MP3 audio files… how to recognize the true quality of a piece of music
Thanks to the MP3 format and Internet connections, the distribution and use of music has changed several times. Thanks to its compression, the MP3 file has made it possible to distribute music with a few megabytes of storage space, a song of about 3/4 minutes to occupy a little more than 7/8 megabytes, this has the great spread of music all over World favors, today also thanks to the introduction of broadband, downloading music from the network is almost instantaneous, but as usual, c ‘is always the side of the coin, not everyone knows that MP3 files are very compressed, only with little space in them To claim megabytes. However, compression significantly affects the audio quality of the track. This is definitely affected. In this article you will learn how the compression of MP3 files works and which features distinguish a high-quality MP3 file.
What are MP3 audio files?
To understand how a good MP3 file is recognized, you need to start over and therefore understand what an MP3 file is and how it is created.
Before going into details, it must be stated that MP3 is of course not the same as audio quality among the many digital audio formats that exist today, the best audio format so far that guarantees listening. The same as a CD is the WAV format, which takes up much more megabytes in terms of storage space than MP3, since it does not compress the track and therefore guarantees optimal audio performance.
If we have this necessary requirement, it is easy to understand that when downloading music in MP3 format we will never have a high quality audio track like a vinyl or the good old CD.
The MP3 file in jargon is called the lossy format. This means that transforming an audio track into this type of audio format will lose a lot of information from the audio track that we cannot restore in any way, even if we extracted the file ourselves.
MP3 audio file, how do you know the actual quality of the title?
But what information does an MP3 file cut within an audio track?
When we convert an audio file to MP3, compression reduces the frequencies in kHz of the track. This results in a less efficient audio quality than the original track. Obviously, this lost audio quality can vary by type. For example, if we listen to music we hear when we hear a tenor’s MP3 audio track, the audio quality can affect the singer’s treble and vocalizations, which may not be perfect if we did one instead A trace of listening to house music, the bass could suffer if you use it well in this music genre.
Even between the same MP3 files, there are different categories of files that are characterized by audio quality. The feature that comes with the files is KBPS, which (kilobytes per second) indicates how much memory is used per second of the track audio, let’s see what the different MP3 file formats are today:
• 64 kbps
• 96 kbps
• 128 kbps
• 192 kbps
• 256 kbps
• 320 kbps
Among the various formats we’ve seen so far, the file that guarantees better audio performance is the 320 Kbit / s compressed file, which in practice takes up much more space than the others and therefore less compression from the original track .
To complete the information, we also provide the various MP3 formats with the relative maximum frequency with which they work:
• WAV 22 kHz track (maximum audio quality)
• MP3 track 320 kbps 20 kHz
• MP3 track 192 kbps 18/19 kHz
• MP3 track 128 kbps 16 kHz
