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Compressing stereo CDs to AAC mono?

post #1 of 9
2/13/10 at 8:12pm
Thread Starter 
Most of my Coltrane collection uses hard L/R panning and I find it hard to listen to with headphones. I store all music on my computer using 256 VBR AAC. I figured I could just compress those problematic CDs by setting the channels to MONO. Now when I rip a CD the bitrate reads 160 VBR AAC. Why is that? Is the quality different?

Thank you.
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post #2 of 9
2/13/10 at 8:16pm
FAIL
Get Foobar2000 and the crossfeed plugin.
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post #3 of 9
2/14/10 at 12:37am
crossfeed is the key to making those hard panned tracks easier to listen to on headphones without going to the extreme of ripping to mono


also mono requires less bitrate to get the same level of sound quality from compressed formats
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post #4 of 9
2/14/10 at 3:52am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by 3602 View Post
FAIL
shut up.

Quote:
Originally Posted by necropimp View Post
crossfeed is the key to making those hard panned tracks easier to listen to on headphones without going to the extreme of ripping to mono


also mono requires less bitrate to get the same level of sound quality from compressed formats
without going to the extreme? i'm not following you.

also i'm sorry for posting this in the lounge i meant to post this in sound science
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post #5 of 9
2/14/10 at 4:19am
Most media players have crossfeed plug-ins available that allow you to tailor the stereo imaging to your preference. Encoding in mono is going to the extreme since you're bound to lose some detail.

On another interesting note, most lossy codecs encode in joint stereo, meaning they use a mono signal and a difference signal used to reconstruct stereo.
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post #6 of 9
2/14/10 at 4:51am
Quote:
Originally Posted by salannelson View Post
shut up.
don't get your knickers in a knot

Quote:
Originally Posted by salannelson View Post
without going to the extreme? i'm not following you.

also i'm sorry for posting this in the lounge i meant to post this in sound science
ripping to mono is an extreme way to fix the panning issues. instead, it is possible to use a crossfeed plugin to allow a certain percentage of the left channel to bleed into the right, and vice versa. this way, hard panning will be mellowed out, without destroying the soundstage
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post #7 of 9
2/14/10 at 11:58am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by El_Doug View Post
don't get your knickers in a knot



ripping to mono is an extreme way to fix the panning issues. instead, it is possible to use a crossfeed plugin to allow a certain percentage of the left channel to bleed into the right, and vice versa. this way, hard panning will be mellowed out, without destroying the soundstage
i really hate it when people say fail.

ok that makes sense now. thank you. how do i go about ripping a CD with "crossfeed"? i looked on foobar's website but i couldn't find a plugin
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post #8 of 9
2/14/10 at 1:26pm
Naive Software

Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural DSP
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post #9 of 9
2/14/10 at 2:33pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by anetode View Post
thank you kindly.
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