What is Digg?125 Comments
- successless, on 10/12/2007, -17/+49If this guy is a recording engineer, I don't want him recording any of my music. His suggestion that any 128kbps encoding scheme is anything resembling "transparent" leaves me with serious doubts his ability to listen critically. From a casual listeners perspective, this is an ok read, but anyone who understands audio fidelity and compression will want to steer clear.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30I remember reading a study in Popular Science (?) that proved that the people most convinced they could distinguish between audio sources, were the least likely able to - at least in the pool of people they tested. It seems years and years of being a music enthusiast apparently had a deafening effect on their eardrums.
Having said that, 128Kbps AAC is not 128Kbps MP3 and 128Kbps AAC is fairly transparent, while the same MP3 is obvious. For my MP3s I go with 192Kbps VBR compression (where 192 is the minimum) - to my ear, on my stereo, these MP3s are indistinguishable from a real CD - and thats all that really matters to me. I suspect that as I get older in my 30's 40's 50's, and my hearing deteriorates, as everyone's does, I will eventually be able to record in 64Kbps MP3 Mono and not be able to tell the difference. So it goes.
What really puzzles me is why people get so hot and bothered over this issue. - betasp, on 10/12/2007, -7/+30I have worked with many audio engineers when I was in Film and Television. Once thing that many audio engineers have that most "audiophiles" don't is practicality. Heck, they will be the first to tell you that 90% of the stuff you buy is so over-compressed and over-processed that the audio quality differences in compression rates for digital music players is nominal at anything over 128k for AAC or WMA. "Audiophiles" will spend 3 times as much for 10% difference in quality, many engineers don't... why do you think JBL still sells studio monitors?
- mesostinky, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14No he should NOT select mp3 via Itunes instead of aac. The Itunes mp3 encoder is crap. If your going to use mp3 use lame.
- callmejordy265, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Just found it odd that a recording engineer goes for the five (or how ever many) years that Ipods have been around without ever picking one up. Maybe im wrong, I just skimmed this article.
- Perk, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8I tend to use 192bit AAC VBR for most things, and Apple Lossless for classical. On the Sennheiser 580's I keep in my desk at work, I generally can tell the difference provided the original recording was of sufficient quality. It's more a subjective thing than objective. If you were to just play a random file, I couldn't tell you how it was compressed, but if you play the same track in AAC, and again in Lossless, I can tell you which sounds better.
I must say though, the iPod truely is a remarkable little device. The mere fact that it has the line out volume to drive a good set of headphones is itself impressive. (Steve Jobs being hard of hearing has turned out to be a serious plus for the rest of us!) My 60 gb Video driving the 580s is as close to the first row of the Dress Circle I've been able to come. - logic6, on 10/12/2007, -13/+20This guy is an idiot that just discovered new technology. He's been listening to Genesis on DAT and Vinyl for 20 years and yesterday he bought an iPod... Welcome to the real world "music lover". Glad you could join us.
- Gardenhead, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10The writer does seem mighty suspicious, at least in the photography realm. Do a google search and you'll see what I mean. Not to mention his site is stuck in 1996.
- Godric, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8As much as I love iTunes and my iMac, I haven't found a program for the Mac that matches the usefullness of Exact Audio Copy for ripping CDs. That program has gotten clean data off of CDs that have been scratched to hell.
- lollar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Tetra, while AAC may be a codec superior to MP3 (I've listened to aacPlus v2 at 128kbit and was impressed, haven't given regular AAC a shot though), the problem is compatibility. The vast majority of (non-iPod) players on the market just don't do AAC. When Joe Average buys that $50 generic flash-based player for his daughter, he doesn't know, nor care about "modified discrete cosine transform" encoding schemes. He doesn't know which codec is better, and even if he would, he wouldn't care. Nor will his daughter, who'll most likely download MP3s (unless she's using the iTunes store). Of course, if Joe Average cares about his daughter, he'll buy her an iPod, but that's another story ;)
Still, there is another problem. Since the late nineties, everything's been MP3. I believe you'd agree that converting MP3 to WAV, to reencode to AAC is a pure waste. So the only option remains to re-rip or re-purchase those songs and AAC them afterwards. You could also download flacs and/or apes of it, but most people just won't go through the trouble. Same with the MP3 to AAC thing: most people will not re-rip or re-download their tracks, just for quality's sake. Hell, with most headphones and earbuds that come with MP3 players, you could be playing 64kb/s 22kHz CBR MP3 and people wouldn't notice. They're not gonna go through the trouble, just for a format.
As for advocacy, the only (good) reason people still advocate MP3 over AAC is because MP3 is easily accessible to basically anyone with any music player, any OS, any computer, and because most of the songs people already have are in MP3, and work almost anywhere. (either that or they're un/misinformed stubborn fanboy kiddies ;) ) Compatibility and accessibility is where the issue is. It's the same with Musepack, or any other non-popular format. Because it's not popular, manufacturers won't support it. Because manufacturers won't support it, people won't encode to that format, hence it won't be popular. Because it's not popular... It's a vicious circle, but one that I don't see us escaping in the near future, because manufacturers want to, above all else, make money. AAC is great. But only (for now) if you have an iPod :)
That's like trusting Paul Thurrott to give you an honest review of operating systems. - gold - DenZ88, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I'll have to agree with Perk.
With my iPod 4g 60GB, PA2v2 amp and HD580s, I can hear the difference in more "lucid" recordings, especially piano solos. At 128kbs, sounds tend to be rather dry and the piano just doesn't sound as clear as it should be.
Because of this, I use Apple Lossless when I import most of my CDs, especially jazz and classical recordings to get the best quality as I can. Of course, I could just stay put at 320kbs or even a lower bit rate, but with 60 gigs on hand I really don't have to sacrifice quality for quantity.
However, I'll agree with this recording engineer that it really all depends on when and where you listen to your music. I listen to my iPod at home without any outside noise, and I usually relax focusing on every vibe of audio that flows through my HD580s in such a way that I would hear rough edges on quality. High bit rates are only just as good as the amount of concentration I put into my ears. - topher1078, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I still remember the days where you had to decode an mp3 to wav to listen to it, as my computer couldn't handle playing a compressed mp3. Good times, good times.
- FotoMalo, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Ken Rockwell is an idiot. Has been and always will be... He is known as one of the biggest morons in the photographic world with his "reviews" of cameras that he doesn't even own or even used. Anything that comes out of his mouth is mostly garbage. To him a good camera is the one he can afford and everything else is garbage. I bet 10 to 1 he doesn't even know what PCM stands for.
- birch25, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8that's the whole point of AAC (mp4), to get the same quality out out a lower bitrate.
- TheTap, on 10/12/2007, -9/+14You're serious?
I've been ripping my own MP3's (at 256k or higher) and listening them for 10 years now.
This guy JUST DISCOVERED MP3's and he wants to share his new find with me? I don't need him to have my own epiphany. What an idiot. He's at least a decade behind the rest of us and he wants to share his new find.
Next, he'll be telling us about a new pointing device he discovered that actually lets you move an arrow across your 14" CRT.
No Digg - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7..actually his main point is that new encoding methods have vastly improved the efficiency of compressed audio (which we all knew already)
- Carv, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12If you're using the AAC codec, 128k in AAC sounds about equal to 256k in MP3.
- wrinkles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I'm not sure that the 128KB AAC that you download is encoded the same as if you ripped a CD yourself with iTunes 128KB AAC. At least I hope they put more than 10 seconds or so into ripping a CD that will be downloaded to millions of people. Not all encoders are created equal, even if the final bitrate is the same.
- turing, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8perhaps this lad has been playing his studio headphones a bit too loudly over the years...i know plenty of people who can easily tell the difference between 128kbps aac and the original on even just halfway-decent listening equipment.
lossy encoding is a tradeoff. you must lose some of the data that makes up the music, but hopefully the losses made there are negligble enough such that the space gains outweigh any disadvantages. so, you should balance it based on YOUR preferences. if YOU really don't care/can't tell the difference with 128, then go along your merry way. However, I'd advice against storing your collection for archival purposes in lossy...one day you might decide that your music isn't as enjoyable as it could be on those apple earbuds! - astrosmash, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8So you've never seen someone link to Amazon before? Welcome to the internets.
- WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Well, for one thing, they're at 48kHz (encoded by the studios from masters) instead of 44.1kHz like CDs are...
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10The thing that bothers me most about this article, is that he is using a "headphone" jack to get the output of his iPod into his "high-end audiophile system". If he really was testing this, he'd use Airport Express or a Dock with an optical cable and get the music into his system without using DAC's on the iPod/Computer.
So what is he testing here? The AAC format? The headphone cable? Or the DAC on the iPod? If he was a pro he'd have broken it down. I still agree with his main point though, iPods sound damn good. - johnnylin, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Obviously people link to amazon. The problem here is that the link he provides is what is called a REFERRAL link, which means that the referrer gets money from each sale generated by the link.
This is problamatic because it means he wrote the article with the intention of trying to get a profit, not to try to actually give a nonbiased review. This means that he will, and has, purposely wrote a positive review, so that he might pocket some money.
Examine his only 2 main points:
1) turn on error correction
2) use proper encoding
Hardly "secrets" of itunes.
This entire article is obviously just a long advertisement. I was hoping I wouldn't have to explain all this because I figured people were competent enough to figure it out, but I guess not.
Review sites like Anandtech and Tom's hardware do comparative reviews/benchmarks, meaning it's difficult to fabricate the results and minimizes bias. Also, they aren't blantantly advertisements. Read this guy's article, he starts off telling the reader to buy an iPod using his referral link. Finally, the fact that the points this particular reviewer makes are fruitless, hardly "secrets", and without substance, means that I've no idea why 600 people digged this article. Because it has a catchy title, maybe?
Perhaps you ought to acquaint yourself with the workings of the internet. - gregh, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6For those comparing AAC and MP3, you may want to research the newest mp3 encoders, lame specifically. They have made huge strides in recent years, and many of the mp3's you download from the Internet surely aren't encoded with these better algorithms. 128 Kb ABR MP3 (average bit rate) gives very similar quality to 128 Kb VBR AAC according to most comparisons that I've read (and my own ears).
And I definitely agree with the EAC + FLAC comments above. - ultraelite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4this guy ^ about the uncompressed music is joking right I mean I'm thinking why go digital why buy an ipod at that point
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6if this was written when compressed audio was first unveiled, this would be very interesting. the problem is, it is the year 2006 and we all know this ***** already.
- nano, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7TFA is written by Ken Rockwell - a well known clown among digital camera enthusiasts. He speaks out of his ass more often than not. Don't waste your time reading the article.
- nwagers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This guy doesn't know anything about acoustics. I'm an engineer... $20 will get you into any society more or less. A real engineer would have done tests, provided real data about the output quality of an ipod. I work in an acoustics lab, if I find the time I'll get some real data up on the web.
- sbilik, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Overall, if you're not an audiophile purist, it had some nice guidelines for getting "good enough" sound. Talking about some of the semi-hidden switches made it digg-able.
- lollar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3MP3 is simply a proven recipe for success. Running a business these days is hard enough, it takes quite a bit of guts to start pushing something new, and a whole ton of luck to get people to adopt it. Many entrepreneurs invest their entire life savings to get their business up and running. If you invest all those dollars you saved up working hard for that PITA boss for all those years in something that might or might not work, you want to make damn sure it works. So you stick to what's safe. I can see where they're coming from, especially if the business is new in the field.
Existing, successful businesses, however, have no excuse. If you've got a product that's doing well, you should go out and do some experimentation, start researching and including other, newer technologies. Of course, they're thinking "Hell, I'm making $ off this thing, why should I take away from my profits to invest in something that might or might not work?". It's the same problem of when you're starting a business, instead it's now fueled by greed.
A great example of something most businesses *aren't* doing is Apple itself. Apple had the guts, and somehow had the luck in pushing a product featuring a new format (aac), beside the old one(mp3), thus making for AAC's gains in popularity (and smiles on the faces of people with decent headphones everywhere ;) ). Hell, the iPod is what rescued Apple in the first place (that and OS X). If it weren't for the iPod, I'd bet AAC would be just another fringe format, with less than .1% of the population using it.
Thing is, new companies in the field gamble with success and failure. Existing companies don't: they gamble with profits. Chances are they're making a killing anyway, so why not include a better, increasingly popular format in their products as well, while retaining compatibility with MP3?
Money.
Vicious circle.
We've got Apple to thank for having the courage to step up to the plate and improve things. Hopefully others will follow.
DRM... don't even get me started. - chosenone-, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Dude, you ever notice the "Ripping" leaflet in the iTunes settings? Yeah, drop-down box to select encoding in mp3.
- RexStJames, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I agree with the comment on not using iTunes to encode MP3s. I'm no audiophile, but I did do my own tests with 128kbs mp3s encoded in lame and in iTunes and I will swear to you I could very much tell the difference. I had my dad listen to them too when I was home (without telling him which was supposed to be better) and he easily picked out the iTunes encoded mp3 from the 128kbs lame encoded one. He couldn't, however, tell the difference between that and the 192kbs VBR lame encoded EAC rip, but I don't want to go and rip my music all over again later if I decide the quality isn't good enough, so that's how I rip mine. To each his own.
- scadam526, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6In the article he acknowledges that 128 kbps is too low for mp3 encoding and he recommends 192 kbps for mp3. When he says that 192 kbps is indistinguishable from 128 kbps he is talking about AAC, and I think he's right.
- Function, on 10/12/2007, -6/+91. 256k Mp3s are a lot bigger than a comparable AAC.
2. Mp3's have only been PORTABLE for a few years now, circa 2000, and the players that were available held practically nothing, not to mention the really crappy DACs in the players, as well as the tedious transfer times over USB 1.0
3. Storage price $/Gig hasn't really been costworthy until fairly recently.
If your a serious music lover, you aren't going to buy a Rio Mp3 player with a Crappy DAC and 256megs of storage in 1999-2000, it's only been fairly recently that iPods and other PMPs have been a viable alternative to vinyl records and CD's. Most people didn't even have the hard drive space (or the patience) to rip their entire music collection. It's very understandable to not get into digital music until now. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Sorry I guess you know more than the professional audio engineer who in his own words:
I was prejudiced after decades of designing my own recording equipment and working in and around the music and recording industries. Not only have I understood all the math behind digital since the 1970s, I even worked with one of the original designers of the MPEG audio standard and delivered a paper to the audio engineering industry's standards-setting body, the AES, in the 1990s. I've been a member of the AES also since the 1970s. Back a few years ago compressed digital audio wasn't that great and even at 384kbs you were making excuses.
Yeah, sure you know more than this guy... - SenyorDrew, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5wait wait, so is it worth upgrading my walkman that uses casettes? Does this "ipod" thing really work?
- frem001, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7Although the tips are useful, how many consumers actually notice the difference? The only tip i can suggest for ipod owners is to ditch the ***** headphones. my favorite ones are from shure, even their cheaper ones are great. iTunes is great, the reason ppl complain is because they are misinformed, but think they know better.
- tokyopimp, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I honestly can't tell the difference between AAC and MP3 at 192 or above. As long as they are properly ripped, and encoded they all should sound great.
- evalf, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3People interested in relevant information about all the codec and DAE issues should definitely check out that website: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php . There is an especially interesting category dedicated to blind testing the codecs and sharing the results.
- addisonj, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2As nice as AAC is, ripping at 224 VBR with LAME imho is just as high fidelity, the thing with mp3 is you really need to use a good encoder and LAME is the king. AAC is superior format per file size but by no means does it sound "better" than a higher bitrate ripped with a good encoder.
- thewordwasgod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3EAC secure mode with offset correction to single file FLAC+cuesheet or nothing.
- domokunt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3with flash and hard drive storage the way it is you might as well record 256kbps VBR and be done with it. I cant stand these morons who say "mp3 sucks" when most people play there over-compressed (at the studio) pop-music on tin-pot stereo speakers.
- norick, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9It's a good read, and unless successless I think that 128kps encoding scheme in AAC is quite perfect. Anyway, like a majority of people listen music in subway with ***** earbuds, that doesn't really matter.
But I don't use Itunes to encode my cds, I use other softwares and I encode in MP3, because it works everywhere, unlike the AAC. - godofpumpkins, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2it's ken rockwell... he has some interesting stuff on photography but is always rather one-sided in his articles (this is good and that's all there is to it, kinda stuff :) )
- thewordwasgod, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2EAC to single-file-per-album-FLACs+cuesheet. keep that as an archive and never have to rip again.
use fb2k to do mass encodes to single-file-per-track lossy files, i like oggs, but thats because i have a the hardware to play them.
HD storage is so cheap that bit-for-bit perfect archives are worth it for the convinience: regardless of the lossy technology of today, i can always convert to any future format, so long as i keep the lossless flacs around.
i have all my discs ripped, i rip them as i get them. 408 flacs, just under 80gb. - cphuntington97, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3The article just reeks of endorsement... I wonder how much amazon payed for it?
- fazalmajid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1On the Mac, try Max (http://sbooth.org/Max/), which is based on cdparanoia, for an EAC sort-of equivalent.
As for iTunes, "error correction", it is completely ineffective, at least on the Mac. I rip with Max and copy iTunes metadata using a bunch of applescripts. - scblock, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Jesus who gives a *****. How the hell does "hurr encode ur itunes at AAC" make the front page?
- prockcore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"Yeah, because MP3 uses a modified discrete cosine transform to encode complex audio (oh, it doesn't)"
Yes it does. MP3 uses MDCT on a PQF bank. Ogg applies MDCT directly to audio, as does AAC. Theora uses wavelets for both audio and video. - nabilanwar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Well one thing that everyone failed to mention is that AAC is the future and Mp3 will be a format of the past given 2 years time. The future of video is HD, with 2 formats HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Those who know this may also know that HD is based on AAC/H264 compression technologies. The future is Mpeg-4, not Mpeg-2. The other word for Mp3 is Mpeg-2 Layer 3. LAME is a fantastic encoder, being neck and neck with AAC. But the problem is AAC is the future for at least the next 5-6 years, whereas Mp3 development will halt.
I'd also like to say that i've ignored AAC like the plague until recently and my Music Library is still in 320kbps Mp3. I just need some time to sit down with my cd collection and EAC (even though i own an iMac, i'm not about to use iTunes for ripping). Word of caution to newbies who are just getting into the compression scene, never ever downconvert. Consider these enconders only when u have actual physical audio cds to rip from. -
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