What is the difference between 256 and 320 mp3s when using cdex

[Clocker]

I plan on backing up cd collection. I was using the ape standard but my hard drive isnt large enough and Im poor.

What standard do you guys and gals use. I tried to google but i didnt find a site that compared 256 with 320 mp3s. I been told lame has gotten better and even at 192 it is pretty awesome.

Any suggestions

Thanks

 

[kamper]

I assume you're talking about kbps? The difference will be size and quality of sound. It's a trade off between how much space you want to use and how good you need your music to sound. I personally don't use mp3s, just aac (mp4) at max bit rate.

btw, what's "the ape standard"? 😕

 

[timswim78]

You may also want to look into FLAC and SHN file formats. They are both lossless, meaning that you do not lose any data in the compression, unlike lossy formats such as MP3, WMA, and etc. I think that you can also compress to a lossless format with Itunes.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: kamper
I assume you're talking about kbps? The difference will be size and quality of sound. It's a trade off between how much space you want to use and how good you need your music to sound. I personally don't use mp3s, just aac (mp4) at max bit rate.

btw, what's "the ape standard"? 😕

Ape is a lossless codec. Also known as Monkey's audio.

Originally posted by: timswim78
You may also want to look into FLAC and SHN file formats. They are both lossless, meaning that you do not lose any data in the compression, unlike lossy formats such as MP3, WMA, and etc. I think that you can also compress to a lossless format with Itunes.

SHN is fairly worthless for him. It has very low CPU usage, but it uses lots of disk space. Flac is much better, because it makes much smaller files. However they are going to be much larger then MP3's. And some versions of WMV are loss-less, some are lossy, some have DRM, some don't, all should be avioded.

anyways. Your not going to be able to tell much difference between a 256kbp and 340kbp. People who claim that they can are smoking crack. But MP3's aren't realy designed for this stuff and it's a bit old fasion.

The advantage to MP3's is that it's common and you can get mp3 players and many car stereos can handle mp3's burned to cdroms. And that's it. LAME is great, it's open source and all that, but you can do better then just MP3's if compatablity with various consumer hardware bits don't matter to you.

If you want best quality + small file space go for ogg vorbis.

It has better sound for smaller bitrates then MP3's. Plus it is variable bit rate, so for songs that need lots of imaging it will use higher bitrates, but songs that don't require a lot of imaging then it will make smaller files. It will make the file just big enough to preserve a certain level of quality that you speficy at creation.

I usually make Ogg Vorbis (.ogg or just ogg. But not all ogg is ogg vorbis and it can even contain videos) at around 192kps. Unless you have very nice equipment your not going to get much sound improvement over that. The loss in sound quality is small enough that you can't notice it unless your under ideal listening conditions.

Now this is not for backups. This is just for easy-listening. For backup you want archive quality, 100% sound reproduction and that requires lossless format (no loss of information,) and that is what Ape and Flac is for (prefer Flac very much personally).

 

[Clocker]

Even though mp3 is lossy I was hoping to encode my remaining collection at 256 or 340. I'll sacrifice loosing quality if that isnt discerning. And unfortunately none of my hardware (mp3 players) can play ogg.

Thanks for the input

 

[drag]

Then mp3's at 256 is just about what you want.

if you want to find out what is the best quality you want to run them at, then take a song you like with lots of detail. Then encode it 3 or 4 different bitrates.. something like 128, 192, 256, 320. Then put them on a player with a shuffle and do a blind test. See if you can identify the version with the highest quality of sound. Sort of like the pepsi challenge. Maybe get somebody to help you.

depending on your hardware and the quality of your ear then pick the lowest bitrate you get mixed up with the higher bitrates in terms of qualiyt. then encode the rest of your music with that rate!