MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by folderol »

My understanding is that mp3 players that aren't steam driven will handle just about any bitrate they are given. Personally I use LAME VBR (variable bit rate) and so far I've not had any complaints.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by sysrqer »

128 is pretty bad quality, and so is 160 and 192. That said, the encoders have improved a lot since the days these rates were widely used. There's no point to such low rates now though, vbr is superior than fixed rates, use V2 if you must have a smaller file, V0 for any other case pretty much.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by Lyberta »

I use 320 kbit/s by default.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by Luc »

128kbps is the standard for a reason. That's all you and listeners need unless you're making music for dogs or aliens. For which you too would have to be a dog or an alien, or you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Or unless you're just stubborn, which is quite the quaint trait among humans. I am stubborn too, so I like to use 192kbps when I care more than I really should. But I admit it's mere superstition. When I really care, I use WAV.

Whether you encode your sounds into 32 or 320kbps, the media player doesn't care. It can play them all. Neither do "normal people."

Some players won't handle ID3tag v2 or v1 though, so I suggest including both.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by sysrqer »

Luc wrote:128kbps is the standard for a reason.
Yes, mostly for legacy reasons, not because the quality is fantastic.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by Luc »

Here, take a test:

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/mp3 ... t-128-320/

But don't cheat by asking your dog to help.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by MattKingUSA »

I do 320. But... yeah 128 is fine. And 8 is fantastic. Hahaha

-Matt :D

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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by folderol »

128k sounds absolute crap if you've got a track with a lot of HF such as cymbals, high hat, etc. being 'enthusiastically' played.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by Lyberta »

I would advise against using MP3 at all as it's a proprietary format.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by lykwydchykyn »

Luc wrote:128kbps is the standard for a reason. That's all you and listeners need unless you're making music for dogs or aliens. For which you too would have to be a dog or an alien, or you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
Woof WOof and Nanu-Nanu. It depends on the source material and the encoder, but 128 often has noticable artifacts to my ears, usually in the form of a splattery jingle-bells type sound in the high-end (cymbals or buzzy guitars).
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by lykwydchykyn »

Back when I was first encoding my band's tracks to mp3 in the late '90's and uploading them via dialup to mp3.com, the size difference between bitrates was significant, and we spent a lot of time agonizing over how small we could make our music without compromising too much on quality.

Today storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap. Why compromise your music? If you hear artifacts in your mp3, make it higher quality. If not, no worries. When I encode some of my songs with lame at 128, I hear junk. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it just sounds "not right" in some subtle way.
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Re: MP3 Export, 128 or 160 kbps?

Post by MattKingUSA »

lykwydchykyn wrote:Back when I was first encoding my band's tracks to mp3 in the late '90's and uploading them via dialup to mp3.com, the size difference between bitrates was significant, and we spent a lot of time agonizing over how small we could make our music without compromising too much on quality.

Today storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap. Why compromise your music? If you hear artifacts in your mp3, make it higher quality. If not, no worries. When I encode some of my songs with lame at 128, I hear junk. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it just sounds "not right" in some subtle way.
My introduction to mp3 was someone in 98 telling me "You can fit a whole cd on a floppy disk!". Haha you still can but the quality would be like listening to an album over a phone line.

-Matt :D

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