MP3s, Classical Music, Quality
ACD at Sounds and Fury is pissed about compression, and bloggers putting up iPod playlists. I think he’s being way too much of an audiophile.
While over-compressed music sounds pretty horrid - especially classical with all it’s acoustic variations and nuances - my MP3s at 192Kbps sound rather good on my non-iPod, iPod (if you see what I mean). When there’s a crazily big tutti going on it can occasionally get a bit hairy, but in general I can actually hear way more subtleties compared to listening to the original CD on the stereo. Of course, this is using a replacement
And if you really can’t stand MP3s, you can always encode in FLAC, which is lossless.
What I genuinely do not understand the animosity toward bloggers who put up their current playlists. I seriously don’t think it’s being done in a effort to look cool, but actually because they like to share their listening preferences. If I didn’t have my portable audio capabilities (what a very futuristic robot I am) I’d be listening to two or three hours less classical music a day, and that would make me sad.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
You wrote: “What I genuinely do not understand the animosity toward bloggers who put up their current playlists.”
No such animosity from me.
None whatsoever.
You need to read more carefully.
ACD
August 9th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
When most people use the term “mp3,” they don’t realize that there are quite a few “mp3″s. I don’t recall at the moment how many are in general use, but “mp3″ is just a term for a certain method of encoding digital sound; it can be done at various levels of “lossiness.” The problem, of course, is that the less “losing” that takes place, the more bits the resulting file takes, and the smaller is the number of pieces that can be put on a hard disk or flash memory of a given size.
As you say, FLAC is a lossless coding system, and there are a number of others that are more often used on Apple equipment. They are as good as a CD (and of course there is the old argument between CD and LP, digital vs. analog, proponents), but take up a lot more space.
As to what is a “good” or “bad” digitization of music, it’s really a matter of individual taste. Whatever a particular individual likes is what is best for that individual. The thing to remember is that no method of recording, digital or analog, is as good as being at a live performance, just as no photograph is as good as being at the actual scene.
August 10th, 2007 at 9:07 am
You wrote that you have your MP3s “at 192Kbps” How do I change that on mine? I use the software that it came with, and I don’t know what rate it uses when it rips files from my CDs. Is there a program I can download that lets me adjust the quality of the MP3?
Thanks,
Andy
August 10th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
iTunes gives you plenty of choices, including lossless (which is what you want for CDs, unless you are pressed for hard disk space).
August 10th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
ACD:
That’s good! I must be misunderstanding what you mean. I blame physics for destroying my language comprehension abilities.
Jon:
You’re right, It definitely comes down to how much one can tolerate in the end, I think for the average user 192Kbps is better than tolerable (although if there were ten times as much space on my devices I’d be storing everything as lossless…)
Andy:
Where you change the settings varies upon the program that you use to rip CDs with, but it’s always done within the program. Looking for a menu item called Preferences or Settings would probably lead you to the right place.