bitrate vs pcm Archives

What is the difference between 128k and 320k music? Part 2

Free Download Mp4Gain

What is the difference between 128k and 320k music? Part 2

Bit Rate

In simple terms, we can think of a sound wave as a curve.

Bit Rate

We know that the curve is made up of points, and the sampling rate is the number of points in the middle of the length per second (the horizontal axis in the figure above). Sampling precision is the number of points in the dynamic range (upper vertical axis). The finer the positioning of these two dimensions, the greater the true sound restoration and the better the sound quality. Of course, the larger the audio file will be. The customer mentioned by the above colleague said that the latest Hi-Res Audio format released by SONY is a 6-channel 192kHz/24-bit recorded audio file. The size of the lossless format, of course, will be more than 200 megabytes.

The sampling frequency is approximately the following depending on the type of use (k is the thousand-bit symbol, 1khz=1000hz):

8khz: used for phones etc, is enough to record human voices.

22.05khz: transmission use frequency.

44.1kb: Audio CD.

48khz: used in DVD and digital TV.

96khz-192khz: used for DVD-Audio, Blu-ray HD, etc.

The common range of sample precision is 8 bits to 32 bits, with 16 bits generally used on CD.

Having said that, my friends are starting to get confused. It’s not the bitrate that determines the sound quality, so why is everyone saying that 320kb sound quality is better than 128kb?

【Audio Compression】

Well, in fact, the bit rate should be said to be another dimension, it is a compression of audio files.

Nowadays, most of the audio formats we use regularly are based on the original “WAV” file of the audio CD (44.1khz sample rate, 16bit sample precision, 2ch). The original recorded sound data is stored in a matrix, which is in PCM format, while WAV format is an encoding format developed by Microsoft. Its function is to reproduce the data in PCM format through encoding.

Since the data in WAV basically completely restores the PCM data, MP3, AAC and other lossless encoding formats are basically recompressed based on the WAV files. Therefore, we can simply think that WAV is the original audio format and other audio formats are compressed formats.

When it comes to compression, storage and transmission are inseparable. The purpose of compression is to improve storage and transmission, so before we talk about compression, we need to understand the basic units of computers.

We all know that the computer is a binary number system, and the files stored by the computer are made up of two numbers, 0 and 1. Therefore, the computer’s transmission is based on each number, and each number is called 1 ” bit”. For example, for an audio piece, its basic data is “0,1,1,1,0,1, 1 ,0”, and when transmitting, these numbers are transmitted one by one. The sampling precision mentioned above is this unit.

The storage unit of the computer is “byte (Byte)”. In the computer, 1 byte consists of 8 bits, that is, 8b(bit)=1B(Byte). In computer parlance, data storage is expressed in decimal and data transmission is expressed in binary, so 1KB=1024B=1024×8b. This is also part of the reason why the hard drive capacity we see does not match the actual capacity.

Go back and talk about audio compression, the bitrate of the audio is actually the compression ratio. So the bitrate really just defines the size of the file, but because under normal conditions the larger the file, the less data you lose, so the sound quality is relatively higher. However, the bit rate itself does not directly affect the quality of the file. For example, if we take a 128kb file as the source file, even if it is converted to a 320kb file, the sound quality will not be better than 128kb. .

Free Download Mp4Gain

Mp4Gain Main Window

Mp4Gain Features

Free Download Mp4Gain

What is the difference between 128k and 320k music?

Bit rate comparision

192k is a turning point. Below 192K, the sound quality is relatively damaged, especially the high-frequency part above 16Khz will be cut off.

bitrate

In a nutshell, mp3s above 192k can no longer be listened to with CD sound quality on ordinary home devices, except for Golden Ears and Hifi devices. Of course, these data are not 100% reliable. There are always people on the internet sharing fake mp3 above 192K. In fact, they are converting low bitrate music to high bitrate through software, but the sound quality will not improve. be improved. Windows Media Player compresses it. The resulting mp3 is absolutely wonderful, no matter how high the compressed bitrate is, it will cut perfectly around 16K.

Some time ago, a colleague came across a very troubled client. The mess was said to have been caused by the client asking him to provide song files larger than 100MB-200MB in size. And my colleagues don’t know much about audio formats, so they started endlessly fumbling about FLAC, WAV and audio size. In the end, the colleague did not explain to the client what was going on.

After that, other things happened that made me feel that in the music industry there are too many practitioners around me who have an extremely poor understanding of music and even lack some basic knowledge related to music. I don’t even have the idea to understand, which makes me very sad. It seems that music has only one merchandise attribute, and our practitioners only need to organize the shelves, encode various merchandise, and use the big data of users’ purchase records to recommend merchandise to users, no matter why to users. they like this. features that these products have, and use cold data to provide users with various services.

Therefore, I think it is necessary to write something. I don’t expect practitioners to become people who really love music. I just hope that even if you still think of “her” as a commodity, you can first figure out what you’re selling. and what is..

PS: The content of the first lesson is about media files. Since the relevant content involves a lot of technical stuff, it seems a bit boring, but if you read it carefully, you will find that it is actually very easy to understand, but this basic knowledge can be very helpful.

Bit Rate, Sample Rate, Lossless, MP3, FLAC, APE, 320kb, 192kb, 128kb, 44.1khz, CBR, VBR. Does this bunch of various names make you both familiar and unknown?

The higher the bitrate, the better the sound quality. Lossless music is the highest sound quality, right? So, let’s start with the sound collection.

【Audio composition】

Nowadays, when we talk about audio, everything is digital audio. Digital audio consists of three parts: sample rate, sample precision, and number of sound channels.

Sample Rate: Both the sample rate, which refers to the number of samples per second when recording the sound, expressed in Hertz (Hz).

Sampling Precision: Refers to the dynamic range of the recorded sound, measured in bits (Bit).

What is bitrate, a thorough explanation

Normally when people read or listen to some of the terms they use frequently referred to music or video when playing on a digital device, it is possible that some terms are very confusing for the common user.

Sometimes people do not understand at all what these terms refer to and therefore make bad decisions in this regard, it may also happen that they completely ignore this information which generates an unsatisfactory result.

That is bitrate, a complete explanation.

When we play music or video, we are transmitting information from a file to the medium that reproduces that information. Bitrate measures the amount of information What is transmitted every second.

let’s look at an example that will allow us to understand very clearly what exactly bitrate is.
Imagine that I must tell you what happened at a dinner, but I can only use three words to tell you what dinner was like.

I could say For example “it was very tasty” and already there use the three words you could use. Of course the description and information is too short.
and instead, I can use 10 words, my description will have information and therefore it will be a higher quality description.
“It was a tasty dinner, with a very familiar and warm atmosphere” if you look closely at crypto contains more information so much makes a better portrait of what happened that night.

And if instead of using 10 words I can use 300 words it could be a much clearer story, with better quality.

Well that’s exactly what happens with bitrate. when a song or video is played if only a small amount of bits can be transmitted every second, detail that can be displayed will be poor because many details will have to be omitted. on the other hand, as the amount of bits increases every second, the audio will continue to be enriched so much will be of higher quality.

So now we are clear. Because it is important the amount of information transmitted every second, going to have greater wealth is to say higher quality. then act to what the term bitrate refers and now we understand exactly what it means. It is obvious that more bits per second will take up more space on the hard disk. Why the file will contain much more information And in return we will get more details and more richness in reproduction.
We will have to decide if what we want is to save disk space and therefore we will choose a low bit rate or on the contrary our priority will be quality and in that case we will choose a higher bit rate, with much more information per second. but that will take up much more space on the hard drive.
in the same way that a description of three words occupied much less space but transmitted a much poorer description, on the other hand a description of 400 words will occupy much more space But it will offer description in much more detail and therefore with greater quality.
Did you see that it was very easy to understand what bitrate means?