mp3 sucks

[1wob2many]

Here's an article from 2009:

http://productionadvice.co.uk/why-mp3-sounds-bad/

[jalcide]

Yup. MP3s are terribad.

Those of us old enough to remember the golden age of CDs (16, 44.1, uncompressed PCM), what you now pay a premium for on Beatport as "lossless," were only happy with MP3s because it provided a reasonable way, in the 90s, to get your stuff heard on this new thing called "the internet," over dial-up modems.

It was amazing! More people than could fit in your basement studio, could hear your stuff and from around the world.

So, we were okay with the loss in quality. Which we ALL noticed because we all had been listening to lossless audio (a.k.a. CDs) for several years by then.

The fact it's now 2015, with internet speeds on our telephones-in-our-pockets faster than what an entire business with "T1s" could afford in the 90s, yet we're STILL LISTENING TO AND SELLING lossy audio, feels like an episode of Sliders (a 90s reference to a television series where parallel universe jumpers end up in eerily similar, but slightly different versions of earth's history).

We had lossless audio. It was good. We figured it out. And now it's almost like we don't have it anymore.

We've gone backwards in time to before cassette tape (I'll take analog cassette over digital lossy formats).

I understand why, but it's still weird to me.

Just wait, Apple is going to come out with a wireless "HI FI / HQ" format that is still, somehow, lossy audio.

They'll spend billions trying to convince us why it's better than even lossless 16/44.1.

And it will all be so that they can shave some bucks off the cloud storage and bandwidth costs they'll be bundling with it for "free," not for any earnest notion of what's best from an audiophile's perspective.

[fedexnman]

MP3 done at 256 or 320 are fine .

[1wob2many]

MP3 done at 256 or 320 are fine .

...for a given value of fine.

For listening to music at home on my hi-fi they are not fine.

For listening to music on my iP*d (when there's likely to be some sort of background noise and I'm listening on headphones/earbuds, i.e. far from ideal listening conditions) they are fine.

[MFXxx]

The smaller the speaker, the more apt mp3.

[Obsolete236871]

MP3 done at 256 or 320 are fine .

I find it hard to enjoy music in 256 MP3 format, 320 MP3s are bearable, but far from optimal sounding - especially if you know how a specific record sounds from a lossless or analogue medium.

I wonder though why superior encoding technologies like FLAC are still not so widely supported?

[Hink]

Well I don't know what age you are but some of us were around long before the Internet was even invented. MP3 was and is, small and portable. It's become the accepted standard. Flac would be better now but can you imagine trying to get the entire world to change, just so they could hear your music in a better quality format? Kids these days even believe that MP3 sounds better than ''wav'' anyway. Etc...

I remember lugging around a CD player with a single CD in it as a young teen a decade ago when I wanted to listen to something if that gives you an idea. I can see the convenience but at a certain point for some music....

well there's part of your problem no offense, it's all relative. Many of us remember lugging around portable tape players, mine was 8-track and the blue one of these until I switched to cassette then I had a bunch of boomboxes.



but I did also have what was then pretty much state a of the art 8-track recorder (cartridge not multi-track) and later decent cassette decks. The world changed when CDs came out because there was no loss of the quality of the sound from just playing the music. Tape, both cassetes and 8-tracks, had a limit on how long they would last and the truth is so did LPs. Sure the first few times you listened to a tape it was good, but if you didn't keep your heads clean it could get the tape dirty, forget about it you got a tape close a magnet.

If you were smart you recorded your own tapes from an LP so you could preserve the LP and not have to keep buying the album. When a tape wore out you dug out the LP and re-recorded it. Again if you were recording it yourself you could go with a decent tape (for cassette my choice was a 90 minute maxell udlxII) but if you bought prerecorded tapes instead of buying the lp and recording the tape yourself you were getting the lowest quality tape there was which might give you 20-25 listens before you started hearing issues.

Capstans would pinch the tape too hard and it was very common for the tape deck to eat the tape. If you left a tape out that was in the middle of the tape it would pick up dirt and other stuffs and that spot would soon have noticeable audio issues so you needed to make sure that you always rewound (or fast forwarded) to the leader to protect the recorded material. But even doing that only meant you were delaying the inevitable because every time you played a tape some audio quality was lost. Then there was the hiss, even with noise reduction it was still a problem and you had to mark your tapes with what noise reduction you used so you could play it back with the same or there would be no NR.

Now when it came to recording your own music the same principles held true, if you had a 4-track you had to make sure you didn't over work your song because every time you played it it lost quality. If you were like me doing many takes, using a second tape deck to mix down to as opposed to bouncing tracks you saved that sound some but still the rerecording process lost some audio quality. You also had to make sure you used a 60 minute tape, 90 minutes was risky and 120 was suicide as the tape was thinner and often broke under the constant rewinding you did when recording. But rarely would anyone come close to the quality of a bad MP3.

Like I said it's all relative, you had your first taste as it were with a format that had little to no loss from playing and very little care is needed with a CD so I can see how MP3 seems like a step backward for you. However for me MP3 is a far cry better than listening to pops, squirggles, dead spots on tapes, lots of hiss (and I mean lots of hiss) so for me MP3's are a huge step forward, especially as I was very hard on LPs and tapes. There are many albums I have owned on multiple LPs, multiple 8-track tapes, multiple cassette tapes but only one cd. Naturally those were ripped years ago into my collection so I have the MP3 as well (ripping is a lot easier and less time consuming than recording a tape).

It all depends on how you look at it I guess, but before MP3 never could I listen to thousands of songs without ever having an audio issue and do so on something as small as a modern cell phone.

[jancivil]

MP3 done at 256 or 320 are fine .

I find it hard to enjoy music in 256 MP3 format, 320 MP3s are bearable, but far from optimal sounding - especially if you know how a specific record sounds from a lossless or analogue medium.

I wonder though why superior encoding technologies like FLAC are still not so widely supported?

I would bet the rent that in a blind test you don't hear it unless you're missing artifacts from vinyl. Certainly not the superiority of FLAC.
EDIT: I mean I'm going to work with audio as .wav or .aif and I may as well work in 32-bit fp. Technically almost everyone here perfectly knows from 'lossy'.
But the end product, unless you have a shite decode, I have become totally skeptical that anyone hears the difference.

[Deep Purple]

Most of the time I can't tell the difference. The only time I can really tell is if I play the original and the mp3 one after the other so I can compare.

Yes, it's a lossy format, but listen to a bunch of recordings from the 1920s to 1960s and tell me they weren't lossy back then. We've unfortunately become accustomed to extremely high fidelity recordings and get too critical of the format rather than listen to the music.

[Zombie Queen]

Oh, audiophloppie legends. Best is to do some blind tests. I did and well, I'm unable to tell 192kbps mp3 from a CD, as far as it concerns popular music, rock, electronic, dance, folk whatever. I found compression barely audible on classical stuff, where there are some actual quiet parts. And the only music that gets really hurt by mp3 is noise, stuff like Merzbow, full scale broadband noise, just doesn't fit the bandwidth.

[jancivil]

Also who downloads to listen to a track? >.>

I do - especially for analysis purposes.

If I care, I would download the .wav because 128 is in some cases so degraded. I used to not mind using SC to share music but I quit. I made something a bit more bottom-heavy one day and I couldn't stand it. and I wasn't about to remaster for Soundcloud, I'm not a fan really.

[cron]

Oh, audiophloppie legends. Best is to do some blind tests. I did and well, I'm unable to tell 192kbps mp3 from a CD, as far as it concerns popular music, rock, electronic, dance, folk whatever. I found compression barely audible on classical stuff, where there are some actual quiet parts. And the only music that gets really hurt by mp3 is noise, stuff like Merzbow, full scale broadband noise, just doesn't fit the bandwidth.

Indeed, I'd like to see ABX results from the people above. Foobar + ABX Comparator - foolproof and free (for Windows users). ABX results should be mandatory when discussing perceived failings of even modestly high bitrate MP3. By perceived failings, I mean anything that isn't 100% transparent to the lossless source. Not something that sounds 'good enough'. 320 is 'bearable'? Cassette sounded better than mp3? Pur-leaze.

You're bang on the money with the noise comment. One thing I often see posted is along the lines of "if you're only listening to overcompressed pop music I understand, but for things like classical there's the world of difference". It's actually precisely the other way around. Classical music is typically exceptionally easy to encode - you'll often see mp3-like bitrates when you losslessly compress certain types of classical music (especially anything largely composed of smooth string section type sounds). All these audiophiles talking about how mp3 sounds 'duller' or 'flatter'. Nobody ever mentions pre-echo. In my experience, a file that is non-transparent to the original (at sensible bitrates) usually comes down to a single flammed transient.

[Tricky-Loops]

Since I have a 10,000 Terabyte hard disk, I only download lossless WAV files with more than 100 MB per song!

Seriously, because of my slow Internet connection - max. 160 kbps - (and a download limit of 8 GB a month!), sometimes I even listen to 24 or 32 kb mp3 internet radios, and my ears are still okay...

My own songs I publish as 192 kb mp3, I cannot upload huge WAV files, anyway!

[Tricky-Loops]

If it's all about 100 % perfect, clean sound, why do people still go to live concerts where the noise floor is even higher than the stage?

And why there are so many "live albums" where they add noises from the audience?

[cron]

My own songs I publish as 192 kb mp3, I cannot upload huge WAV files, anyway!

Assuming you mean 192 CBR (constant bit rate), consider getting LAMEdrop or similar and using one of the 'V' presets. The V presets create VBR (variable bitvrate) mp3s. Aiming to create VBR mp3s with an average bitrate of 192 kbps will yield much better results. More modern codecs such as AAC and Ogg don't even have CBR modes.