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General discussion

Lowest acceptable bitrate?

Jul 18, 2005 12:53PM PDT

If I want to cram as much as possible onto a 1gig player, what bitrate should I rip at? I'm using WMA and windows media player for said ripping. My ears aren't great, but sometimes more discerning people borrow my player, so trial and error isn't going to do it for me. The player is a Creative MuVo Tx Fm.

Discussion is locked

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I rip at..
Jul 18, 2005 3:01PM PDT

48 kpbs WMA. I use a Sandisk Sansa 1 GB flash player
(http://www.epinions.com/content_186478988932) and I cannot tell the difference between those tracks and the original ones, which were encoded in MP3 at 128kbps+.
I've found that to be quite useful, as now I can fit close to 500 songs on my teeny 1 gig player. and that's before I use the SD card to up my memory (up to a max total of 3gb (player+ card)

I use DBPowerAMP software to convert. It's free, and provided you download the plugins, you can convert anything to anything, WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG, you name it.

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Your Nuts!
Jul 19, 2005 8:29PM PDT

48 kbps WMA sounds horrible, it is not worth listening to.
Period!

There is tons of cliping in the tracks, the bass sounds muddy and it lacks most of the high range.

You should get your hearing checked, or get better headphones.

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It's sure nice for audiobooks
Aug 31, 2005 6:17AM PDT

When you want to cram a long book onto a 1gig drive 48kbps is great.

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Use the setting that sounds good to YOU.
Jul 18, 2005 7:38PM PDT

If you're using lossy compression like WMA or MP3, there will always be people who think that it will never be good enough. Finicky golden-eared audiophiles shouldn't be complaining anyway. After all, you're using a portable player. There have been studies on whether normal people can hear any differences between an MP3 and its original CD track. Here's one of them, from the German magazine C't:

http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3test.html

You may or may not agree with their methods or their findings, so this study won't settle anything. For one, the article doesn't mention which encoder or encoder settings were used to prepare the MP3s.

Here's the short version: most people can tell the difference between the original CD and a 128K MP3, but when they weren't told which one was which, they sometimes judged the 128K MP3 as better-sounding. They also found that most people cannot tell the difference between a 256K MP3 and the original CD.

So just experiment a little and trust your own ears to find the right balance between quality and size. This is probably the most practical solution for you.

Another approach would be to disregard file size and encode using the highest-quality settings available (maybe even lossless if you distrust the C't study and you have a large, hard-disk player that will play those big files).

This is impractical for many people, but it might be the more future-proof solution because flash memory and hard drives are almost always getting bigger and cheaper. Some time in the future, maybe 10 years from now, the average person will be able to hold his or her entire music collection on a portable player, even with lossless formats. If you RIP using the highest-quality settings now, you won't need to do it again should you want better audio quality later (assuming of course that the dominant media formats would still be the same when that day comes--this is a big if).

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I forgot to add...
Jul 18, 2005 7:54PM PDT

For WMA 64k VBR or 96k VBR is acceptable to me even though I can hear the difference from the original PCM. But I have a high tolerance for distortion--my brain can filter out most of those imperfections and I can hear the music loud and clear. You might not be as lucky. There's just no answer that works for everybody. That's why you should listen for yourself. Rip a couple of your songs with various settings and pick the one you can live with.

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Compression.....
Aug 31, 2005 8:11AM PDT

256 kbps is made for stereo systems and stuff like that, headphones wont be able to tell the difference.


What you should do dude is rip a song in 48, 64, 128 and see if you can tell the difference. If not go with 48 kbps. I can tell the difference between them though.