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so if I notice a slight difference on a hifi deck, it might be noticeable to someone else on PC speakers.

I think there was a typo there. I reckon he meant to say that you might not be able to hear the same difference on PC speakers. As the fidelity is less, that makes perfect sense.

My original post way up the chain was mainly because I've heard so many people compare an mp3 on their PC speakers/headphones through an on-board soundcard to a CD played on their HiFi. That's just bad science.

If you care that much about music, then why not just listen to CD's or pure WAV form? Why mess with lossy compression at all?

Because when it's done properly, the "lossy" issue is not a problem, as you will have already decided what your minimum requirements are. I use the r3mix mp3 encoder preset (site seems to be down, very odd), and I get great results through my AWE64 soundcard hooked up to a separates system.

The open-source cd -> mp3 ripper/encoder CDex has an encoder option to use this quality preset. Ideal.

Oh yeah, and for everybody who's been bitching about what Apple introduced today, you're insane. I've spent the last few hours trying out the service and it rocks! I don't think 99 cents is too expensive when I can assemble the equivalent of a CD single for less than the price of buying one or when the full album price is less than or equal to what I'd pay for the physical copy. Add to that tracks that you CAN'T get on CD from bands like U2 and other popular acts and I'd say you have a winner. The service is easy to use and provides a good balance between fair use and content owner concerns. My guess is that Apple has a big hit on their hands. Just wait for Steve to announce the first week, month or whatever numbers.

Finally, everyone knows AAC is lossy, but if you can't hear what's lost (like with those --r3mix LAME MP3's) who cares? If you can't distinguish it from a CD in a double blind test then it's as good as the CD. So, like I asked in the beginning, any info on this? Here's some intelligent discussion on the topic, but no answers.

For the unenlightened, click here to find out about r3mix.

Thanks!

It's a good site if you're into MP3. It's out of date now, as the author stopped updating last year sometime, but it's still a valuable resource and a great start on learning how to encode superior-quality MP3s.

Sounds like your getting shitty mp3 files. If you get properly made ones at a correct bitrate there is no differance between the cd version and the mp3 version. Check out http://www.r3mix.net/ for more information, including graphs and results of a test that was done with some audiophiles and some expensive hardware.

Even 256kbps mp3s are noticeably worse than CDs when listening to certain types of music.

300 "audiophiles" disagree with you.

I don't see a need for lossless compression. LAME MP3 with the r3mix preset sounds perfect to me, and anyone who thinks that they can tell a difference between that and CD audio is only saying that to impress people.

And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.

The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.

mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.

However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.

If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!

I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.

That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.

At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.

And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.

I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.

Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction? ;-)

And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.

I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.

Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!

Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.

If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.

Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!

Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.

I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?

It really depends on the bitrate. I am an audiophile, and I think I have quite sensitive ears, I beleive. However, at mid-level and beyond bitrates (i.e, 192-256 for mp3), I can't hear a difference between ogg's and LAME or new Fraunhofer-ripped mp3s.

Also, most times, I get comparable filesizes between OGG and mp3-vbr encoding. mp3-cbr is pretty much a waste of time (read some of r3mix's articles).

However, the main advantage to ogg's is that they have no patents attached.

As several other posters have pointed out, this guy is full of shit. He reminds me of the sort of people who call in to the Art Bell show.

If anything, my hearing has gotten better since I started listening to MP3s. I remember when I first started encoding my CDs, I couldn't tell the difference between 128kb CBR MP3s and the CD source. I can't even fathom how I was able to believe that; I encode everything with LAME's r3mix preset now.

This guy is right, the guy above is wrong. For more information see the "Myths" section on r3mix

Pops and clicks, to my knowledge, are the result of poor ripping generally. Could be the ripper software, a cheap or dying CD drive, or just a really scratched-up source CD.

If you have the original CDs, re-rip them with a quality ripper/encoder pair. On Windows, I'd personally recommend Exact Audio Copy (postcardware, IIRC, that does a really nice job of error correction) and LAME (check r3mix.net for dl URLs). If you're on Linux, CDParanoia (also maintained by Xiph, apparently) is a great ripper that does a lot of error checking, and LAME is also available for encoding.

(You do have the original CDs, right? :)

256-kbit is a tad excessive. You should be using VBR, such as the r3mix preset. I've never seen any mp3 files with a better quality/size ratio than those encoded with it. Encoders/rippers such as CDex (windows) and LAME support it. Basically it's a "shortcut" to a whole load of command-line switches that have been through blind listening tests.

Try E-Music. It sounds like the future, unlimited downloads of uncrippled mp3s for a monthly fee. I've not tried them yet, but the only downside I can see is that the music is 128 kbit CBR files; I'd have prefered VBR hoving around the 128-192 range e.g. r3mix preset.

As for content, I've found at least 20 albums I would download imediatly in the short time I've looked at the site. However, I don't listen to mainstream music, so if you are looking for Britney, you might do well elsewhere.

The grand thing about DVDs and CDs is that they are the same size and work of reasonably similar technologies, at least similar enough to integrate into a single device. The problem with MD is that it's size is unconventional (what with the "boxy thing" that they are in like the earlier Mac CDROMs), this is why I personally I wouldn't go for MD again (I had one, it got stolen).

Next time I think I'm going to go for a player that can play VBR (Variable Bit Rate) (Specifically -APS) MP3s from half-size CDRs. My personal favourite is <plug> this one </plug>.

Eh? No way! Any normal person can tell the difference between 128k and CD quality on a stereo with real speakers. On my walkman, even. I dare you to burn a CD with a 128k track and a WAV rip of the same track and tell me you can't hear the difference. Sure, some parts will sound fine, until your drums and bass turn to mush during the fast part of the song.

Check out the "Quality" page of R3mix.net for a little more information.

>We did a blindfold test. I could hear the difference in microphone cables. Line level cables are harder but at least 80% of the class still got it.

EE says that's highly unlikely, unless you were comparing something like balanced vs. unbalanced cables. I really, really, really doubt that a reasonbly cheap Mic cable (not the absolute bottom barrel) and an expensive Mic cable have anything different other than durability (I think a 2-input summing/inverting Oscilloscope could show there's no difference). But, in the home stereo world, you don't get balanced, so you need to stick with decent quality cables.

If you're really worried, use RG-6 satellite cable for home stereo stuff. Cheap, easy to get ahold of, and if the quality is good enough to carry 1 GHz 100 ft., 20 kHz is not going to be a problem.

>Furthermore you can hear the difference between minidisc and CD and MP3.

Go here and read it. 320 kbps MP3 (which is similar to MD for recording time) is better, bar none, when coupled with a decent encoder and decoder. It actually picks up more of the (admittedly useless) frequencies that the MD doesn't.

>Furthermore you can hear the difference between a 2 million dollar Sony Oxford and a Behringer and an SSL.

Can't fault you there. But most people don't have a 2 million dollar budget.

>If you could not tell a difference professional studios would just use shit cables.

No they wouldn't. In a professional studio, cables get stepped on, ends crushed, and they get yanked out of the sockets by the cable. They need the durability that a good cable brings. Not to mention that you're looking at 100ft.+ runs -- you don't want a cable with high resistance. They don't need a cable that goes flaky the fist time the audio engineer rolls his chair over it.

>There is a difference its just that for some electrical applications the difference is less.

Seriously, electrical applications (by which I'll assume all electronic applications) often work in the Ghz range. Even a $100/ft. Balanced XLR cord won't handle that, nosiree.

But audio frequencies aren't even within a factor of 100 of that.

>Use good cables for speakers

Use 16 or (if you can find it and have high-current speakers/stereos) 14 AWG lamp cord for speakers. Nice and flexible, and unless you run it parallel with your fluorescent light ballasts/power cables, very clean sound.

>Use pretty good cables for line level signals and you should be ok.

Of any signals, line level reqiures the best cables. We're talking less than 1V signal level in some applications. Thin, crappy cable will not do.

Just my 2 cents.

I don't have to worry about crappy encoding.

I don't have to worry about crappy encoding.

"what I really think is the problem is quicktime/iTunes which cant deal with variable bit rate codec's so playing them on the mac is a no no"

wow, you must have really good ears to be able to distinguish 256kbps lame mp3s from the original. i haven't heard much of itunes, but so far, nitrane (winamps's mp3 decoder since 2.71) sounds the best to my ear (with lame). try a different lame encoder, like the newest one that's been around for a while (as in ~1mo longer than the latest winamp), and see how that goes. also try using lames's r3mix settings. variable bitrate is what makes mp3 (and ogg) great; those artifacts that can't be filtered out at lower bitrates just use more space as needed (don't use average bitrate as it ruins more difficult tracks). better yet, use ogg vorbis, which seems to have been accepted universally as superior to mp3 regardless of its encoder.

>i took the rca outputs from my turntables and got a rca to 1/8th of an inch (the walkman sized headphone plug) converter and stuck that into the line in on my soundcard (a SB Live) then i fired up goldwave and set it to record the input and recorded it at the highest level possible.

Uh, just a *big* suggestion here -- you really must use an RIAA-curve biased phono preamp between the record player and the computer's line in (maybe you did that and I didn't notice -- sorry).

That way it'll sound like it should (less bright, for instance) and you won't need to jack up the input to full.

You might want to re-rip those albums anyways. The XING encoder (click on Analysis) has a serious bug that limits much of any kind of serious quality increase past 128 kbps mp3.

"I'd also expect quality too, which is certainly something that's lacking on the P2P networks."

Exactly, and that is why I'll be buying CDs for a long time yet. I cannot stand the poor quality of the MP3s found on all the P2P networks.

I use music for the Internet souly for previewing, and seeing if it's worth buying. The only time I will 'steal' music is when I can borrow the original from a friend and rip it myself, and even then I generally end up buying them anyway.

Popping crap and poor encoding will not do. Give me lame --r3mix or give me nothing.

Ditto on the r3mix preset, VBR is where it's at. Check it out at the site here

As soon as you hook an 'MP3 Player' up to a quality playback system (somthing better than your PC speakers)

What makes you think that my sound card isn't plugged into a medium-high-end receiver and speakers?

it become obvious that it's 'way worse' not 'way better.'

NO. Tests performed by r3mix show that 192 kbps LAME encoded audio is transparent to the human ear. Your concept of "mp3" seems to be stuck at "128 kbps encoded with MusicTrash Jukebox".

lossy:

Conversion of the original analog sounds into 44.1 kHz stereo 16-bit linear PCM is itself lossy. Even conversion into 2.8 MHz stereo 1-bit PCM (Sony Super Audio CD) is lossy. It's a matter of how much loss you are willing to accept. For instance, the median *NSYNC fan wouldn't care if her copy of her favorite song was 64 kbps mono MP3.

20GB is cool, but 60GB would rock!

But remember, it doesn't need to keep a copy of the operating system and applications on the same drive, so you gain 5-10 GB right there vs. a PC solution.

Anyway, how many CDs do you have? At 192,000 bits per second (which has been shown to be transparent for stereo audio, even on good speakers), 20 metric GB equals 160 billion bits equals 833,333 seconds, or 231 hours. Assuming each CD is one hour long, I infer that you must have a huge collection. How big is it?

lame --r3mix

I think you should look into LAME's --r3mix preset.

In my experience, it's as efficient at the balance between quality and filesize as mp3 gets.

When speakers have the ability to playback all those frequencies clearly the ear can easily hear the difference between analogue/44.1kHz/MP3

Not when the ear has a bandpass filter centered at 3000 Hz, and when you're not dealing with pure tones, spectral masking effects inside the inner ear kill everything above 19 kHz, giving CDs a 3 kHz margin of error. In addition, CD has a -90 dB noise floor (can you hear a faint whisper over the pounding music?), and even that can be reduced by pushing dither noise up above 18 kHz.

I can hear the difference between the source and MusicMatch at 128 kbps, but LAME at just under 192 kbps has been shown (on good speakers, no less) to provide transparent reproduction.

If you're concerned about sound quality, you are not listening to compressed audio of any sort.

Tell that to the r3mix team, who achieved transparent reproduction of audio using the LAME MP3 encoder at under 192 kbps.

Use --r3mix, you fool!

Or even better, check out --r3mix.

As far as try-before-you-buy goes, how come no one ever complains that we don't get to preview entire movies before we decide to shell out for the tickets?

A movie is one coherent audiovisual work that tells a single story. Reviews dissecting every part of a movie are available in almost every imaginable news medium. On the other hand, a typical album is a recording comprising twelve musical works, unrelated except for having been recorded (and possibly written) by a single team of performers called a "band". (Themed albums are the exception to this rule, but they are also the exception in the pop marketplace.) It's hard to judge whether or not critics like a whole album because 1. the music reviews don't get as much publicity as the movie reviews, and 2. music listeners have much more diverse tastes than movie viewers.

It's about time media companies realized that if they want customers' money, they must work with their customers, not against them. To let listeners preview a whole album, I'd suggest that the label publicly release an MP3 file containing a representative 20 second snippet of each song for free promotional redistribution.

In addition, if the RIAA labels put up a site where I could download high-quality singles (MP3 encoded with LAME 3.92, preset r3mix) for $1.00 each, and the site showed exactly how much of my buck went to the songwriters and performers, I would sign up in a heartbeat. The most popular legit major-label MP3 site (eMusic, $15 per month for unmetered downloads) offers only 128 kbps MP3, and 128 kbps MP3 sounds like crap on my speakers because it throws away so much information.

Listening to that on one of those teenie Mac speakers, of COURSE it's not going to sound any different. ;) While I can't entirely vouch for the quality of AAC, from what I've heard, it's really fitting to be alongside MPEG-4 video -- MPEG-4 video was designed for Internet viewing, and IIRC, AAC was designed for the same purpose.

Really, it comes down to this:

In the beginning, there was MPEG-1 and MPEG-1 Layer 1,2,3 audio. Big deal, koz they were all more-or-less firsts in semi-quality video compression.
Then came (in no particular order) MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. MPEG-2 was a format designed for DVDs and other high-resolution media, and AC3, its companion, designed for high-quality audio. MPEG-4 was designed for Internet viewing, and, as I said, AAC was (is) its companion.

That said, there is a lot of crossing over within the formats. Personally, I encode DivX video with MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio (VBR, which is against the AVI standard, bad me, but oh well).

I don't mean to get off on a rant here, but the largest problem I see with MP3 is that people aren't using VBR. It's an EXCELLENT thing: take bits from places where they aren't needed and put them where more bandwidth is needed. You can have a "CD-quality" MP3 file using VBR -- at lower filesizes -- that you would need 320Kbps CBR to achieve.
Well, that, and people are still using Xing. stop it! Use LAME + EAC to rip and encode your CDs. Honestly.

And now, the obligatory plug. For more information on MP3 encoding, visit r3mix.net. Of course, these are facts, not opinions; I couldn't be wrong.

Listening to that on one of those teenie Mac speakers, of COURSE it's not going to sound any different. ;) While I can't entirely vouch for the quality of AAC, from what I've heard, it's really fitting to be alongside MPEG-4 video -- MPEG-4 video was designed for Internet viewing, and IIRC, AAC was designed for the same purpose.

Really, it comes down to this:

In the beginning, there was MPEG-1 and MPEG-1 Layer 1,2,3 audio. Big deal, koz they were all more-or-less firsts in semi-quality video compression.
Then came (in no particular order) MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. MPEG-2 was a format designed for DVDs and other high-resolution media, and AC3, its companion, designed for high-quality audio. MPEG-4 was designed for Internet viewing, and, as I said, AAC was (is) its companion.

That said, there is a lot of crossing over within the formats. Personally, I encode DivX video with MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio (VBR, which is against the AVI standard, bad me, but oh well).

I don't mean to get off on a rant here, but the largest problem I see with MP3 is that people aren't using VBR. It's an EXCELLENT thing: take bits from places where they aren't needed and put them where more bandwidth is needed. You can have a "CD-quality" MP3 file using VBR -- at lower filesizes -- that you would need 320Kbps CBR to achieve.
Well, that, and people are still using Xing. stop it! Use LAME + EAC to rip and encode your CDs. Honestly.

And now, the obligatory plug. For more information on MP3 encoding, visit r3mix.net. Of course, these are facts, not opinions; I couldn't be wrong.

Offer it in multiple different formats. Some Monkey's Audio for a lossless copy, some VBR MP3 encoded with LAME using the --r3mix tag, some Shorten lossless audio for those that prefer it, some OGG Vorbis for those that prefer the ultimate in open-source audio, and perhaps an AIFF. Makes sense to me.

Get a good receiver, no, your 79 dollar Aiwa system with blinky lights galore doesn't count, and some respectable speakers.

These guys did, and they found that LAME 3.92 can encode CD quality sound transparently at an average data rate between 160 and 192 kbps. For more information, read the "quality" section of r3mix.net.

You can definitely tell the mp3 artifacts

What artifacts? You mean the artifacts from the Xing encoder?

Get a good receiver, no, your 79 dollar Aiwa system with blinky lights galore doesn't count, and some respectable speakers.

These guys did, and they found that LAME 3.92 can encode CD quality sound transparently at an average data rate between 160 and 192 kbps. For more information, read the "quality" section of r3mix.net.

You can definitely tell the mp3 artifacts

What artifacts? You mean the artifacts from the Xing encoder?

MP3 quality is a far cry from CD quality, afterall.

Not always. A specific preset in LAME 3.92 will provide transparent reproduction at an average data rate of 192 kbps. Read the "quality" section of r3mix.net to learn more.

Sure you can [provide a benefit to only those who pay]. It's called: CD Quality vs. MP3 Quality

A properly encoded MP3 is CD quality. lame --r3mix will compress stereo sound to an average data rate of 176 kbps with no audible loss. See r3mix's "quality" section for details.

Even then, most consumers are happy with the 128 kbps files that permeate the WinMX, Kazaa, and Gnutella networks. You can't hear the difference above the ambient noise of the street, etc.

I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec),

For 192 kbps class MP3 encoding lame --r3mix produces the best results. It even beats Fraunhofer's own encoder. Go to r3mix.net and click "quality" and "analysis" for the lowdown.

>The original wav tracks on the cd ALWAYS sound better than anything that has been encoded.
>I think many a studio engineer would be kicking themselves for trying to hard to give you a good sounding record that you are then going to listen to in a bastardized form.

For the good of the audio community, read this site thouroghly, please!

The fact (and I mean proven both by double blind test and waveform analysis) is that 256-320 kbit MP3 perfectly* reproduces the same audio you hear from a .wav file. If your encoder sucks (and one can assume the RIAA-et al. would have access to the world's best MP3 encoders) that's your fault, or the fault of the mp3's creator, not ours.

* [By perfect I mean so perfect that any imperfections in the mp3 are likely less than 100x that of which most audio equipment itself introduces into music!]

>Go buy the cds and dont whine to everyone about your entertainment dollar. It suited you fine before Napster came out.

What a luddite statement.

Why not just say:

"Go wash in a tin tub outside the fireplace. It suited your father perfectly fine when he was a kid."

This is why I say "properly encoded," because half the work is using the right encoder with the right settings. If you use Xing, the MP3s will sound like crap no matter what settings you use. :) The short version is, use new versions of LAME with the --r3mix alias. :)

Nathan

There is lots of excellent information on creating high-quality MP3 files at www.r3mix.net.

Nathan

The first time I tried playing a burned CD made from mp3s, I was deeply, deeply disapointed.

In my 2002 Golf, I have a JVC KD-SH99 MP3 CD reciever that plays disks burned using the VBR LAME help offered here. I run no other aftermarket stereo parts in the car and have marginally minimal problems with the sound quality.

Of course, what constitutes "excellent" sound is subjective. I will say that after hauling my friends around, they never complain, they always compliment, and the few times where I was reminded I was listening to MP3 were when the source material overwhelmed my stock car speakers - four tweeters and four woofers on factory crossovers. I'm certainly no textbook audiophile, but when I'm listening to music, I am anal about it being clear and clean. And it is, 99.95% of the time. That JVC deck was the best $400 I've gotten my dad to spend on me for Christmas. =)

There are lossless audio formats out there. The best ones generally compress at around 2:1. I believe the most popular one is called Shorten, commonly abbreviated to .SHN. It's quite popular with show tapers, from what I understand.

The thing is though, when encoded right, Mp3's are practically indistinguishable from the source, even by "golden ears", or by looking at the waveforms.

When I say "high quality mp3", I'm talking about high bitrate VBR mp3's encoded with newer versions of LAME. See www.r3mix.net for more info. Even with 8:1 compression you get 4 times as much music as lossless formats, at practically indistinguishable quality.

Unfortunately, 99% of the mp3's you see out there on the web are recorded at low bitrates with crappy encoders. :-)

Now, I'm not saying that lossless compression doesn't have its place... once audio is lossy-compressed once, even if it's compressed well, it's essentially useless for further editing if you care about sound quaslity. But for just LISTENING to music, trading uncompressed audio seems like overkill no matter how much bandwidth and storage space you have....

22 hours of CD quality audio on a CD (MPEG4 format) - 2002

Hybrid rollercoasters using real and virtual effects - 2001

Positioning sound at any point in space - 2001

Doorstep videophone allowing remote interaction with callers - 2001

Automatic music composition in any style - 2002

Notebooks with P4 chips - 2002

> (I encode nearly everything at 320).

oh god... please go to r3mix and save yourself several megabytes...

Now I'm thinking about giving ogg a spin but I feel like I'm back where I was when I started making mp3 files.

What encoder to use? What options to use?

Can someone point me in the right direction? Thanks!

many may not have heard of SHN vs. mp3 (debates for or against these 2 can cause a war), but SHN is a lossless compression of a WAV file, and it compresses the wav file approximately 50%. This is compared to mp3's where they are lossly compressed about 90%, but it throws out information in the original wav.

For one thing, FLAC performs a few percent better than SHN and has a more free license. For another, tests performed by r3mix.net have shown that it's possible to encode MP3 at a variable bit rate centered about 192 kbps and lose nothing audible. (Whether this is legal under the Fraunhofer patents is a different story.) MP3 and Ogg Vorbis produce significant quality loss in only the following situations: 1. low bit-rate operation, 2. crappy encoders, and 3. repeated conversions of wav -> compressed -> wav.

A lot of the hard-core collectors of the live music refuse to collect mp3's due to the loss in quality from original wav->mp3

What about the loss in quality from analog->wav? It's negligible, but it's still a measurable loss.

128 kbps is not CD quality. Please refer to this site to learn a bit about this stuff -- it is very informative. They even got a --r3mix option added to LAME, which encodes with their recommendations.

This is why I don't use OGG. Yeah, it sounds great and it's free in the true sense, but if I can't play it on my new RIO SP100 it's no use to me.

For now I've learned to live with MP3. lame --r3mix produces almost perfect MP3s that are more than good enough for me. Checkout r3mix.net for more info.