Digital Music

[Wrench722]

What is stuff like MP-3, MPEG, WAV, and so on? I am trying to find the clearest the best recording sound. I have down loaded a lot of music and some sounds good and some sound like crap.

I am also looking for a good place to down load good and clean music and not spend a arm and a leg.

[Dennie]

One of the most important things to remember is.......You Get What You Pay For!

Try this---------------------> CLICK HERE FOR HD TRACKS - opens in new window

Dennie

[runninshine]

Look into FLAC.

[ttrhp]

wrench,

I just bought an external usb dac for my laptop/external hard drive that can store thousand of CD..you are not too far from me so if you need any help just pm me your number and we can set a date/time for you to come by and check it out.

[skonopa]

What is stuff like MP-3, MPEG, WAV, and so on? I am trying to find the clearest the best recording sound. I have down loaded a lot of music and some sounds good and some sound like crap.

I am also looking for a good place to down load good and clean music and not spend a arm and a leg.

Ah yes, the wonderful world of digital music...

Now, granted, there are some "format snobs" on here that will swear that the only good music is on vinyl with tubes, but, personally, I find there is a lot to offer using the digital music. For one thing, it is a hell of a lot more convienient and with a bit of diligence, you can get a very fine sounding recordings via the digital realm. There is nothing like being able to call up my music sever with some 10,000 tracks and with a couple clicks of the mouse or press of a button, and got an album playing through my rig.

For the best possible quality, try to go with one of the "lossless" encoding formats.

WAV or Waveform Audio is the raw, full, uncompressed representation of the music as ripped from a CD. In term of space, it takes up about 10 megabytes per minute of music. However, the music you get will be identical as that on the CD from which it came.

Next comes compressed formats, but that are lossless, in that in the compression, these formats don't "thow away" anything, thus you will still get exactly the music like it would be on the original CD, but able to save some space on your storage medium (be it on your laptop, an external harddrive, or my case, a music server). One of the most common/popular/better known, is called FLAC or Free Lossless Audio Codec. Another one, if you are using iTunes with iPods or on Macs, is Apple Lossless. These typcially run about 5 megabytes/minute of music.

Then comes the so-called "lossy" formats. The most common is the venerable MP3, or MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3. There used to be a so-called MP-2, but that is very rarely, if ever, seen anymore. Another common one is often refered to AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding. This is the format most commonly associated with iTunes, but it is certainly not exclusive to iTunes. Another somewhat common format, at least if you using the locked up subscriptions servies, that you will encounter is WMA, or Windows Media Audio. This is pretty much a Microsoft format, and is often saddled with DRM (Digital Rights Managment) when obtained from any of the commercial download services, such as Rhapsody or Napster. Just for that reason alone, I tend to avoid anything in WMA format. DRM is the restrictions they try to place on the files to keep you from copying it or playing on more than one PC.

If not for the lossless encodings (or for me, just simply playing the CD itself), I typcially just stick with the MP3 format, as I am guranteed that it will play on just about anything that I can throw at it. MP3's are typically encoded to a "bit rate", with the higher bit rate being better/higher quality. As a standard rule of thumb, I would not go any less than 128 kbps (kilobits per second), for anything even remotely listenable on a decent setup. Maybe if you really need to save space, for say on a portable MP3 player for working out at the gym, this will be good, but beyond that, I'd try to stick with the better quality bit rates and formats. I personally will not except anything less than 192 kbps, and if all possible try to keep everything at the maxium 320 kbps. I've found for most typical listening sessions, it is very difficult (and depending on the recording itself, nigh impossible), to tell the difference from the original CD. As for downloading music, I primarily use eMusic, Amazon.com, and LaLa.com. All of these provide standard DRM-free MP3, typically in 256 variable-bit-rate (that is, it varies the bit rate depending on the music, i.e., quite passages with not much going on can get away with lower bit rate, but louder, much busier, passages needs a higher bit rate). I've gotten some really excellent recordings off of eMusic, despite them being in the lossy MP3 format.

Typically, MP3 formatted files take the following space, depending on bit-rate

128 kbps - about 1 meg/minute of music

192 kbps - about 1.5 megs/minute

320 kbps - about 2 megs/minute.

As you can see, compare the 5 to 10 megs/minute for the lossless, the lossy formats can save space, but at the cost of some quality to the recording itself.

My suggestion is that if you have the hardware that can play it back - go with FLAC if you are ripping your own collection to a computer. In this day and age of cheap 500+ gig drives, you can still hold A LOT of music, but still retain the full quality of the original recording. Beyond that, you will just have to shop around the download services and see what format/quality they provide thier music in.

If you are using Apple hardware, such as MacBook Pro and iPods, than it may be worth it to use the Apple Lossless format that is provided in the iTunes software.

Hope this helps.

[Brockybear]

I would recommend FLAC and Apple Lossless if you use iTunes. The trick is to use the best bit depth 16-24 and the best sample rate 44.5-192khz the higher sample rate the better. If you go to http://www.linnrecords.com/ you can download Studio Master Recordings at 24bit 192kz which is the closest you will get to human hearing. There is a real movement downloading high quality recordings that surpase CD quality. You will need a high quality sound card like an ASUS Xonar or Creative X-Fi that has optical or Sony SPDIF output and a high quality DAC like the Cary Xciter DAC. The way it is going now the CD i dead. I think ultra high quality downloads will spell the death knell for this low resolution 80's technology.

[smokarz]

sorry, why would you need an external DAC?

isn't connecting your sound card directly to the receiver via toslink/coaxial is good enough. given that you have a solid sound card?

at least, that's how my system is currently set up. and i have a very capable card from HT Omega.

[Brockybear]

Hi smokarz I have a Asus Xonar soundcard with SPDIF output. The problem is my preamp and amplifiers are valve so I need the DAC to convert the digital signal to analogue.