421 k-bit/sec mp3?

[Bmxpunk86pl]

Yea i downloaded a mp3 (Rammstein -ich will-) and its at 421kbit/sec, is that even possible? or did someone just trick me. cd quality music is at 320kbits so how is this possible?

[JaY_III]

It was just encoded at that bitrate, plain and simple
Who Ever encoded it must not have wanted to lose any quality.

[Ebola]

whoever encoded it must not have been too bright. a wav file is about the same size as a mp3 encoded at this rate. and yea you lose a ton of quality just changing fromat to mp3.

[Bmxpunk86pl]

yea i guess ur righ ebola

[cornbread]

Originally posted by Ebola
and yea you lose a ton of quality just changing fromat to mp3.


Nope, not really. Yeah if you encode to a bitrate below 256 you will see a quality loss, but using a GOOD encoder like Lame you will not even notice the difference between a good encoded mp3 compared to a wav file.

As for the mp3 with a 421 bitrate, I have never seen anything like that before, even with a vbr encoded file. 421 is overkill IMO, I would also do a virus scan on that file just to make sure.

[Bender]

By the way I love your choice of music! Rammstein is the best. It could also be your player telling you it is 421 Kbs. I have seen windows media player go wacky with variable bit rate MP3s.

[cornbread]

Originally posted by Bender
It could also be your player telling you it is 421 Kbs. I have seen windows media player go wacky with variable bit rate MP3s.

Yep, you might be right, I forgot about that, but older versions of Winamp had problems displaying the correct bitrate, especially with bitrates encoded in vbr.

[Bender]

Whats really funny is this was in Winderz xp that I had media player reporting higher bitrates on variable rate songs. What is the size of the MP3 anyway? By the way I just downloaded a bunch more Rammstein!

[VashTheStampede]

Odd, when I use MP3Pro (Converts MP3s into MP3Pro [Smaller size] format) to convert a 256Kb MP3 to 64Kb MP3Pro, I can tell no difference whatsoever.

Of course to convert it to MP3Pro you have to do it like this;

MP3 -> WAV -> MP3Pro

~Vash~

[WyrmMaster]

ummm, i thought CD quality was 128kbps

[cornbread]

Originally posted by WyrmMaster
ummm, i thought CD quality was 128kbps


Nope, most people consider 256-320 to be cd quality, but it depends on how well you hear of course. If 128 sounds good to you then that's all that matters. I used to use the vbr method, but here lately I have been encoding to 256, because the size of the file doesn't matter to me and I want people I share with to have a good file. HERE (http://www.r3mix.net) is a great site for learning about ripping, encoding, vbr, Lame and all kinds of mp3 info.

[LJ5L]

CD quality by definition is 44100 x 16 bits = 705600 bits/s = 88.200 kbytes/s x 60 seconds ~ 5.3 megabyte/minute x 2 for stereo so roughly 10 megs/minute

421 kbit/s sec MP3 is only about 3.2 megs/minute

Not exactly the same thing.

Now on the matter of "cd quality", there was a credible double blind test done a while back that concluded that even the best of ears could not discern between the original CD material and a 160kb/s (and up) MP3 compressed file.

[Bmxpunk86pl]

Yea ur righ Bender, Rammstein is awesome!! YEa probobly media player is screwing some thing up but as long as the music sounds good then i dont care. Thanks for your replies everyone!

[cornbread]

Originally posted by LJ5L


Now on the matter of "cd quality", there was a credible double blind test done a while back that concluded that even the best of ears could not discern between the original CD material and a 160kb/s (and up) MP3 compressed file.

I can tell easily, 160 to "MY" ears sounds a lot different compared to 256. A lot depends on the encoder used too. MusicMatch is crap (my opinion) compared to Lame.