I have a friend who is a session drummer in LA. On his web site, he has some examples of work he's done, here (excuse the bad layout. It looked good when I gave it to him, but then he edited it in Frontpage!)

The MP3s he posted are all resampled down to 32 khz. This in itself isn't usually a problem, a good resampling algo can make it sound like you just put in a lowpass filter. But the samples all sound very strange, a sort of distorted sound in the mid frequencies. Is this some kind of aliasing artifact from bad resampling? And what kind of horrible encoder would do such a thing? I wish I lived in LA so I could go over and show him how to rip stuff properly. =D Oh well.

Here's a weird sounding MP3:
http://www.rarewares.org/rja/burp.mp3



BTW: Maybe your friend's files were encoded with Lame? Lame is know for working well only at 44.100kHz, and performing badly at other sampling rates.

Downloaded Roses And Kisses and did not notice any significant distortion in the midrange. Overall, the sound is kind of raspy, but not bad.

The encoder is LAME 3.89 (beta), according to Encspot.

That raspy sound is what I'm talking about, it's particularly noticable on the vocals. As for "not bad," what kind of audiophile forum is this? =D

I'll have to do some tests in my spare time with lame on 32 khz material... Anyone know where I can get an old copy of 3.89?

http://www.rjamorim.com/rrw/lame.html

Heh. I should have said "not bad for a 128kbps MP3", I guess =)

Okay, I took a sample of music and put it through some good resampling down to 32 khz, then encoded using LAME 3.89 -m s -b 128, since the sampled are encoded in full stereo and 128 cbr, and I don't think he would have used any other switches. The distortion artifact isn't present in the encoded file.

Then I went back to LAME 3.2 from that page, and still didn't get the artifact, though I definitely heard how far LAME has come along. =D

I want to see if it's bad resampling, but all my audio software is designed to do good resampling. Aww, too bad. I'm thinking something like, don't do any interpolation, just drop a sample here or there to make it 32khz.


EDIT:

I've talked with him, and he said he uses dB Poweramp Music Convertor to rip and encode. I downloaded it and tried it. BINGO! Poweramp's resampling is simply awful unless you check the "professional audio resampling" box in the configuration dialog. Anyway, I've told him to stop resampling, so it should be good from now on.

At the risk of starting a flame war, the choice of "-m s" at 128kbps is, er, interesting!

Hopefully he's grabbed a new version of lame and is now using the presets?

Cheers,
David.

Yeah, I told him to start using joint stereo instead of full stereo as well.

He's not exactly a techie, so showing how to use command-line options would probably be a bit of a chore.