What is bit rate? Knowledge of the MP3 audio format. Part 2


Free Download Mp4Gain
picture

What is bit rate? Knowledge of the MP3 audio format. Part 2

bit rate
bit rate

Bitrate is a benchmark indicator of the efficiency of digital music compression.

bit rate.
bit rate

The bit rate represents the number of bits bps (bit per second, bits per second) transmitted per unit of time (1 second). We usually use kbps (in simple terms, it is per second) clock 1000 bits) as the unit. The bit rate of digital music on CD is 1411.2 kbps (ie recording 1 second of CD music requires 1411.2 × 1024 bits of data). The higher the bit rate of the music file, the more data (Bit) must be processed in a unit of time (1 second), and the better the sound quality of the music file. However, when the bit rate is high, the file size increases, which will occupy a large amount of storage capacity. 8 to 320 kbps.

1. WMA (Windows Media Audio, Windows Media Audio)

As a Microsoft media compression method, it is a part of the technology that only compresses audio data in Windows Media Technologies. The sound quality is similar to MP3 and can be compressed with half the technology of MP3. It has the copyrighted Windows Media Rights Manager and can be played by installing it in WMP (Windows Media Player, Windows Media Player). Due to the strong influence of Microsoft and Windows, as well as major copyright reasons, the major American record companies, EMI and BMG, officially confirmed that they use the WMA method developed and produced by Microsoft. It is believed that this advanced method will become even more popular in the future.

2. MP3 (CBR, VBR, ABR)

MP3 is currently the most widely used and widely used lossy compressed digital audio format. It has been explained above and will not be repeated here.

CBR (constant bit rate)

CBR is the oldest and simplest MP3 encoding (compression) method. When this method is used for encoding, the bit rate of the entire file is the same, in other words, the bit rate used by the MP3 file per second is the same. Although the music file has sections of varying complexity, the encoder always keeps the bitrate constant, unless you use the highest sound quality; otherwise the sound quality of the different sections of the MP3 file will vary. The more complex the passage, the worse the sound quality. Its biggest advantage is that the file size is fixed, which is convenient for calculating storage space.

VBR (Variable Bit Rate, Variable Bit Rate)

VBR is a variable encoding rate MP3 compression method. Its principle is to encode the complex part of a song with a high bit rate and the simple part with a low bit rate. Through this dynamic adjustment of the encoding rate, the sound quality can be improved. additionally obtained and the size of the file. Its main advantage is that the entire song can approximately meet our sound quality requirements, but the disadvantage is that the size of the compressed file cannot be estimated during encoding.

Most MP3 players released now support VBR, but although some machines can play songs in VBR format, they can’t display the playing time correctly. Nowadays, a lot of high-quality MP3 music is encoded in VBR.


Free Download Mp4Gain
picture


Mp4Gain Main Window
picture


Mp4Gain Features
picture


Free Download Mp4Gain
picture

Author: R. Arias

R. Arias is the author of this article and has extensive experience for more than 30 years as a recording engineer and audio specialist, as well as more than 20 years of experience creating algorithms related to audio and video. Linkedin