[bigshot]

flac is a pita for mac folks. I don't want to have to download and convert to apple lossless. If it was mp3, I just hit the link and it plays. Sorry, yes I AM lazy.

 

[ferday]

Lol I don't blame you. I convert a lot because I keep getting iTunes cards, I use JRiver / foobar which will play any format, but I prefer flac/mp3 as I'm a PC guy

 

[brhfl]

  I think it would have been much more useful to have the actual MP3s at 1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and 5000. I don't think anyone cares to do DBT with these. We're more interested in the degree of degradation in a range of generations.
 
For instance, I posted a track that had been re-encoded 10 times in AAC 256. I would be interested to hear how 10 times in MP3 320 compares.
 
Also, which MP3 encoder were you using, Frauenhofer or LAME? That makes a BIG difference.

If you're trying to determine at what point you actually notice degradation, then I do think it's useful to not know ahead of time which is which. I sure wouldn't trust myself listening when I knew, oh this is 5 and this is 50, if I'm really trying to determine at what point it becomes an issue.
 
Also, there is no 10 times in MP3 320 here - as was explained, each run was back and forth M4A - MP3. It's trivial to script such a thing, of course, but that's not what this was.
 
XLD uses LAME for MP3. I haven't tested this myself, but I've heard the gap is much, much narrower these days between the two encoders. 
 
I'll try to get the MP3 up on its own tonight for the lazy folks (

), my line of thinking (as primarily a Mac user) is that FLAC is less of a hassle on a Mac than ALAC is on Win & *nix. I've just been shuffling a lot of crap around on my computer the past week or so.

 

[cjl]

  flac is a pita for mac folks. I don't want to have to download and convert to apple lossless. If it was mp3, I just hit the link and it plays. Sorry, yes I AM lazy.

As I've mentioned to you before, VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html) works on macs, and it is free and it will play pretty much every format under the sun (including flac).

 

[ab initio]

  If you're trying to determine at what point you actually notice degradation, then I do think it's useful to not know ahead of time which is which. I sure wouldn't trust myself listening when I knew, oh this is 5 and this is 50, if I'm really trying to determine at what point it becomes an issue.
 
Also, there is no 10 times in MP3 320 here - as was explained, each run was back and forth M4A - MP3. It's trivial to script such a thing, of course, but that's not what this was.
 
XLD uses LAME for MP3. I haven't tested this myself, but I've heard the gap is much, much narrower these days between the two encoders. 
 
I'll try to get the MP3 up on its own tonight for the lazy folks (

), my line of thinking (as primarily a Mac user) is that FLAC is less of a hassle on a Mac than ALAC is on Win & *nix. I've just been shuffling a lot of crap around on my computer the past week or so.

 
In other words, "Go FLAC yourself!"

 
Cheers

 

[castleofargh]

  In other words, "Go FLAC yourself!"

 
Cheers

so that's what they were saying all the time in battlestar gallactica

 

[bigshot]

  As I've mentioned to you before, VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html) works on macs, and it is free and it will play pretty much every format under the sun (including flac).

 
I am lazy. I want to click on a link and have the MP3 play. I'm not interested in downloading and transcoding. If it was already an MP3, I have no idea why anyone would change it into something else.

 

[bigshot]

  If you're trying to determine at what point you actually notice degradation, then I do think it's useful to not know ahead of time which is which. I sure wouldn't trust myself listening when I knew, oh this is 5 and this is 50, if I'm really trying to determine at what point it becomes an issue.

 
If it's 50, I'm not going to care because I don't see myself every transcoding something 50 times. 5 maybe. 50 never.
 
LAME and Frauenhofer are two different animals entirely.
 
It really doesn't matter because I use AAC 256 VBR and I know that ten generations of that make no significant difference. I'm only interested in where the rubber hits the road. I'll leave the t crossing and i dotting to others.

 

[brhfl]

   
I am lazy. I want to click on a link and have the MP3 play. I'm not interested in downloading and transcoding. If it was already an MP3, I have no idea why anyone would change it into something else.

You do have an idea, because I told you. Had you done this, you would have had different goals, but that shouldn't make it some unfathomable mystery. 
 
And of course LAME and Fraunhofer are different. But there have been tests by others that have shown the recent iterations of Fraunhofer to be on par with LAME. I haven't compared them recently myself, as I don't bother with lossy audio in a situation where bandwidth and storage are, for practical purposes, unconstrained, but I'm perfectly willing to believe the team in charge of the encoder is capable of bringing it up to speed with the competition.

 

[bigshot]

As I understand it Frauenhofer is Frauenhofer. That codec is the same as it was when it was created back in the earliest days of MP3s. LAME is the update on Frauenhofer, and AAC is a totally new format altogether (MP4).
 
I've done tests with iTunes and the MP3s that it produces are not as good as LAME. I think iTunes uses Frauenhofer for MP3 encoding. The codec you choose is just as important as the bitrate.

 

[brhfl]

  As I understand it Frauenhofer is Frauenhofer. That codec is the same as it was when it was created back in the earliest days of MP3s. LAME is the update on Frauenhofer, and AAC is a totally new format altogether (MP4).
 
I've done tests with iTunes and the MP3s that it produces are not as good as LAME. I think iTunes uses Frauenhofer for MP3 encoding. The codec you choose is just as important as the bitrate.

MP3 was, of course, a part of MPEG, but the Fraunhofer Institute was responsible for separating out the audio layer as its own standalone format, and creating the first MP3 encoder (L3enc - a cool couple hundred bucks or so would unlock the ability to go full throttle to 320kbps!). Fraunhofer continues to develop their own MP3 encoder, and licenses it for commercial applications and embedded solutions.
 
LAME is not an update to Fraunhofer. LAME is to MP3 what Linux is to Unix - a free, open source implementation of a product that was, at the time, a pricy license from a giant. Despite the fact that it's an original implementation based off of the MPEG sources, Fraunhofer still controls who-knows-how-many patents on MP3, a key reason why LAME (Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder) has attempted to distance themselves from that which is 'officially' MP3, while remaining compatible. The format itself is not terribly flexible, and is taken from MPEG. Where there is room for differentiation, and where the LAME team had to do their own work (unable to source what Fraunhofer was doing) was in the psychoacoustic modeling process, which leads to what we see (hear) as a difference in encoder capability. 
 
Fraunhofer also develops commonly used commercial encoders for AAC, among other formats. Despite the fact that AAC (which should not be confused with M4A/MP4, as such is merely a container, capable of holding various codecs) is an entirely different codec, it was also largely developed by and is largely controlled by Fraunhofer. 

 

[bigshot]

My point was Frauenhofer is Frauenhofer. If I pull out a fifteen year old Mac with a fifteen year old copy of iTunes, the MP3 codec is going to be the exact same one that is in a brand new Mac. Frauenhofer as a company does a lot of things and has a bunch of different codecs for different purposes. But the plain vanilla Frauenhofer MP3 codec is the same as it's always been. Other codecs are more up to date and better than the standard Frauenhofer MP3 codec.
 
I can guarantee you that multiple generations of Frauenhofer would yield different results than the same bitrate and the same number of generations with LAME or AAC. They are definitely not all the same.

 

[brhfl]

My point is that that is not correct. Fraunhofer continues to develop and license new versions of their MP3 encoder (to Apple, MS, Sonnex...), just as the LAME team does. Well, not just as, as Fraunhofer's priority is clearly AAC and their various surround formats, but it is not fixed at L3enc version one or whatever. This is why people who have previously panned the encoder in iTunes have found it to be on par with LAME in more recent versions. 

 

[castleofargh]

interesting, I thought like bigshot(probably saw it on some wiki page).

 

[brhfl]

  interesting, I thought like bigshot(probably saw it on some wiki page).

Fraunhofer is, unfortunately, very secretive about what they do, and as far as their encoder is concerned, they only deal with a handful of companies directly. What seems to be true is that they don't update often (certainly not as often as the LAME folks do), but based on peoples' experiences with iTunes versioning, and my and others' experiences with Sonnox (which is slightly more up-front about codec information), we're not dealing with the same encoder as a decade ago. It's also possible that the psychoacoustic modeling may be up to the customer to implement if they so choose, but the end result would be the same. All I know is that folks seem much more pleased with iTunes MP3 output now, compared to LAME, than they were several versions ago. I haven't put any effort into directly comparing myself, as I don't really care. However, scripting up such a thing would be trivial and could prove entertaining. I just think that for anyone dealing with MP3s, who hasn't compared the two in a while, it's worth doing again (just as basing an opinion on LAME from 15 years ago would not be a great idea). 
 
Regardless - my experiment used XLD in CLI mode as the interface, and XLD uses LAME.