How does the bit rate affect the quality of the music?
Which indicator determines the bit rate of an audio file?
There is a lot of talk these days that we have lost real music with the advent of compressed audio formats like MP3, AAC and the like. Is it really so? Will lossless music save music? Can an inexperienced listener tell the difference between MP3 and FLAC music? Let’s take a look at this problem.
What is Bitrate?
You’ve probably heard the term “bitrate” before, and you probably have a basic idea of what it means, but it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with its official definition to find out how it all works.
Bit rate is the number of bits or the amount of data that is processed over a period of time. In audio, this generally means kilobits per second. For example, the music you buy from iTunes is 256 kilobytes per second, which means that every second of the song contains 256 kilobytes of data.
The higher the bit rate of the track, the more space it will take up on your computer. Audio CDs tend to take up quite a bit of space, so it has become common practice to compress these files so that you can burn more music to your hard drive (or iPod, Dropbox or whatever). This is where the “lossy” and “lossy” formats conflict.
Lossless and Lossy formats: what’s the difference?
When we say lossless, we mean that we haven’t really changed the original file. That is, we copy a track from the CD to our hard drive, but we do not compress it to the point of losing data. Essentially the same as the original CD track.
However, most of the time, you will probably extract your music in Lossy format. That is, you took a CD, copied it to your hard drive and compressed the tracks so they don’t take up much space. A typical MP3 or AAC album is probably about 100MB. The same album in a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC (aka Apple Lossless) will be around 300MB, so it has become common practice to use lossy formats for faster downloads and more hard drive savings. .
The problem is that when you compress a file to save space, you are removing chunks of data. Just like when you take a high-quality image and compress it to JPEG, your computer grabs the raw data and “tricks” certain parts of the image into being basically the same, but with some loss of clarity and quality.
Let’s take the following two images as an example: the one on the right is clearly compressed and the quality is reduced as a result.
Remember that you are saving hard drive space by compressing music in lossy formats, which can make a big difference for an iPhone with 32GB of storage, but is only a trade-off in terms of size / quality.
There are different levels of compression: 128 kbps, for example, takes up very little space, but it will also have lower playback quality than a larger 320 kbps file, which in turn is of lower quality than a 1,411 reference file kbps. 1,411 kbps is CD-level audio quality, which is more than sufficient in most cases.
The problem is not how much the music is compressed, but what equipment you listen to it on.
Does bit rate really matter?
As memory gets cheaper every year, listening to sound at a higher bit rate, or even lossless formats, is starting to become more and more popular. But is it worth the time, effort, and memory usage on your phone or computer?
I don’t like answering questions this way, but sadly the answer is: it depends.
Part of the equation is the hardware you use. If you are using a good quality pair of headphones or speakers, you are used to wide frequency and dynamic range. As such, you are more likely to notice the downsides that come with compressing music into lower bitrate files.
You may notice that low-quality MP3 files lack a certain level of detail; Subtle backing tracks may be harder to hear, the highs and lows will not be as dynamic, or you may hear distortion in the lead vocal.
