On Wednesday, November 28, 2001, at 03:38 , Eckhart Koeppen wrote:
>> What level of compression do you use? I have it
>> on the second best and the sound is really great.
>
> I use 128kbit and generally, that sounds good enough. The hard drive of
> the iPod is a bit too small for me, so I have to get the file size down.
> I might however go with VBR encoding (128kbit minimum) in the future.
I use VBR all the time and I can definitely recommend it.
When I used SoundJam to encode I had to test-encode at various rates and
check afterwards which one was the smallest size at which I would not
spot the difference anymore. This was a bit cumbersome, but eventually I
got a feeling for what kind of music would need what kind of settings to
deliver a compact file at good quality.
Various Hard Rock (mostly saturated): 80 Kbps, high quality
Rock, Pop, Folk, Chansons, Canzoni, Salsa: 96Kpbs, high quality,
but sometimes depending on the piece highest quality or even higher
bitrate
for example, Angelo Branduardi almost always requires at least 112Kbps,
highest quality
Classical Music: 112Kbps, highest quality, but some pieces will do with
lower bitrate.
The VBR in conjunction with high or highest will give you a good
indication how much breathing space you'll need. For example, you might
encode Anatol Ugorski with some piano piece and think it's fine at 96,
highest, but it turns out that it went up to 160 during VBR encoding.
This largely depends on the piece but also on the interpret, i.e. the
same piece with another pianist was happy with 115. PS: If you like
piano and haven't heard of Ugorski, get yourself a CD now - the guy is
fantastic!
However, now I am using iTunes and it seems to me that the encoder is
much better or whatever else, I can't spot the difference between
various bitrates as I did when using SoundJam. Even when cross checking
(encoding on one, decoding on the other) it occurs to me that iTunes
does a better job.
So now, I use 96, high for modern and 112, highest for classical, but
always with VBR.
At home I have a BOSE high end soundsystem with a subwoover, directly
attached to my G4. It has an A-B switch built-in, so I can switch over
to input from my Onkyo stereo (also high end). I used that feature to
play the same piece from CD and off iTunes and switch between the source
for comparison, but nobody could ever spot a difference other than on
very old MP3s that I did years ago when decoders weren't as plenty and I
didn't have any experience what settings to use then (i.e. Van Halen at
64Kpbs makes a noticeable difference but not as much as to rush into
encoding it all over again, unless of course you are a Van Halen fan,
that is ;-)
All in all, I can say that if you have good encoder/speakers/headset,
then you are likely to be fine with VBR at much lower base bitrates and
able to save yourself some disk space.
According to iTunes, my MP3 library is 840 pieces, 2 days 23 hours 30
minutes and it occupies 2.72GB on an HFS+ filesystem. There are about
10-10 old pieces encoded with fixed bitrate below 80Kbps and there are
about 5 or so pieces encoded above 128Kbps. The majority is in the range
of 96 to 118.
That's 4290 minutes of music / 2785MB = 1.54MB per minute on average.
rgds
BK
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