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Bit Rate of Your MP3's?

post #1 of 70
12/15/06 at 1:25am
Thread Starter 
Just curious, I'm in the process of re-ripping all my CD's to 320 KBPS. The 128 KBPS just wasn't cutting it anymore... and with my new 80 Gig IPod and my Etymotic ER4P headphones coming, I want to take advantage of what they can offer.

What about you?
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post #2 of 70
12/15/06 at 1:37am
ALAC for me
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post #3 of 70
12/15/06 at 1:54am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sean.Perrin View Post
Just curious, I'm in the process of re-ripping all my CD's to 320 KBPS. The 128 KBPS just wasn't cutting it anymore... and with my new 80 Gig IPod and my Etymotic ER4P headphones coming, I want to take advantage of what they can offer.

What about you?

My opinion is that on a portable player most people aren't going to hear a difference in most popular music between high-bitrate .mp3 and lossless. I especially believe this if you're not going to be using the line-out > amp. I personally use LAME encoded vbr .mp3s with the bitrate averaging above 224kb/s. This may even be overkill, but it saves enough space for me to be happy for now. FWIW, I use a ZVM and Shure E4s/KSC-75s on the go. I don't carry an amp because I think it's too much to carry around for portable use.

I've seen people here claim they can hear a difference between even 320kb/s .mp3 and lossless on a portable player. I don't know if that's possible or not, but I suspect that they might be fooling themselves.

If you want you can use foobar2k to test yourself to see if you can here a difference through your sound card.
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post #4 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:06am
192. I feel it is the best compromise of sound vs space. Can't really tell much difference between 192 and 320, or maybe I just don't care. When I am listening on my computer I am usually doing something else and not really being critical of the quality, but 128's sound like ****.
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post #5 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:07am
FLAC. If I damage/lose one of my discs, I want it back in the exact same condition it came to me.
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post #6 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:28am
I initially burned everything in 128 and came to regret it. Therefore, I re-burned everything in WMA Lossless.

I decided I wanted to archive in lossless for transcoding down the road. I really do not want to burn my 1300+ CDs ever again. Luckily, I have a changer that will batch 200 at a time, but it is still a pain to get all those CDs out.
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post #7 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:31am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by uofmtiger View Post
I initially burned everything in 128 and came to regret it. Therefore, I re-burned everything in WMA Lossless.

I decided I wanted to archive in lossless for transcoding down the road. I really do not want to burn my 1300+ CDs ever again. Luckily, I have a changer that will batch 200 at a time, but it is still a pain to get all those CDs out.
1300... wow.

Lucky you have that burner though.

128 IS ****... the few of my 400 i have burned from 128 to 320 sound CONSIDERABLY better.

It will be a few month long process for me though I assume, I don't have weeks to sit here on end and burn 400 CDs one at a time.
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post #8 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:33am
lame224abr

128cbr might be crap for audio, but for movies its tolerable for me. beside if the song is consist of one single instrument, its not bad either. or if its a very bad recorded cd.

it have to be base on the quality and demand of the original recording, and how to codec capable of containing it.
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post #9 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:44am
On the computer all my music is Apple Lossless, but for the iPod I keep a second copy (using Doug's scripts Lossless-to-AAC Workflow) in 192 AAC which is more than good enough for portable listening on my Ety ER-6, IMO.

--Chris
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post #10 of 70
12/15/06 at 2:57am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sean.Perrin View Post
1300... wow.

Lucky you have that burner though.

128 IS ****... the few of my 400 i have burned from 128 to 320 sound CONSIDERABLY better.

It will be a few month long process for me though I assume, I don't have weeks to sit here on end and burn 400 CDs one at a time.
Yep! Unfortunately, I was way ahead of the curve and everything I read back then said 128 was CD quality..which was obviously BS. It took a few months to get everything on my computer and I decided in the last year I wanted to burn everything again for better sound quality that I could play back with assorted media players around the house. I realize that 320kbps is very good and I could probably not be able to tell a difference...but, for peace of mind, I wanted lossless so I would (hopefully) not have to go through the process again. Even with the changer it took 2 weeks because it takes it a long time to burn 200 while gathering album info.

My point being that lossless is good for transcoding and archiving. For mp3 players, something less than lossless is okay since it is usually just background music for something else. I mainly listen to Yahoo Music Unlimited on my Creative mp3 player, so I get 192Kbps WMA which is livable.

However, in my car, I can play back FLAC and I will transcode all of my WMA lossless files into FLAC for backup and for the car (Music Keg) in the next month. 128 sounds awful on my car stereo.
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post #11 of 70
12/15/06 at 3:33am
The majority of it is 192kbps. I don't have a DAP, and that's always been sufficient for listening at my PC.

I have the odd FLAC set for classical, but I'm not motivated to make a complete lossless archive of my CDs. I wouldn't have the HD space even if I were.
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post #12 of 70
12/15/06 at 3:47am
98% of em were imported @ LAME 320kbps

not ready to take the Lossless leap (yet.)
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post #13 of 70
12/15/06 at 4:02am
My Rio Karma running in "limp" mode now with dying HDD. So I voted for 160kbps and below because I have all 128kps running on my DAP. Smaller files runs okay with my dying hdd. Of course on my PC I have FLAC archive ready to be synched when I receive my 60GB Hitachi HDD fooo!!!
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post #14 of 70
12/15/06 at 4:11am
I don't get why people are still using CBR.
VBR has every benefit over CBR except maybe minor quirks like slightly less battery life on portable players or something, but I'd say there's not much use for anything other than V2 or V0 mp3 nowadays, with such a good compression algorithm going on.
The only step up from V0 is lossless.
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post #15 of 70
12/15/06 at 4:11am
so where's the multiple option option? I rip everything to lossless and then transcode using the lame preset extreme for use with the mp3 player.
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