Re: Why bother with lossy encoding?

Clyde Lyman <[email protected]> Mon, 6 Mar 2017 23:29:46 +0000 (UTC)
Newsgroups gmane.comp.audio.audacity.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I poked around and found that mp3's at 128kbps sound like radio and 160kbps sound like CD. Now if that's true then even in the 1970's you could get an astonishing amount of fidelity out of radios, especially classical stations. My stereo has a Realistic Accurion sub, some speakers that I picked up at a thrift store and Realistic horns that kick in at 2,000 and go up to 25,000, up until about 27 years ago, certain cash register aisles kicked out a sound that, in freq and volume went righ through me that nobody else coud detect. When I was audio tested in 1973, I was told I was losing some of my upper frequency hearing and when I got a bit nervous the guy said not to worry, ti was in the 48,000cps area and later on in the 1970's a friend of mine was told the same. If those bitrates are ture, I wonder what the 320 kbps is used for
Also, from what I understand, do the 96k and beyond sample rate and 32 bit depth recording settings really accomplish anythinhg? I have the previous incarnation of the M-Audio M-track plus and it maxes at 48k and 24 bits. Even then, the DAW has to step it down to 44k/16 bits which appears to be the same as 160kbps mp3
I mentioned that GEM Genesys as being able to use mp3 samples, also can most sfz players

I am looking for somethng. The full Cakewalk sfz player went on the free market at some time, However I can't find it on any page. Anyone know where I can get it. I have the jr. edition btu the full boat one had a superb GUI and would be worth the $60 if I could find it. it had infinitel layering


      From: Bob Cavanaugh <[email protected]>
 To: 'Discussion list for Audacity users' <[email protected]> 
 Sent: Monday, March 6, 2017 2:55 PM
 Subject: Re: [Audacity-users] Why bother with lossy encoding?
   
>From what I understand, wav files sound great on the air, so radio stations
use them. That being said, the processing used by the station, combined with
the nature of fm radio means that by the time I record it, I'm not going to
be able to tell the difference between a wav file and an mp3 file. As has
been pointed out before, why take up so much space on your hard drive with
wav files when the same amount of audio can be used in half the space? My
aircheck collection is about 3 gb, most of which is 128 kbps mp3 files.
Imagine how much that would be in wav files. 

-----Original Message-----
From: J.B. Nicholson [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2017 2:36 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Audacity-users] Why bother with lossy encoding?

Clyde Lyman wrote:
> With the vast amounts of memory we have today, why bother with lossy 
> files at all unless it's to keep continuity with other elements of a 
> collection?

I'm not sure what "continuity with other elements of a collection" means.

Lossy encoding is useful for:

- delivering multimedia over slow links or to low-end computers (mobile
phones, tablets, some laptops, toys). Even YouTube finds it useful to encode
a lot of audio as Opus and a lot of video with VP9 nowadays.

- embedded players that don't handle lossless encoding (some cars and some
portable playing devices don't support FLAC, WAV, or AIFF files, for
example)

- maximizing use of (as you point out) inexpensive storage. If I can't tell
the difference between a high-quality Opus encoding over the same audio
ripped from an ordinary Red Book audio CD and encoded as a FLAC (which is
lossless), I might choose to keep the Opus file because it uses
significantly less space and works with every computer program I use for
playback. Thus my casual listening needs are met and I get to store a lot
more audio.


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