Poll: At what bitrate do you encode music?

[LikeLinus]

I have everything lossless FLAC/ALAC and a copy in AAC 256k or 320kbps MP3 for my car/phone.

 

[sdifox]

Long drives?

No, just something to torture the kids with xd.

 

[IronWing]

Why not just stream? Spotify is 320k anyway so...

I prefer that musicians get paid for their work.

 

[WelshBloke]

I prefer that musicians get paid for their work.

I have CDs from decades ago. The artists are making nothing from those everytime I listen.

 

[Thump553]

For home listening or archival purposes, FLAC-been doing that for at least twenty years.

I spend a lot of time in the car. Unless I can pick up a decent college station/show or am in a NPR mood, I play music off my phone on a random basis our of an approximately 2500 tune collection. Given how noisy cars are, I generally don't even mess with quieter tracks, so audio quality is a lesser priority than available storage space (damn modern phones) so the car tracks are 128 bit MP3s (now AAC since now using an iphone).

Let me divert this thread a bit. Is there anyone besides me that thinks iTunes is perhaps the most unintuitive major piece of software ever? I miss my android phone where I could easily drag and drop music on or off my phone. I recently spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out how to take an album off my phone and/or add just one new album from my home computer's library of mp3s/AAC. Never did get it done. Something that would take a couple of seconds on my old android phone (or the antiquated Windows phone before it).

 

[sdifox]

For home listening or archival purposes, FLAC-been doing that for at least twenty years.

I spend a lot of time in the car. Unless I can pick up a decent college station/show or am in a NPR mood, I play music off my phone on a random basis our of an approximately 2500 tune collection. Given how noisy cars are, I generally don't even mess with quieter tracks, so audio quality is a lesser priority than available storage space (damn modern phones) so the car tracks are 128 bit MP3s (now AAC since now using an iphone).

Let me divert this thread a bit. Is there anyone besides me that thinks iTunes is perhaps the most unintuitive major piece of software ever? I mess my android phone where I could easily drag and drop music on or off my phone. I recently spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out how to take an album off my phone and/or add just one new album from my home computer's library of mp3s/AAC. Never did get it done. Something that would take a couple of seconds on my old android phone (or the antiquated Windows phone before it).

They were on bad drugs when they designed that.

 

[bigboxes]

If I'm ripping the source myself, it's 320kbps CBR. Stream over Plex when not local.

 

[MrSquished]

320

 

[Fallen Kell]

Mine are encoded to flac and 320 (my car does not support flac on its built in player).

 

[CP5670]

I use ogg at 256-320kbps. I mostly listen to electronic music from games, and FLAC is nice but often not worth it when the music and instrument samples are not top quality to begin with.

 

[Oyeve]

Back when I started creating MP3s from my disks I used 128k because in the early 90s HDs were expensive and space was a premium. Now, I redid most of my collection at 320k minimum but for the most part I just create a wav file and leave it at that. Space is so cheap any my main PC is at 20TB of SSD and I have so many NAS boxes with even more TBs.

 

[damian101]

I always set quality instead of bitrate when possible.
When encoding to a lossy format I normally choose Vorbis with the aoTuV encoder with Lancer patch, normally at quality 5 (~160 kbit/s, tends to overshoot), or 7 (~224 kbit/s) for transparency even in rare edge cases.

For Opus a target bitrate of as low as 112 kbps
(tends to overshoot quite a bit) normally sounds transparent to me and is pretty much on par with libvorbis q5 (~160 kbit/s). For transparency even in rare edge cases I go with a target bitrate of 192 kbps.

 

[damian101]

For MP3 I never bothered with constant bitrate, I always chose one of the three presets of the LAME encoder, "medium, "standard" or "extreme".
Constant bitrate is a waste of space.

 

[mikeymikec]

Flac, and convert to 320 kbps mp3 if needed

That would be my logic if not for the "if needed" bit (which would be a showstopping PITA considering the mobility of music these days, all on my phone for example). I suppose these days the likelihood of a device not reading FLAC is minimal, but I'd still need to rip my whole collection again. When I made the decision to start ripping my CDs around the year 2000, I tested out mp3 on various settings and initially settled on 256kbit constant bitrate (I wasn't aware of VBR back then), and couldn't tell the difference between it and the original, so to me going back and FLAC'ing the lot would be much like ripping my whole film collection again on slightly optimised settings: Too much time and effort for not enough benefit.

Let me divert this thread a bit. Is there anyone besides me that thinks iTunes is perhaps the most unintuitive major piece of software ever?

iTunes (for Windows at any rate) is pretty badly designed. It suffers from what one could mistake as 'feature creep', but I think the Apple design philosophy of 'keep it simple' translated into something akin to a person tidying a house by sweeping up everything without an obvious home under various rugs.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I tried itunes a long time ago. I do remember liking it's randomizer. It seemed to pick popular music from just hundreds of albums worth of music, like it knew which songs to pick. *shrug*

 

[dlerious]

FLAC. I use one of my DAPs when I'm mobile / away from home.

 

[NINaudio]

Flac for home use, 256kbps MP3 for the car

 

[Grabo]

FLAC or ALAC from cd/ store (Bandcamp, one sure can find any obscure artist found on YT there) because, well, if I'm going to save audio files lossless makes sense.

They are encoded as m4a (aac) via fdkaac "m4" which is a vbr mode that gives files approx as large as YT original audio m4a (which is 128kbps aac cbr) but in theory pads the sections of songs that need it with bits from other places. Tags are preserved.

I like Bandcamp because flac and you can engage with artists and I like to imagine they get paid a bit more than via youtube music or spotify. Yes, one can stream everything, that would require a more expensive phone plan as well as a streaming music service subscription and couldn't use it in my current car anyway.

Flacbox is great for iOS for playing local files.

 

[Justinus]

FLAC or ALAC from cd/ store (Bandcamp, one sure can find any obscure artist found on YT there) because, well, if I'm going to save audio files lossless makes sense.

They are encoded as m4a (aac) via fdkaac "m4" which is a vbr mode that gives files approx as large as YT original audio m4a (which is 128kbps aac cbr) but in theory pads the sections of songs that need it with bits from other places. Tags are preserved.

I like Bandcamp because flac and you can engage with artists and I like to imagine they get paid a bit more than via youtube music or spotify. Yes, one can stream everything, that would require a more expensive phone plan as well as a streaming music service subscription and couldn't use it in my current car anyway.

Flacbox is great for iOS for playing local files.

I am pretty sure Bandcamp does pay more of the money to the artists, which is why a lot of albums are cheaper and obscure artists flock to it for an easy to use and manage platform.

I also like that once I purchase a song or album I can download the FLAC and whatever bitrate MP3 I want, so I don't have to hassle with encoding myself if I don't want to. Just two clicks and two separate downloads.

Edit: some preliminary research suggests it's normal for artists to have to pay for an account or plan, receive payment monthly or quarterly, and only receive about 50% of the revenue from their sales.

Bandcamp accounts are free, the artists are paid instantly upon a sale, and Bandcamp gives them 85-90% of the revenue. Seems like a far superior option from an artist's perspective, especially a niche one who can simply direct their fans to their Bandcamp page (vs. a huge well known artist where people expect to be able to stream everywhere and buy from any and all music stores).

 

[dlerious]

Bandcamp accounts are free, the artists are paid instantly upon a sale, and Bandcamp gives them 85-90% of the revenue. Seems like a far superior option from an artist's perspective, especially a niche one who can simply direct their fans to their Bandcamp page (vs. a huge well known artist where people expect to be able to stream everywhere and buy from any and all music stores).

Bandcamp has been running Bandcamp Friday about once a month (1st Friday). Thay've skipped a month here and there. Artists get all the money during them.

 

[biostud]

Lossless, unfortunately I have lots of old stuff that is encoded in 192-320kb mp3 where I have ditched the CDs :/

Also I buy most my music on bandcamp, if possible.

 

[biostud]

Let me divert this thread a bit. Is there anyone besides me that thinks iTunes is perhaps the most unintuitive major piece of software ever? I miss my android phone where I could easily drag and drop music on or off my phone. I recently spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out how to take an album off my phone and/or add just one new album from my home computer's library of mp3s/AAC. Never did get it done. Something that would take a couple of seconds on my old android phone (or the antiquated Windows phone before it).

Yet another reason, why I will never buy an iPhone.

 

[Grabo]

Yet another reason, why I will never buy an iPhone.

Flacbox for iOS has a several ways of connecting for transferring music files. One is "wifi drive" (webdav) which I use, it works to copy to/from the iPhone over the wifi, from the computer.

 

[biostud]

Flacbox for iOS has a several ways of connecting for transferring music files. One is "wifi drive" (webdav) which I use, it works to copy to/from the iPhone over the wifi, from the computer.

The main reasons are that I really don't need an expensive phone, the one I use is a dual sim paid by my work, and I prefer not to subsidize Apple more than necessary.

 

[Grabo]

The main reasons are that I really don't need an expensive phone, the one I use is a dual sim paid by my work, and I prefer not to subsidize Apple more than necessary.

I understand. The main reasons I purchased the 2020 SE were the small form factor - not a lot of those around, Apples update history which says ~5yrs and is better than most/all Android phones, at least last year, and the for Apple relatively low price, and the lens with the single stabilized focal length.

(Can have a phone via work as well but I don't really like bringing "work home"..which is funny because I've been forced to work from home for the last year and am staring at the work laptop sitting right beside me at the moment )