Lowering Music Quality

Reeves · Wed 04 Oct, 2006 17.13

At the HMV website you can see that song previews are only 30secs and play at 32kbps. I am trying to downgrade a few songs myself to this kind of quality.

I've tested on a few CDs, ripping them using WMP and converting them to WMA files. They only go as low as 64kbps and, to be honest, I can't notice any difference in the quality.

Does anybody know how I can downgrade music to as low as 32kbps?

Many thanks

Andrew Wood · Wed 04 Oct, 2006 17.58

Strange turn of events, really.

Going back to when CDs were becoming mainstream, people were bemoaning the lower quality and not hearing the subtle nuances cut out of the audio by compression.

Now we've all got PCs and mp3 players, it's more about how much can we compress stuff so as to get more on a device - forgetting quality!

Ant · Wed 04 Oct, 2006 17.59

nodnirG kraM wrote:Off topic i know, but why on earth would you want to listen to music of such terrible quality!? I can't personally stand hearing a 128k MP3 - most of my music is at least 192 VBR OGG and even at 320 I can tell the difference between OGG and CD.

dbPoweramp does conversions down to about 8k. As does Cool Edit/Adobe Audition.

Most of my music is in 128k and I don't really notice much of a difference. I suppose it just depends on what you're used to.

Chris · Wed 04 Oct, 2006 20.42

Reeves wrote:At the HMV website you can see that song previews are only 30secs and play at 32kbps. I am trying to downgrade a few songs myself to this kind of quality.

I've tested on a few CDs, ripping them using WMP and converting them to WMA files. They only go as low as 64kbps and, to be honest, I can't notice any difference in the quality.

Does anybody know how I can downgrade music to as low as 32kbps?

Many thanks

Why, just why? The preview clips on the HMV website are AWFUL - they are nothing short of telephone quality if not worse.

Hard drive space is ten to a penny these days and even an 80Gb is very cheap and will hold hours of uncompressed music. It's highly ironic that as hard drive space gets cheaper and plentiful, people seem to want to compress their music even more.

And I loathe the current trend of having compressed-to-hell and back MP3s being played through mobile phone speakers. A painful experience for those around them.

Recently, I had to borrow someone's mobile phone to make a call (I do not have one), and I was amazed at the lack of sound quality compared to that of a landline to landline call. The whole call sounded underwater, even though we were pretty much standing under the base station, the battery was full and the signal was excellent. I had to ask the person at the other end to repeat what they were saying because I couldn't make out what they were saying.

Rather than compressing everything to hell and back, I am going back to nice uncompressed audio - all of the wavs I now have (as ipposed to MP3s) sound much richer compared to the compressed ones. And I remember going back ages ago from listening to Radio 2 on Freeview to good old FM and the quality of audio was astounding - the FM sounded much richer, plentiful in bass and full of beans when compared to the Freeview stream which was flat, over compressed (in terms of audio format compression not dynamic compression) and sounded horrible compared to FM.

I am shocked at how low people will go these days when it comes to audio quality.

Bail · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 00.09

WMA encodes better than MP3 at lower bit rates, go for a low bit rate mp3. If you have Audition you can turn it into a batch process and get all the files lowered on its own...

As for quality, I'm a fan of winamp which for mean means OGG files are a bit unstable but I refuse to download/rip mp3s under 192k min. I always rip at 320 where I can. The main reason why I like allofmp3 is that you can choose the encoding format. And yes, I can very defiantly tell the difference between 96k/s 128k/s and 320k/s

For example:

320k/s - 909KB - Perfect

128k/s - 363KB - OK, but the high end treble from the drums is gone

96k/s - 273KB - You can still hear it, but it sounds "mushy"

20k/s - 57KB - The "preview" version from a website, ghastly!

Now obviously the higher the rate the bigger the filesize, but in the days of Terrabite harddrives and iPods, who cares? I've not even come close to filling my iPod up, despite the 320file being twice the size of the "normal" 128 version.

Anonymous · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 10.38

is it okay if I put up an animated avatar on my profile?

Pete · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 12.25

pepperchips wrote:is it okay if I put up an animated avatar on my profile?

no it's not you home schooled freak

Gavin Scott · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 12.58

Hymagumba wrote:
pepperchips wrote:is it okay if I put up an animated avatar on my profile?
no it's not you home schooled freak

He's a spambot, isn't he?

Spencer For Hire · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 12.58

Bail wrote:For example:
320k/s - 909KB - Perfect
128k/s - 363KB - OK, but the high end treble from the drums is gone
96k/s - 273KB - You can still hear it, but it sounds "mushy"
20k/s - 57KB - The "preview" version from a website, ghastly!

Although to be fair that song sounds ghastly at any bit-rate.

Reeves · Thu 05 Oct, 2006 19.49

So besides all the critisism of the sound quality, can anyone answer my question?

Neil Jones · Fri 06 Oct, 2006 00.05

Reeves wrote:So besides all the critisism of the sound quality, can anyone answer my question?

See post above this one.

Also Media Player will let you rip in WMA at 44k sampling rate, though it won't be any different to your preferred 32k apart from being slightly bigger. Personally I would not go below 128k sampling rate though, but if you're happy listening to music that sounds like it's being played in a wind tunnel, then go for it.