Hello everyone. I have a few questions regarding mp3 gain/quality. What is clipping...I hear a lot of that on this forum. And how do I get a mp3 downloaded from a p2p program to have the same quality as a mp3 that I had converted from wav: for example: band/song title Hoobastank running away. I dowloaded one from the net off of winmx and I have the cd which i ripped the track and converted it into mp3. Both are 192 bps, but the one off the net has a crappier quality and is much lower in volume than the one from the cd. Why is that and is there any program i can use(preferably free) to make it better quality? Any replies are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

No one knows???

http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/MPP/clipping.html


This is impossible. Once you encode something with lossy coder you can't restore the lost quality.


Don't mistake lower volume with lower quality. You can't restore quality, but you can increase the loudness of the file with MP3Gain without losing any more quality. You can find mp3gain here, and it includes all the documents needed.

I get all of that except clipping. I don't reall follow all the stuff about sine waves and frequency and all the math involved. Is there a simple explanation of clipping...meaning is it bad whats it sound like etc....? Thanks

In simple terms, if the level is destined to go thru either +/- 32768, it clips. You will click and pops, or worse distortion.

Hey John, I download this one mp3 song...but later on it it fades out completey and i hear a "whistling" sound. Its definitely not normal. Is that clipping or just bad encoding?

That is bad ripping or encoding.

And for the "crappy" MP3, well, the quality of an MP3 and depends on the encoder used. If you use LAME with "--alt-preset cbr 192", it is bound to sound much better than Blade at 192kbps/stereo. As far as the volume thing goes, well... some people are really odd and choose to normalize (via peak normalization) at low %'s like, let's say 75%, and *bang*, there you go, you have a quiet WAV which will be a quiet MP3 when encoded.

...

Here's a simple enough description of clipping, I hope.

CD-audio as well as any other audio format, does not have an unlimited volume range. When a sound goes past the maximum, it is said to clip, and what occurs, is rather than having a nice curve or spike for the sound if viewed on an oscilloscope, we have a curve or spike that has the top chopped off. To your ears, bad clipping usually sounds kind of like static that accompanies the sound... a bit like when you're listening to FM radio and the tuner is just a tiny bit off the station.