How to make an mp3 sound great? Part 2

If you want to know how an mp3 works, this article is for you.

As we pointed out in the previous article, talking about a digital audio file refers to the ability to take 44,100 samples per second and thus be able to draw as precisely as possible the wave, with its curvature, that describes the sound.

or that the sound is produced by the fluctuating pressure that produces a movement in the air. Like the string of a guitar or a piano that vibrates X times per second, depending on the pitch, and these vibrations produce waves in the air similar to those produced in water if an object falls.

Then those waves propagate, reach our ears and produce a wave with a certain curvature.

Digitizing this implies, as we have already said, taking 44100 (or more) samples per second and capturing its position in order to later be able to reproduce that wave as close as possible to the original.

But this implies an enormous flow of information, which must be compressed and, if possible, even discarded, to reduce its size to a point that today, with this technology, is manageable.

This is based on these principles:

– There are certain sounds that the human ear cannot hear.
– There are certain sounds that the human ear hears better than others.
– If there are two sounds playing at the same time, we can hear the one that is higher, and not the lower one.

These principles of human hearing allow us to discard sounds without a considerable loss of quality.

How to make an mp3 sound great?

If you want to know how an mp3 works, this article is for you.

An mp3 stores information digitally. The music is captured 44100 times per second, each of these parts has a size of 16 or 24 bits. The usual is 16 bits.

The sound has a curved shape, what is sought is that each frame captures an instant of that curve or bell.

If 16 bits are used, we have a little more than 65 points that form a kind of grid where each point will be located to form the curvature. It is enough information to achieve a very good definition. In 24 buts we have several million possible points on the grid to place each point on the curve.

To understand the size of a file, the following formula will be useful:

frames*bits*channels= x bits per second

In a good quality mp3 we speak of 44100 multiplied by 16 bits multiplied by 2 channels (stereo) which gives us 1,411,200 bits per second, that is, 176,000 bytes per second.

If the song lasts an average of 3 minutes, each one will occupy 32 million bytes.

Using Mp3 that 32 million bit song can be compressed to about 3 million bits.

We will need to be able to transmit 16,666 per second to be able to transmit the 3 million bits of the total song.

We will see that the more information it contains, the more transmission capacity per second we will need.

Mp4Gain is the ideal program to get these mp3s that have a sound practically identical to a CD.

What do lossy and lossless mean and which is better? Part 2

How are audio files encrypted?

In the first part of this article we saw why it was necessary to compress the audio files, since the original formats like WAV or AIFF were unmanageable if you think about sending them by mp3 and storing many on the hard drives that existed at the beginning.

In fact, even today, despite the fact that internet transmission and storage capacity have improved, wab bi el aiff is not used for this purpose, for the same reason: they take up too much space both in transmission and in storage. .

So he had to find ways to compress these files without this meaning a very notorious loss of quality.

The mp3 emerged and revolutionized the world and is still the most important format.

On the one hand, it obviously used some compression, but since it was not efficient enough, it must have begun to understand how human hearing works, in order to eliminate frequencies and sounds that are inaudible to humans and that, however, were stored, occupying space in WAV and AIFF formats.

Over time, better compression methods were developed and then formats emerged that could greatly reduce the size of the file, without losing or discarding any information. This is what is known as lossless, that is, without loss of information.

It is said that the FLAC will end up taking over the market, because it compresses the file and does not need to discard information, achieving that when decompressing the FLAC file we have an original WAV file without having deleted anything.

Mp4Gain can convert mp3 to flac and also normalize its volume or it can just normalize an mp3 or flac, without converting it. You can even extract from a video, just the audio, and record it as any popular audio format like mp3, m4a, flac, ogg, etc.

What do lossy and lossless mean and which is better?

How are audio files encrypted?

Initially, audio was recorded on a computer in WAV or AIFF format and these took up too much space.
They took up so much space that few audio files could fit on the first hard drives, because they had only a few megabytes of available space.

This still happens today in portable devices in general.

Nobody would think that a service like spotify could transmit and store wavs or files without compression.

It could not have the transmission speed, it would spend too much bandwidth and occupy the disk or storage space right away.

If we talk about videos, the same would happen with Youtube or Ntflix.

So, initially almost desperately, they looked for ways to save space, even if this had some impact on quality.

Over time, the Internet’s transmission capacity improved and different compression methods made significant progress.

Lossy

Initially, the hearing capacity of the human being was used to, in addition to compressing the files, also discard non-audible information.

Many people wonder why 44100 was chosen as the samplerate for CD discs and the first more or less obvious answer is that if the human ear is capable of hearing sounds between 20hz and 20khz then more or less twice as much was needed to be able to manage and store audio with good quality.