What sound quality is better than 320 or 128?

What sound quality is better than 320 or 128?

Bit Rate

What are bit rates? How do they affect the quality of music and video? Optimal bit rate for various musical styles

Bit Rate

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

The higher the bit rate of the track, the more space it will take up on your computer. Audio CDs typically 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 a lot of space. A typical album is probably about 100MB. The same lossless album as (aka Apple Lossless) will be about 300MB in size, so it has become common practice to use lossy formats for faster boot times 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.

WHAT IS THE NORMAL BITS SPEED ON AN MP3?

BIT RATE

The bit rate of an MP3 indicates the density of the audio information contained in the file. Therefore, every second on a 192 kbps MP3 contains 192 kilobits (24 bytes) of data. The higher the bit rate, the more information the MP3 contains; The more information it contains, the quality will be closer to the original audio recording. The bit rate also determines the size of the MP3 file: a four-minute song encoded at 128 kbps takes up just over 3.5 MB, while the same song encoded at 320 kbps requires more than 9 MB of space.

Bitrate

CHOOSE A BIT RATE

When converting an audio file or ripping the CD collection to MP3, you must specify the bit rate you want the encoder to use. Choose a bit rate based on the type of audio you are encoding and the desired purpose. If you are converting a conference or other piece of vocal audio, a 128 kbps bit rate is more than enough. If you encode MP3 files for use with a portable media player, a 192 kbp bitrate generally provides a good balance between audio quality and file size. If you are converting your CD collection to MP3 for archiving, encode your files with 320kbps bit rate.

Mp3 Bitrate

VARIABLE BIT SPEED

Encoding with a variable bit rate changes the MP3 bit rate based on the type of data present at a certain point in the audio. For example, a variable bit rate encoder can encode dense information from an MP3 at 320 kbps; however, when the audio contains a mute section, the encoder reduces the bit rate to 32 kbps. If the bit rate of an MP3 has an unusual number (for example 204 kbps), this indicates that the MP3 creator has encoded it with a variable bit rate.

BITS SPEED CONVERSION

Although most MP3 encoding and conversion programs can modify an MP3 with a different bit rate, this is not a good idea in general. Converting an MP3 to a higher bit rate does not add audio information to the file, so the sound quality does not increase. Converting an MP3 to a lower bit rate reduces the file size, but it could also have audio defects as the encoder is compressing an already compressed file. If you need an MP3 file to have a different bit rate, re-encode an MP3 from the original audio CD or WAV file.