SOLVED Absolute best sound format?

[Richard]

EDIT: I've been suggesting lossless as the "best", but I highly recommend you investigate the lame mp3 encoder. lame --alt-preset extreme renders CD quality. Don't just take my word for it. Test it yourself.

To give you idea on filesizes...

The track in question is, "World in my Eyes, by Depeche Mode's Violator Album."

CD rip: 45 MB
FLAC encoding: 28 MB
MP3 "insane" 320 Kb/s : 10.5 MB
MP3 "extreme" VBR : 8.2 MB

All of these sound identical. In fact, there have been tests with $15,000 equipment in which a number of audiophiles have not been able to discern a difference between 256 Kb/s and up mp3s.

The best recommendation is to be judicious in your encoding. Not every piece needs lossless encoding. For those that do (or your favorite CDs) go for it. For the rest. You have some good alternatives.

http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/ has a good article on creating better mp3s. I suggest you take a look around.

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As was mentioned previously by myself and MospeadasDark lossless encoders are what you're after.

You'll be hard pressed to do better than lossless encoding. (If you find better please share it.)

I can't tell the difference between the original CD and the flac encodings. This is with rather expensive audio equipment as well.

Something I think bears mentioning: Ensure that your CD/DVD drive is up to snuff. If the original rip isn't perfect, even the best encoder will be useless. For windows I recommend EAC. Exact Audio Copy.

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/

If you're in linux. A program named Grip will be more than adequate.

http://nostatic.org/grip/

Happy listening.

What about encoders?

 

[JokerHCG]

AAC is good and WMA is promising at low bitrates but my vote goes to midi(although its not a very good comparison) . Just as long as your midi playback is excellent

 

[FunkDaMonkMan]

---X--- what are you going to do with this really high quality sound you store?

 

[CrystalMethod]

It's better than changing CD's everytime you feel like listening to something. I have all my CD's ripped to MP3 and are stored on my file server. If I want to play anything, I just stream it over my network to either my first or second machine.

 

[Penguin4x4]

16 bit 44.1 khz is the standard red book cd specification. 16 bit means the quantization and 44.1 indicates the sampling rate. this means when the analog audio was converted to digital, sixteen voltage measurements (approximations)were taken 44,100 times per second.

So you take the quantization x sampling rate, i.e. 24/96= 24 x 96 = 2,304Kbps, to get the data rate, right?

 

[Avatar28]

I was unable to find the exact link where I read about it earlier, but if you go to Google and do a search for lossless audio compression, you'll find a LOT of hits. There are apparently a number of programs out there that will do lossless audio compression.

 

[Penguin4x4]

Which means 24/96 encoded .wav's would average 70MBytes.

 

[Nismo Nate]

Great Thread Guys!!!!!!

I feel smarter now that I've read it, and these are great links....

On a side note, anyone tried Music Match Jukebox? I used it.. Encoded some CD's at 160kbs, that was the highest it went. But to me it was a resource hogger, I won't be using it again.

IMHO..... I smell Sticky......

 

[Penguin4x4]

@Avatar28 - Would this be the link? WavZip seems to be the "losslessest", no?

 

[MospeadasDark]

Great Thread Guys!!!!!!

I feel smarter now that I've read it, and these are great links....

On a side note, anyone tried Music Match Jukebox? I used it.. Encoded some CD's at 160kbs, that was the highest it went. But to me it was a resource hogger, I won't be using it again.

IMHO..... I smell Sticky......

Ugh! The only thing MMJ is good for is playing music. Don't rip with it. It keeps your albums, artists, et-c together, unlike winamp. I like using WMP7.1 for it's SRS in older songs to bring it out.

Also for some reason winamp doesn't like playing all my chinese and korean songs. The "shuffle" mode is broken and will always play certain songs over and over. Sure, it's small..but if you have 256MB/512MB of ram what is 13MB to that?. WMP works, and works well. If I have ram, I will use it.

 

[Nismo Nate]

Yeah, I didn't like it at all, the only reason i used it, is that since my new sys build, for some reason my audio grabber dosen't work with my machine, i think it might be XP compatability, i just havent' goten around to looking for an update.

I happened to have MMJ on a Max PC cd so i tested it out

I hated that it always wanted to be conected to the internet , that sucks when you are on dial-up.

I'm gonna look at all these new links here i find a new one

IS there any "better" format for certain gere's of music?

For example i listen to Rock and Trance primarily...

 

[Richard]

As was mention, Music Match Jukebox is trash for ripping and encoding. I'm not a fan of all-in-one utilities. They tend to be Jacks of all trades - Masters of None.

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I've done some experimenting with the Ogg Vorbis encoder and I must say I rather like it.

It renders very high quality encodings. Plus, its an open format. It seems to have already gained a large acceptance.

If you're into HQ audio compression. It's worth a look.
http://www.vorbis.com/

Very easy to encode extremely nice sounding audio. Read through the FAQs and you'll get an idea about lossy vs lossless encoders as well.
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Onto music players... The vast majority of players are not very good. Winamp's output can be improved easily. Give the MAD plugin a listen.
http://www.mars.org/home/rob/proj/mpeg/mad-plugin/
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When I use windows I use a different program for MP3 listening. Known as coolplayer. It has been around for a long time, but has undergone some recent improvements. If you give it a try make sure you go into options and change the directsound output to coolwavemapper.

http://coolplayer.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/coolplayer/

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[Avatar28]

@Avatar28 - Would this be the link? WavZip seems to be the "losslessest", no?

No, that's not it. It was an article talking about different compression methods. I'm not certain, I'm thinking it was either Huffman encoding or u-law (technicall the greek mu).

 

[Penguin4x4]

mu-Law

 

[flaming gerbil]

sorry guys i was reading my original post and see part of it may could be possibly read incorrectly. i stated a 16 bit system takes 16 voltage measurements which is incorrect. i takes a 16 bit word length voltage measurement which is exponential. for example: 1 bit system would take two voltage measurements, ei.e. 1 and 0. a two bit system would take four 00,01,10 and 11. 3 bit is eight: 111, 110, 101, 100, 011, 010, 001, 000 and so on. so 16-bit (standard cd specification) would take 65,536 voltage measurements. 24-bit is 16,777,216. so you can see the difference in sound quality between 16 and 24 bit. so 16/44.1 (again stand cd quality) is 65,536 voltage measures ments taken 44,100 times per second (the sampling rate).

standard 16/44.1 files take 5 megs per minute per track. the songs you listen to off a cd are in stereo, i.e. a left channel and a right channel. so this is two tracks making it 10 megs per minute. so a three minute song off a cd as a standard .wav file would be 30 megs (at 16/44.1). increasing the sampling rate going from 44.1 khz to 96khz doubles the storage space. increases bit-depth increases storage space exponentially.

 

[Richard]

Thoughts about encoding quality...

The general consensus seems to be that 128 Kb/s .mp3 is rather poor. (In relation to CD quality) I tend to agree with that. Granted, if you do your own ripping and encoding you can obtain rather good results with 128 Kb/s. However, it will still sound lacking in comparison to CDs.

160 Kb/s is my cut-off for encoding. If there's a piece of music that I don't intend to listen to a lot; I'll encode it at 160.

192 Kb/s renders near CD quality. Some encodes will be nearer in quality to the original depending on the source. It is pretty much universally accepted that 192 Kb/s is the best tradeoff between quality and size.

Higher than 192 Kb/s is for all intents and purposes CD quality. An .ogg or .mp3 at 256 Kb/s or better will be nearly indistinguishable from the original.

The most demanding music tends to be symphonic music. The frequency range tends to go lower and higher than any other genre. If you're big into classical guitar, jazz, orchestral recordings, etc. Go for broke. Spare no size expense. The decay of a note on a piano or the crash of a cymbal will sound significantly worse on anything lower than 192 Kb/s. Consider .ogg quality level 9 or 10 or .mpg lame extreme or insane.

This brings me back to lossless encoding. Lossless should be considered a convenient method of archiving your music. If you have a rare CD that you would like to preserve for all time. It is a great way of storing it for future listening since the original bits are all neatly compressed. If you have an extra 100 GB hard drive laying around. Why not preserve your CD collection? The added advantage is you can seal those CDs and keep them pristine for when 1 TB hard drives are all the rage.

 

[Richard]

standard 16/44.1 files take 5 megs per minute per track. the songs you listen to off a cd are in stereo, i.e. a left channel and a right channel. so this is two tracks making it 10 megs per minute. so a three minute song off a cd as a standard .wav file would be 30 megs (at 16/44.1). increasing the sampling rate going from 44.1 khz to 96khz doubles the storage space. increases bit-depth increases storage space exponentially.

Indeed it does. Which is another nice thing about good lossless compression. As it stands with 24/96 audio or 24/192, it wouldn't take long at all to fill up a hard drive. Sure, with DVD writers coming down in price all the time, and even better mediums on the horizon storage space is becoming less of an issue. For the time being though, compression still has its place.

Very soon I'll be adding an SACD player to the mix, and picking up either a LynxTwo or DAL Deluxe to do some listening tests on really high end audio. I've listened to some SACDs in the past, and it really does sound worth the added investment if you're big into audio.

 

[Penguin4x4]

So a 24/44.1 would be 256x the size of a 16/44.1, correct?

 

[flaming gerbil]

yep that is why i have around 60 hard drives in my closet. storage for current projects and some past projects. to give you an idea of what us audio engineers need in terms of storage (at 24/96) take the example above how how much megs per minute per track. the current project i'm working on at my home studio is 42 tracks. the last one i did was only 9 though. of course in reality the difference between let's say 24 bits and 16 bits is subtle. but i definitely hear a difference. even between 44.1 and 96. some studios are doing 128 and even 192. the quality of the digital to analog (d/a) and anolog to digital (a/d) also plays a significant role in the sound quality. 16 bits over really good converters sounds much better than 24 bits over mediocre converters. at my workplace (i.e. the "real" studio) we still mostly track to analog (reel to reel) which to my ears sounds better. yep richard is right about the classical thing. i almost always go digital with classical and extremely good converters are needed with the highest bit depth and resolution you can get. those last piano notes and reverb dying out can be lost without really good resolution and converters.

 

[flaming gerbil]

penguin you seems pretty interested in this file size thing so here you go. i took an mix done at 16/44.1, which ultimately at some point everything has to be mixed down to to get it onto a cd. it is a 3 miniute and 52 second song with a file size of 40.05 megs. i then resampled at and converted it to 24/96. it's file size increased to 737. 4 megs. now imagine a 40 track mix. hard drives fill up very fast. this is the conundrum with dvd audio, we don't know if consumers would want 24/96 or surround sound. it's got to be one or another, not enough storage space for both. you either have to have a standard "cd" done at 24/96 or six channels of sourround at 16/44.1 i'd be interested in what people think, since i know people involved in making these decisions. me as an engineer i'd prefer 24/96 but most of us think consumers would prefer surround sound. personally i don't like mixing surround.