mp3 music / audio question

[balajeem]

Hi

When I download mp3 from different sources, I see that while I play one song the volume sounds high/good, but for other song, it plays as though it's playing from a well , sound quality is bad - The mp3 downloads are sometimes from pay sites, where the quality is 192 or 224 or sometimes even 384.

 

[thevortex]

Each of these songs may have been recorded at different gain levels. If you want uniform volume level, please use Winamp or Foobar (among others) and try using a feature called 'Replaygain'. It allows you to calculate the gain and reset it equally to a particular value (say -1'). That way all songs come out with the same output volume.

This will still not solve the issue if one song is particularly poorly recorded than others though.

 

[balajeem]

when I burn them to disc and play in DVD player - is there any option ?

 

[sam9s]

Hi

When I download mp3 from different sources, I see that while I play one song the volume sounds high/good, but for other song, it plays as though it's playing from a well , sound quality is bad - The mp3 downloads are sometimes from pay sites, where the quality is 192 or 224 or sometimes even 384.

lol I have been saying this in lots of MP3 vs FLAC threads, that encoding to MP3 depends on various factors, and setting up the compression level is not the only thing that decides the quality ........ this.......is one of the few reasons....... I gave up MP3 after a modest collection of 8K songs ...... With FLAC we dont face any such issue every song encoded sounds same in terms of volume and quality ....

 

[balajeem]

not sure on the FLAC, will dig it up (search hifi), if you can give link it will be great. is Apple's AAC also like FLAC ?

 

[sam9s]

Not AAC but Apple Loss less .... its just like FLAC ..
Cant give links here, but uploading sites like Rapidshare are great source for things like these ...

 

[hifimusic]

when I burn them to disc and play in DVD player - is there any option ?

Ye syou can equalize the volume when burning to disc. Nero provides a option to do so.

 

[gadgetcrazy]

lol I have been saying this in lots of MP3 vs FLAC threads, that encoding to MP3 depends on various factors, and setting up the compression level is not the only thing that decides the quality ........ this.......is one of the few reasons....... I gave up MP3 after a modest collection of 8K songs ...... With FLAC we dont face any such issue every song encoded sounds same in terms of volume and quality ....

BUt flac being lossless, will be uncompressed. HOw much space did those 8k songs occupy?

 

[shailenderb]

BUt flac being lossless, will be uncompressed. HOw much space did those 8k songs occupy?

Gadgetcrazy: I think Sam is talking of 8K MP3 songs after which he switched over to Flac - exactly what I did. I, in fact, swithced over to Wav format. With the prices of HDDs coming down, it has become more "sensible" to collect wav files, for me at least.

Shailender

 

[asliarun]

BUt flac being lossless, will be uncompressed. HOw much space did those 8k songs occupy?

FLAC is lossless and yet compressed. It occupies about half the space of a wav file.

I'm curious to know why people prefer wav over FLAC, by the way.

 

[hifimusic]

Wave has zero compression for starters.

 

[asliarun]

Wave has zero compression for starters.

Does that matter? I mean, wav itself isn't a redbook CD format, so it cannot be natively played by a CD player anway. So, what difference does it make if you store a song as a wav or flac? The only advantage I can see is that the decoding chip will have to do less work as it doesn't have to decompress the data.

On the downside, wav files cannot store any meta data about a song like song name, singer, etc. This becomes a major pain if you are trying to manage a playlist.

 

[venkatcr]

The idea of using a PC as a source is not to use a CDP. You store your songs on the hard disk, and in a format as close to the original CD format as possible. In that area WAV is the best. When you play a WAV file it will be the closest to playing a CD in terms of sound quality.

Though WAV may not carry tags, there is enough software available to hold all the tags information and link it to any file.

Cheers

 

[hifimusic]

Also wav is more like a raw format that any computer would be able to play. FLAC files specifically need the codecs to be installed.

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

One possible advantage of FLAC might be when streaming music to a network-attached device. Less data to stream.

Just an idea.