Hi Gary. If you're playing an audio CD versus MP3 files on a PC, depending on your sound card and speakers, it's very conceivable that you won't notice much difference if any at all. Also, if you were to play an audio CD on a fairly low-fi portable CD player and compare MP3 files played by the same player you may not notice any difference at all.
However, if you were to play them through a hi-fi you would probably start to hear that the MP3 files yield less low frequency and high frequencies would be limited too. As I said before, it's pretty much horses for courses and there's no right or wrong. You just find the best medium for what you want to achieve. With regards to your CD having 140 MP3 files, it's all relevant to the length of the tracks and the bit rates used. A bit rate of 128kbps usually equates to 1mb per minute of music. If the average length of your tracks is 5 minutes then in total you have 5 times 140 which equals 700 minutes of music. This would also be 700mb of disc space. Dividing this by 60 to give the total number of hours of music gives 11.6 hours. Obviously, your tracks are going to vary so this affects the number of tracks on the CD. If the average length of your tracks was 3 minutes rather than 5 minutes, then you'd get closer to that 200 number. Regards. Kevin ----- Original Message ----- From: "Gary Wood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2004 6:23 PM Subject: Re: which is better format > Hi Kevin. As stated before, I'm trying to learn how to burn CD's. My > brother copied ten MP3 CD's for me that he got from a friend. In comparison > with some songs that I have on music CD's, I didn't find much difference > between how those songs on the music CD's sounded with those same songs that > were on the MP3 CD's I have now. When I copied my music to the harddrive > with CDex, I did have the bit rate at 128 k. From what I heard, I also > didn't seem to frind much difference in sound quality from the original > recordings. If I were to make copies of music CD's, I wouldn't see much > point to that, since I already have the originals. The advantage of > converting songs to MP3 CD's for me would be that I could save a lot of > shelf space, or else have even more room for MP3 CD's. I counted the songs > in one of those MP3 CD's I have. You're supposed to be able to fit 200 > tracks on one of those, but I only counted 140 songs. Most of those were > MP3s, but some were WMA files. If you can conceivably put ten hours of > music on an MP3 CD, at what bit rate would that be at? I set my CDex to rip > at 128 K, as I said before. But I also use variable bit rate (VBR). I had > that set to 9. > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Kevin Lloyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2004 6:59 AM > Subject: Re: which is better format > > > > Hi Gary. > > > > You've probably seen Bruce's note on music sound quality and I'd agree > with > > him 100%. Any music compressed to MP3 will suffer some degradation in > sound > > quality. > > > > However, WAV files don't support MP3 tag id's and are a little unwieldy > for > > today's portable players so if you want to take a lot of music with you or > > you just want a large collection of music on your hard drive with tags > then > > MP3, encoded at a high bit rate, is probably not a bad compromise. > > > > I've read a lot of statistical analysis on frequency range and sound > quality > > testing with various MP3 encoders and the Lame encoder is very highly > rated > > in this field. > > > > 128kbps is generally regarded as alittle too low for good music quality > but > > is obviously great because the file size is about as low as you would > really > > want to go. I've always been surprised that the companies selling music > > downloads sell music at this bit rate to be honest. > > > > With regards to frequency range alone, I've seen many analysis reports > that > > measure 256kbps as just about meeting the CD frequency range and so > 320kbps > > is probably not going to yield much more in that respect but if you've got > > the disc space, why not. > > > > Even ripping a CD to WAV files will incur some degradation in quality but > as > > Bruce pointed out, it's all about how high fidelity your player is and how > > good your hearing is that needs to be considered. > > > > Kevin > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "Gary Wood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 11:30 PM > > Subject: Re: which is better format > > > > > > > Hi Kevin. I have my CDex set to 128 K. I thought that was supposed to > be > > > CD quality. Maybe I'm not sure, but when I went into Soundforge, it > > classed > > > 128 K as CD quality. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > From: "Kevin Lloyd" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Sent: Friday, June 11, 2004 4:14 PM > > > Subject: Re: which is better format > > > > > > > > > > Hi Ron. > > > > > > > > This is a pretty loaded question as there are many factors and > > preferences > > > > to be taken into account. > > > > > > > > Personally, I rip using the Lame MP3 encoder at 320kbps. This gives > me > > as > > > > close to CD quality as possible and I have plenty of hard disc so > don't > > > have > > > > to worry about file sizes. > > > > > > > > I do have a portable player so if I need to load more music than it's > > > modest > > > > 10GB hard disc will take, I use CDEX to re-encode down to a level that > > I'm > > > > happy with, for example 192kbps. > > > > > > > > As I always keep the 320kbps masters which I've cleaned up and set > > volumes > > > > to be the same, there's no great loss in quality in re-encoding down > to > > a > > > > lower bit rate to my portable player when required. > > > > > > > > Kevin > > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > > > From: "Ronald Glaser" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > To: "PC audio discussion list. " <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:17 PM > > > > Subject: which is better format > > > > > > > > > > > > what is the better format between > > > > windows media 9 loss less aug and mp3 or mp4 > > > > Ron > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > > http://www.pc-audio.org > > > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > > _______________________________________________ > PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... > http://www.pc-audio.org > > To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ PC-Audio List Help, Guidelines, Archives and more... http://www.pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
