What MP3 does to an Original Audio Track
I wrote this article for another site..but since a lot of people download MP3s..here is my contribution for anyone who is interested in these things...
I'm a big fan of lossless music formats (for downloading and backing up my albums). If you want to listen to compressed music with the minimum amount of quality loss of the original song, lossless music is the best and the closest you can get to perfection.
What is Lossy & Lossless?
There are 2 types of music compression formats in the internet.
Lossy - (MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg Vorbis)
1. Humans have a hearing range between 20 to 20,000Hz. What lossy formats do is remove frequencies of sound below 20Hz & above 20,000Hz. We think we are still hearing the same sound, as our ears cannot pick frequencies above or below the above mentioned range. This is not the only way as there are other ways lossy formats uses to reduce the file size such as-
2. If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one. By taking advantage of this inability in us, the codec removes the softer sound. Ex- imagine a quiet whisper following a loud sequence of music, The lossy encoder will see this and discard the bits representing soft notes immediately following loud ones.
3. Also certain sounds in a song can be removed by the codec, where it decides that the human ear cannot hear it. (We can hear certain sounds much better than others)
Using factors like these, MP3s give you a compressed song of about 10-12th the size of the original wav. But if you look closely what lossy formats do is remove data completely from the original wav to give you a near CD quality track with a reduced file size. But now using encoders like LAME (Worlds best MP3 encoder), Using the right Presets (V2,V0) & Using EAC (the best CD Ripper around) you can get the best possible copy of the original.
>> - How to make the best possible MP3s using EAC & LAME
But still it depends on the type of music you are trying to encode. Certain types of music are more difficult to encode than others (A Hip Hop track will be encoded much quickly and will be sounding much closer to the original than a Metal track because, a Metal track has lots more Transients in it and this may trick the encoder when it is deciding which bits of audio information to keep and which bits to discard. That’s why they say "MP3 is not cut out for Metal')
All in all mp3 was designed specifically to make the file smaller by any means necessary (even by completely destroying data) so that people could share it / transfer it in the internet and other small portable storage devices without much fuss.
Usually, lossy formats are meant for average speakers and stereo headphones only. When played through a Hi-Fi system, this loss becomes obvious, as these systems work by boosting certain frequencies into the audible range in audio. When these frequencies are absent in a MP3, the quality loss is clearly audible.
Lossless (FLAC, APE (Monkeys Audio), Windows & Apple Lossless formats)
The term "lossless" means no loss (the name speaks for itself ha?).. While Lossy codecs generate smaller files by removing bits from the original song that it thinks you won't notice when they're gone, Lossless codecs keep all the audio information contained in the original song by merely shrinking the file size. (compressing)
For example it works the same way as a zip file do. If you compress a file using Winzip, the zipped file have a much smaller size than the original. But when you unzip it, it will be back to its original form without a single bit of data missing right ? Lossless codecs are like Zip compression specifically designed for audio files.
In short, songs compressed with lossless codecs represent exact digital copies of the originals bit for bit.
>> Download FLAC here
A Simple Test
As I mentioned earlier Humans have a hearing range between 20 to 20,000Hz. But to capture any sound sample digitally you need to go double that amount. Thats 40,000Hz & you leave another 4100Hz for buffering. Thats how you end up with 44100Hz you see in your Winamp when plyaing a mp3.
So we know MP3 (Lossy) removes all data below 20Hz & above 20,000Hz while FLAC (Lossless) retains all the data of the original exactly as it is down to the final bit.
To see how it works-
1. I ripped a track off EAC as 1.Wav 2.MP3 (LAME V2 VBR New) & 3.FLAC (Level 8)
2. Then I loaded all the 3 tracks to Adobe Audition and viewed them seperatly in 'Spectral Frequency Display' mode
Original Wav Audio
Flac (Preset 8)
MP3 (LAME V2)
3. You Can clearly see how the MP3 is starting the chop around the 16,000Hz range
4. But Flac is identical to the Original wav
So the Verdict is simple.. If you are a quality freak like me..or is simply fed up with listening to low quality mp3s that sounds like shit.. or want to back up your CDs and want them to sound exactly like the original when burned to a CD..Then use Lossless
Tips
1. If you are using P2P (Torrents, usenet, ect.) always search for lossless format of the album you are looking to download.
Just type the keyword Lossless or FLAC in front of the album name you are searching.
These public trackers have a good collection of Lossless albums -
>> Mininova.org
>> thepiratebay.org
>> torrentreactor.net
>> btjunkie.org
2. You can be pretty sure that all FLACs in the internet are ripped straight off the CDs because thats the whole point of lossless music.. unlike in MP3s where people just re-encode low quality MP3s in higher bit rates thinking falsly that they can get higher quality MP3s out of it (Ex- a 128KBps MP3 re-encoded in 320KBps doesnt do shit because you cannot recreate the original music data which was lost when creating the 128KBps MP3 in the first place) [128KBps IS NOT CD QUALITY]
3. If you are encoding Metal, Symphonies or any such musical genre where you think it to have complicated music parts or Transients, encode it in FLAC not in MP3
4. If you wanna backup you cd collection in the hope of burning them to CDs later if your original CDs get damaged, then never encode them in a lossy format (MP3) because the data lost when encoding can never be recovered and the burnet CDs from the mp3s will never sound the same as the originals.. always encode them in Lossless & burn them to CDs and you cannot tell the difference from the original as there is no loss of quality
Good Listening
I wrote this article for another site..but since a lot of people download MP3s..here is my contribution for anyone who is interested in these things...
I'm a big fan of lossless music formats (for downloading and backing up my albums). If you want to listen to compressed music with the minimum amount of quality loss of the original song, lossless music is the best and the closest you can get to perfection.
What is Lossy & Lossless?
There are 2 types of music compression formats in the internet.
Lossy - (MP3, WMA, AAC, Ogg Vorbis)
1. Humans have a hearing range between 20 to 20,000Hz. What lossy formats do is remove frequencies of sound below 20Hz & above 20,000Hz. We think we are still hearing the same sound, as our ears cannot pick frequencies above or below the above mentioned range. This is not the only way as there are other ways lossy formats uses to reduce the file size such as-
2. If there are two sounds playing simultaneously, we hear the louder one but cannot hear the softer one. By taking advantage of this inability in us, the codec removes the softer sound. Ex- imagine a quiet whisper following a loud sequence of music, The lossy encoder will see this and discard the bits representing soft notes immediately following loud ones.
3. Also certain sounds in a song can be removed by the codec, where it decides that the human ear cannot hear it. (We can hear certain sounds much better than others)
Using factors like these, MP3s give you a compressed song of about 10-12th the size of the original wav. But if you look closely what lossy formats do is remove data completely from the original wav to give you a near CD quality track with a reduced file size. But now using encoders like LAME (Worlds best MP3 encoder), Using the right Presets (V2,V0) & Using EAC (the best CD Ripper around) you can get the best possible copy of the original.
>> - How to make the best possible MP3s using EAC & LAME
But still it depends on the type of music you are trying to encode. Certain types of music are more difficult to encode than others (A Hip Hop track will be encoded much quickly and will be sounding much closer to the original than a Metal track because, a Metal track has lots more Transients in it and this may trick the encoder when it is deciding which bits of audio information to keep and which bits to discard. That’s why they say "MP3 is not cut out for Metal')
All in all mp3 was designed specifically to make the file smaller by any means necessary (even by completely destroying data) so that people could share it / transfer it in the internet and other small portable storage devices without much fuss.
Usually, lossy formats are meant for average speakers and stereo headphones only. When played through a Hi-Fi system, this loss becomes obvious, as these systems work by boosting certain frequencies into the audible range in audio. When these frequencies are absent in a MP3, the quality loss is clearly audible.
Lossless (FLAC, APE (Monkeys Audio), Windows & Apple Lossless formats)
The term "lossless" means no loss (the name speaks for itself ha?).. While Lossy codecs generate smaller files by removing bits from the original song that it thinks you won't notice when they're gone, Lossless codecs keep all the audio information contained in the original song by merely shrinking the file size. (compressing)
For example it works the same way as a zip file do. If you compress a file using Winzip, the zipped file have a much smaller size than the original. But when you unzip it, it will be back to its original form without a single bit of data missing right ? Lossless codecs are like Zip compression specifically designed for audio files.
In short, songs compressed with lossless codecs represent exact digital copies of the originals bit for bit.
>> Download FLAC here
A Simple Test
As I mentioned earlier Humans have a hearing range between 20 to 20,000Hz. But to capture any sound sample digitally you need to go double that amount. Thats 40,000Hz & you leave another 4100Hz for buffering. Thats how you end up with 44100Hz you see in your Winamp when plyaing a mp3.
So we know MP3 (Lossy) removes all data below 20Hz & above 20,000Hz while FLAC (Lossless) retains all the data of the original exactly as it is down to the final bit.
To see how it works-
1. I ripped a track off EAC as 1.Wav 2.MP3 (LAME V2 VBR New) & 3.FLAC (Level 8)
2. Then I loaded all the 3 tracks to Adobe Audition and viewed them seperatly in 'Spectral Frequency Display' mode
Original Wav Audio
Flac (Preset 8)
MP3 (LAME V2)
3. You Can clearly see how the MP3 is starting the chop around the 16,000Hz range
4. But Flac is identical to the Original wav
So the Verdict is simple.. If you are a quality freak like me..or is simply fed up with listening to low quality mp3s that sounds like shit.. or want to back up your CDs and want them to sound exactly like the original when burned to a CD..Then use Lossless
Tips
1. If you are using P2P (Torrents, usenet, ect.) always search for lossless format of the album you are looking to download.
Just type the keyword Lossless or FLAC in front of the album name you are searching.
These public trackers have a good collection of Lossless albums -
>> Mininova.org
>> thepiratebay.org
>> torrentreactor.net
>> btjunkie.org
2. You can be pretty sure that all FLACs in the internet are ripped straight off the CDs because thats the whole point of lossless music.. unlike in MP3s where people just re-encode low quality MP3s in higher bit rates thinking falsly that they can get higher quality MP3s out of it (Ex- a 128KBps MP3 re-encoded in 320KBps doesnt do shit because you cannot recreate the original music data which was lost when creating the 128KBps MP3 in the first place) [128KBps IS NOT CD QUALITY]
3. If you are encoding Metal, Symphonies or any such musical genre where you think it to have complicated music parts or Transients, encode it in FLAC not in MP3
4. If you wanna backup you cd collection in the hope of burning them to CDs later if your original CDs get damaged, then never encode them in a lossy format (MP3) because the data lost when encoding can never be recovered and the burnet CDs from the mp3s will never sound the same as the originals.. always encode them in Lossless & burn them to CDs and you cannot tell the difference from the original as there is no loss of quality
Good Listening
.....with the help of the crystallizer.....Also noise sharpening DSP in foobar does wonders to mp3s.....
