OT ... audio

Well first of all, the main factor in MP3 quality is the level of compression - the more compression, the smaller the file, but the lower the quality. Typically you'll see MP3s listed with a "bitrate" -

128kbit is generally considered to be the lowest acceptable for decent music reproduction and provides approximately 10:1 compression; 320kbit is usually about the highest you'll see on downloaded material and reduces the ratio to about 5:1 (exact compression ratio will vary with the material).

Quality can also be somewhat affected by the codec (compressor/decompressor) used to create the file, and to a smaller degree by the codec used to play it back.

The player itself is pretty much a non-factor except where it may add other effects or processing to the playback.

There are better-sounding compression formats... WMA (Windows Media Audio) can often be "cleaner" while allowing lower bitrates (and thus smaller files); FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is another common codec that in theory at least causes no loss of quality, but generally only compresses by about 2:1. If you're jamming stuff onto a portable player or "ripping" CDs to hard disk, you can also just rip straight to uncompressed WAV format, with no quality loss but no space reduction either.

As to why... when you figure that CD-quality audio, at 44.1kHz, 16-bit, two-channel sampling, requires 176,400 bytes *per second*, or just over

10MB per minute (not including overhead), a 10:1 space savings can be substantial, which was the original attraction of MP3 in the days when just about everyone was still using dialup. A full 640MB/72-minute CD can be reduced to

I don't get them from file sharing protocols like Kazza because they are virus laden. Generally BitTorrent is okay (use Peer Guardian with it and a private tracker). Also there are some search sites that are decent for finding music:

As far as it being "stealing", well, that is a matter beyond the scope of this thread. :-O

Thanks Matt,

At least now I'll have a little bit of information under my hat so that I'll sound a little bit knowledgeable.

At this point, I just need to know enough to set up an MP 3 player for someone. I don't even know how to use one, so I was thinking maybe I should buy a cheap one so I can learn how to handle it.

These "streaming media players" are they considered a computer device or an audio device? I've never seen one advertised but of course, not being interested in one myself, I may have just not noticed them. I'll start looking now. That sounds like it might be something I personally would be interested in, if the sound quality were there. I'd guess you'd need a "better" sound card in your computer to be able to reproduce better sound (?) Or would you think the computers streaming outputs basic quality is( what I consider bad) the same a MP3? I've got probably about 2000 records going back to the time of the Victrola forward to about the 70's or so. I've got a Victrola and a couple of good record players also. I don't get to listen much anymore but maybe someday I'll put them on CD / DVD disk ..... if I ever decide to retire. And nowdays it looks like you can download just about anything that was ever recorded.

Again, thanks for the preview.

Just enough to be dangerous :)

If you've ever used a Walkman-type portable cassette, or portable CD player, then your 90% of the way there, as the controls are typically very similar, and the icons/pictographs haven't generally changed at all: "play" is a >, "fast forward" and "fast reverse" are >> and or an audio device? I've never seen one advertised but of course, not

Well, both... generally they're using an embedded operating system, but are given simplified interfaces.

Here are a few examples:

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That would only apply if you're plugging your computer's output directly into the stereo system... the sound card has no effect on the quality of "ripping" CDs to MP3 or other formats. Plus, most these days are capable of far beyond "CD-quality" anyway. Streaming receivers are essentially just small standalone computers that read the digital files over the network from the machine they're stored on, so again, your PC's sound card has no relevance.

Audio is always a weakest-link medium, and in this case, the MP3 format itself is almost always the weakest link.

There are some devices that can help in that pursuit as well - a USB-connected turntable, for example:

You can always plug your turntable into your computer's line input, running through an appropriate pre-amp, but there are also specialized interfaces for that, that take care of the pre-amp and equalization: There's also software available (and some of these devices ship with it) that have special functions for removing clicks, pops, hiss, and other such unwanted noises associated with analog music :)

There's always that option as well :)

Thanks Matt.

I'll follow up on all this. It's just that I don't have as much time as I'd like to do these things. (The reason why this room of mine has taken so long. I'm doing it all, myself) Fortunately it's separated from the rest of the house, otherwise my wife would be off the wall by now ..... looking at it. I'm always coming up with another wire to add or something, over the last few years. I look at it sort of setting up a hobby for me to fiddle with should I decide to retire.

Figure I'll wait till the last minute to buy all the electronics, rather than now, so that something doesn't go out of date by the time I actually get to use it. And .....anyway, I told my wife that if I don't get to use the room, she can have me laid out in it for the funeral and she can have her choice of music too.

Thanks again.

I would like to say first off your response to Jim have been pretty much spot on and very thorough. I can't really add much, and I even learned a few things. Back in the day when MP3 was the thing we used to hear claims that 128bit was considered near CD quality. Most of the loss to my ear was in the high and low range. A range where many people have trouble discerning subtleties, and some do not hear at all. I think some processers may even have cut the bass (low range) into partial waves so as not to damage the small speakers used with most PCs. I could hear the difference, but since I am a rocker where most of my instrumental sounds are in the mid range it was not a huge loss to me.

At 128bit compression for MP3 files you get record files sized at about 1 meg per minute. I have noticed that with better quality rippers those pieces of music with lots of detail subtley and multiple simultaneous tones and sub tones will still generate slightly larger files. My favorite ripper for years was Music Match. It was slow, but did a very good job and it also integrated with the CDDB to automatically generate Song Artist and Album information in the files.

With MP3s ripped at 256bit I can still hear (or imagine I hear) a slight difference, but I have been told that I should not be able to.

For Jim's applications a few questions to the customers should answer his clients needs quite easily. In many cases it might be as simple as putting up a small shelf below an electrical outlet, and putting a jack plate next to it that goes to an aux input on the clients sound system. They can then put any MP3 player they want right there and plug it into their sound system. My wife has a docking station for her iPOD that is always left connected to our living room amplifier and television. She can listen to audio files adnaseum, or even play videos on the TV that she has downloaded to her iPOD just by setting the unit on the docking station and playing it like she would when using it as a portable.

Dear Client,

1 Place MP3 player (with or without docking station) of your choice hear. 2 Plug headphone jack patch cord from player to wall. 3 Press Play. 4 Select Aux Input 1 on your sound system.

Sincerely, Installer

The only thing I can add is that you need to know if your client is an audiophile or just somebody who wants what other people have. If an audiophile have them select their own MP3 playback device and explain to them that playback is no better than the quality that they record it at.

If you want to make it even easier on them, upsell them to a Logitech Harmony or similar type of "advanced" remote... then you just program the appropriate macros to do everything.

I know one person that has put his entire music library onto an iPod... but all using Apple's own lossless codec, then running through the dock port to an outboard D/A converter and into his ridiculously expensive stereo system. It sounds... well, spectacular.

of your choice

Now THAT sounds like something that I'd like for my personal use.

This "lossless codec" .... do you have to subscribe to this as a service or do you just download the codec and use it for your personal recordings?

iTunes has an option, under CD Import Settings, for Apple Lossless Encoder, as well as MP3, AAC, AIFF, and WAV encoders. Comes included with my bone-stock install of iTunes 8.x.

Thanks Matt, I'll check it out.

Just out of curiosity, which format is the best? I would imagine if one recorded their favorites on a Terabyte external drive, or two, in the best lossless format, they could always down convert them to lesser formats for other devices ..... Yes?

I just saw an external terabyte hardrive on sale for 169.00. So with a couple of those, it seems that one could have a pretty good size collection even using lossess format. I've also seen these hardrive racks that you can add 6 or eight hardrives, as you need them and for a mirror drive set up too.

So lossless audio storage doesn't seem that hard a thing to do. Or am I missing something? How about management? I'm presuming that the I-tunes application will do that, or that there are other music file management tools that are available?

Quality-wise, ripping to WAV at 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo (which is what your CDs are recorded at - well, technically they're 14-bit, so you're already ripping at a higher resolution) will give you NO loss of quality, but will also use the most space.

Figure 44,100 samples per second, 16 bits (or two bytes) per sample, time two audio channels, that's 176,400 bytes per second of audio... give or take. Factor in a bit of overhead, round it up to 180,000 and convert that to kbytes, and you can call it 175kB/s. Multiply by 60, that's about 10.5MB/min... 630MB/hour... 1000 hours of music becomes "only" 630GB.

And yeah, from there you can convert to MP3 or whatever other supported format if you need to load some music on a smaller device (Smartphone, iPod Nano, etc.)

I've set up a couple now for additional storage for high-traffic DVRs. $3000 or so for a rack-mount, 8-bay system with hardware RAID (including RAID 6). $200 each (a few months ago) for eight 1TB SATA drives to load it up... configure for RAID 5, and I have 6.5TB of usable space with parity and hot-swappable drives. Very nice.

Lots, I was just using iTunes as an example because my friend was doing this with his 80GB iPod. And I personally like iTunes (I know a lot of people don't), largely because of how it automatically manages the files and folders. But there are certainly others that will use WAV, and most of them will also use FLAC if you want to go that way.

You say that as if you think I know what you're talking about. :-)

But ..... that's ok, I've got the basics. I'll look it up to see if I can find out what the differences are. But, it's like too many things now. There's just so freekin much information on the subject that after reading for an hour, you've got so much info that you can't remember what the hell you wanted to know to begin with ..... because NOW you've found out about a hundred more NEW things that you didn't even know existed ..... that now you want to know about ........ too!!!!!

Hahahah, no worries, I'll still be here if you have more questions :)

For now... yes, a 1TB drive will be LOTS of storage... and yes, you can rip your CDs and LPs to WAV format for highest quality, and still store a ton on that drive, with room to spare for smaller MP3'd versions...