMA) that could handle the above-mentioned "Show Me Your Spine" killer sample with no artifacts at all.

Edited by Brian W.