PLEASE HELP quality question

[Spoons]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

Weird I know, I must be crazy but eh! that's me!

no not weird just Canadian lol j/k couldn't resist :p:p

i have a really old cd with 11 albums burnt on it in mp3 and still sounds good

[RossRoy]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

no not weird just Canadian

Are you implying Canadians are weird??? Well you are right!!


* I am not Canadian, I am Quebecan!! *

[MARK S]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

thanks administrator, regular, super moderator,

1. No, i dont want them for streaming ...... its all for ME.

2. Ya, Ive already asked myself the question - is it worth all the effort? Is it worth filling a 200gb hard drive? Ill have to test to figure that one out .... I use Sennheiser HD 600 headphones, theyre pretty sensitive so probably I WILL hear some difference .... at least I SHOULD

3. Thus far, before I got involved with all of this trying to figure out about what "lossless" is, Ive been ripping my CDs to MP3s (lame) using the dbpoweramp, bitrate of 320, frequency of 48000. 2 things about this :

A. was i right to use 48000 rather than 44100? I have no idea what the difference is, but its higher, so I went for it.

B. Now I see many mentions of "OGG" ...... whats OGG? Is it better than what I was doing in A ??

- Very appreciative of all the help newbie

[RossRoy]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

A. was i right to use 48000 rather than 44100? I have no idea what the difference is, but its higher, so I went for it.

Actually, 48000 will not make any difference, seeing as the CD itself is at 44100. At best, it will be exactly the same, and worst case scenario, the "upsampling" might bring in some undesirable artifacts, so I'd leave it to 44100 which how a CD is encoded anyway.

B. Now I see many mentions of "OGG" ...... whats OGG? Is it better than what I was doing in A ??

OGG is just another audio codec, like MP3 and APE and FLAC. I think it gives better quality than MP3, and so does most of the people At equal bitrate, OGG blows MP3 away in terms of audio fidelity. Now encoding time (which shouldn't be an issue, but is for some people) and compression ratio, I have no idea, I never did any comparison nor have I read anything about it.

Personally, I think going at 320 kbps for MP3 is overkill, but that's just me. between 256 and 320, I personally can't hear a difference and I highly doubt that many people can on a blind test. What I do usually with MP3 is use the ALT-PRESET set of switches. I usually go for Alt-Preset-Standard, but if you want more quality, go for the Extreme or Insane setting.

OGG does it in a different way. You can still give it a bitrate you want to use, but as I understand it, the preferred method is to use the Quality setting that ranges from q-.1 (or 48kbps) to q1 (or 500 kbps). Again, my personal opinion is that q1 is way overkill, whereas q.7 (224kbps) is my setting of choice, but Razgo here believes q.6 (192kbps) sounds brighter (unless he changed his mind :p).

I guess you will have to do a listening test for yourself. You will probably get as many different preference as there are people answering you.

Oh and by the way, great headphones! I have Sennheisers myself, though a lesser model, the HD570, they still sound great! And yes, OGG at q.7, I can't tell the difference with the CD using 'em.

[MARK S]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

SENN hd570 headphones!! cool! they also sound great ..... not even worse than the 600s i think, just different ...... ya so you know where im coming from with the sound quality obsession .......

OK, so I downloaded the OGG and I'm running a test with them. From what I understand, theyre not as good as the monkey files, but definitely better than mp3. I set it to rip at top quality (500) , but you think thats overkill ?? No difference between that and less? ...... anyway ill test different settings .... 1 question : would you recommend ripping at 'variable bitrate'? Of the options, based on what I read, thats what I chose.

I see the 1st song has been ripped, its bigger than an mp3, but smaller than an APE file. i guess that makes perfect sense.

[RossRoy]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

Well like I said before, I can't tell the difference between the CD and a q.7 OGG file which is at 224kbps, so for me, 500 would be way overkill. You may have more sensitive hearing than I do though!

Definitely go variable bitrate, unless you know you don't need it. What happens is it allows the codec to go over the preset bitrate for harder to encode segments, and drop back lower for quieter moment. Think of it as adaptive resource allocation. So, overall, your file would be on average 224 kbps, but you can have spikes at over 300 kbps and passage at less than 196, it all depends on what's happening on the audio.

[Unregistered]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

>>Well like I said before, I can't tell the difference between the CD and a q.7 >>OGG file which is at 224kbps, so for me, 500 would be way overkill. You >>may have more sensitive hearing than I do though!

Ill definitely test both ...... so I guess the only? advantage of going for a "q.7" over the 500 (which i guess is CD?) setting is that it makes the file size smaller, right? Ya, if they sound the same, why not?
Can you hear a real difference between the .ape files and the .ogg files? i guess you CAN definitely hear the difference between the mp3 and the ogg files, i think you said that in an earlier post ...... that OGGs are clearly better ....

OK, ill definitely go variable bitrate.

thank you again for all your help. im sitting here on the floor in japan for the last 12 hours trying to work this out, its already 1 in the afternoon here!!

[MARK S]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

by the way, i posted the last post. forgot to type my name .

[Spoons]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

to my ears OGG -q.6 192kbps is cd quality. save typing your name and just register !

[Paddy]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

Can you hear a real difference between the .ape files and the .ogg files? i guess you CAN definitely hear the difference between the mp3 and the ogg files, i think you said that in an earlier post ...... that OGGs are clearly better ....

Best way to test is to listen yourself, everyone has different hearing and have different opionions of which is best. Just Rip an album or a couple of songs to wav, then compress them using the different codecs at different bit rates and then compare their sound quality and their file sizes yourself. Best to try MP3, OGG and MPC aswell as APE :D

[Unregistered]

Re: PLEASE HELP quality question

So, 320 is the best, thanks. Am i right to use "stereo", rather than "joint stereo"?

I don't know about Dual Channel, but Joint Stereo is mathmatically equal to stereo. Meaning that you would get the same sound with Joint Stereo than you would with normal stereo. The only difference being is that you will have a file marginally smaller if you used joint stereo.