What makes up an MP3

[Rod76]

This subject has been on my mind lately I'm in the market for an iPod and I'm wondering if I should just wait till I can afford the 10 Gb model. I don't really want to put more music on it just higher quality.... Now for my question.. What gets dropped when you create an MP3 ( I understand what happens to a JPEG and I can see the difference ) Would there be a noticeable difference listening to a song at 128 vs. 256 using good quality head phones?.....

[Jadey]

You would be able to hear the difference. Apple's, "1000 songs in your pocket" motto isn't based on 128bit encoded songs though. I haven't got an iPod (yet) myself, but a friend said that this was for 160 kb encoded songs. You could still fit several hundred songs on a 5 gigabyte iPod at 256 kb.

[nkuvu]

If you have poor hearing (like myself) it doesn't matter.

How about trying both yourself and seeing if it makes a difference? It doesn't take an iPod to make an MP3...

[ulrik]

The idea behind the MP3 encoding algorythm is quite simple. Lets imagine you hear a bee flying around you, and suddenly a car drives by. Both sounds "exist", both sounds enter your ear, but only the sound of the car is interpreted by your brain. MP3 uses this "flaw" of the human brain by removing "similar" sounds which you won't hear anyway. The less bits it hat to encode, the more sounds it has to drop, you will notice that the music get's "flat", basses are not as pumping, high tones are not that clear and loud. So basically, the lower the bitrate, the more "flat" the MP3 song will sound. Anything from 128 and above is nearly unnoticable for an untrained ear, even 96 mbit is good enough to take the music with you IMHO.

Then again there is variable bitrate, but I heard some iPods have problems with that. Mine hasn't, and I think these problems are fixed already with some new iPod firmware.

excuse my bad english, I'm german.

[rusto]

Another good analogy is the JPEG image format: take an original image and save it several different files, each at increasing amounts of jpeg compression. Then open all of your new jpegs and compare them side by side.

The JPEG compression scheme does a similar thing that MP3 does, it tosses out what could be unnoticed information to gain smaller filesizes...

more compression = smaller file = lower quality

less compression = larger file = higher quality

Before I got accessory speakers for my b&w G3, I was content with 128 bps mp3's, never noticed the lack of quality...but after I got them, nothing less than 160 was acceptable.

[dschep]

Originally posted by rusto

more compression = smaller file = lower quality

less compression = larger file = higher quality


This isn't always true the quality of compression also matters for example an AAC (some thing to do with mpeg 4 go to the QT website for info) makes smaller files than mp3's (mpeg-1 layer 3) with the same quality

[rusto]

apples and oranges then, yes?

[mervTormel]

i gotta agree with rusto there; given a compression codec, his description stands.