Entertainment For Lively Minds
mp3 ripping help
I remember the day I bought a wee Hi-fi thing for the kitchen that'd play CDs and would dock my iPod. I wondered would I ever bother putting a CD into it, what with all of my collection on the 'pod. I've always thought that really and truly, with tunes ripped at a relatively good 160 bitrate, the sound would be fine.
Today, I've found a case where there's a definite problem. Mr Cee Lo Green's Lady Killer album, and particularly the Billie-Jean-esque Bright Lights Bigger City*. I ripped it at 160 Kbps and noticed a level of distortion in the bassline. It sounds equally ropey on the nice Sennheiser headphones.
I popped in the CD, and it sounds a hell of a lot better. Is there anything I can do? I rip using FreeRip which has that LAME encoder doobiewotsit. Is this just a limitation of MP3, that in stripping out certain components of the overall sound, what's left just sounds wrong?
Is, in this instance, Apple Lossless the way to go?
*it's a right belter of a tune, actually...have a blast!
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MP3 is a significant compromise.
If you use iTunes, set your import settings to 'AIFF,' 'automatic' and make sure the 'error correction' box is checked.
I'm no audiophile
but at 160kps you're going to lose a lot of 'information' and you may well find it doesn't sound quite right especially in headphones. It's the audio equivalent of that pixelating effect you get when you see a poor quality youtube clip or a badly rendered image on a website.
These days I rip everything at 320, it's the closest mp3 gets to CD quality. Try that it should do the trick, although obviously what you gain in quality you lose in disk space.
But it's still mp3.
At least one advantage with iTunes is you can choose the encoder that's used to rip your CDs and AIFF is going to outperform mp3 no matter what the bit rate. Even at 320k, the mp3 file is approx. one quarter the size of the original file.
AIFF, like WAV, uses the same linear PCM as a compact disc so what you have, in essence, is a facsimile of the CD on your computer.
That's not
exclusive to iTunes, most media players/rippers can encode to any format.
I'm well aware that an uncompressed format like WAV or AIFF is not only as good as CD but can be better than CD. You're talking to an amateur musician here ;)
But Ivan was wanting to play back music from his iPod. AIFF or WAV won't play on iPods as far as I know, and even if it does it would take up loads more disk space.
thank you for your comments.
Yes, listening back on the iPod was part of the 'requirements' of the project. I tried apple lossless last night, and on playback, there still seemed to be a bit of distortion in the bass. I fully get what Dr Volume is saying in that a certain amount of loss is to be expected; I guess that I'd never actually had a noticable instance where to these (cloth) ears the original CD and the version of it that came from the ipod could be so different.
So, if AIFF and WAV won't play on the thingy, there's only AAC left. I'll go back and try 320 mp3 and see what happens. It's also just crossed my mind (and I'm at work so I can't check) that maybe there's a graphic equaliser setting on it that's over accentuating part of the musical spectrum.
Of course, anybody who's reading this and who's just ripped everything they've owned and flung away the original source should now be asking themselves - 'Did I listen and check that EVERYTHING sounded okay before I brought that barrowload down to Oxfam?'
Even if you rip at 320kps...
...you'll be able to hear a difference from the CD if you have keen ears - personally, I find I notice distortion in anything ripped below 192kps.
Hmm.
You shouldn't be seeing any noticeable difference with when playing back lossless content. This does indeed point to something else modifying the sound, such as equalisation settings or volume boosting (labelled as Sound Check on the iPod).
A few months ago I did some comparative testing between AACs and Lossless content. Even at 320 kb/s there were noticeable differences on some music, particularly string basses.
Comparing the filesize of an
Comparing the filesize of an MP3 file to the file on a cd doesn't really tell you anything about what's been thrown away. The cd file format is very inefficient for size as it was designed way back when sensibly priced hardware was only capable of reading a stream of ones and naught and feeding them to a d to a. If Cds were to be reinvented today the filesize would be smaller because any player would be able to extract all the required data on the fly and send it to the a to d.(In fact, the filesize would probably be similar but it would have a lot more information in it with higher sampling rates etc).
To roughly see how much information is thrown away, you need to compare it with a compressed, losses format such as flac.
Everything in my iTunes
collection that's 'musical' (not comedy, for example) gets ripped at AAC at a bitrate of at least 256kbps. MP4 is slightly better at preserving the dynamic range than mp3 as the algorithm has been refined a bit, so it does tend to sound slightly better. I tend to prefer mp3 at around 320. Even so, you do tend to still get some just noticeable quality loss on better systems. I notice it particularly with treble loss. It was exactly the same with MiniDisc's ATRAC encoding scheme.
Because of the way MP3 works, it could be that some songs just won't compress very well, especially if they've been subjected to audio compression during production. MP3 generally works by splitting the sound into frequency bands and compressing each of the bands separately, stripping out things it thinks are 'extraneous'. Unfortuately, with some music this causes problems because you can lose tone colour and higher harmonics. It may also have problems with particular frequency bands. That may be the root of your bass problem.
The proof for me that this rate for mp4 works comes in some parts of Jean Michel Jarre's Ethnicolor, which contains some fairly growling bass, together with some high end treble which tests reproduction quality quite well. My docking equipment and hi-fis seem to cope with this reasonably well, even at higher volumes. While the iPod does have a rudimentary equaliser with some presets I'm not sure that they work when playing through the data connector instead of the 3.5mm jack. But I might be wrong about that; best to experiment.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a musician, but I do know a bit about media encoding and file formats as part of my job
see I think that's the problem....
I'm just ruminating on it here, and your comment "Because of the way MP3 works, it could be that some songs just won't compress very well" is sticking with me. The Cee Lo Green Album is the epitome of 'radio friendly' music, and it's quite possibly been mixed/produced/whatever to be 'loud'. Normally, of itself, that wouldn't be a problem, (except that it's annoying!) but if you throw a very low bassline in there, it might lead to distortion when run through the mp3 process.
As I mentioned in passing to a pal of mine - and this might be truer than I thought - Quincy Jones wouldn't have let this happen.