I get really frustrated trying to tell people that their 128 K (or lower) mp3s don't usually sound as good as the CD, but people don't listen to me. I'm not saying 128 is necesarily bad but it's a bit low for myself. I tell them to try LAME --aps and whatnot but most people just don't care. They're more concerned with getting their free 128 Xing (old probably -- 12 kHz lowpass ) mp3s and not paying for anything.

Anyone have anything to mention with their frustrations with people's encoding habits. I understand LQ has its uses but these people think that their copies are perfect. I know it's probably good enough for them but it's just hard for me to take.

And I'm not trying to break TOS #8 or anything by saying that 128 sucks but I personally don't think it's enough for me. I'm going to stop now. I've just dealt with two people who've decided they want to start "archiving" at 128 K against my advice and I'm a bit frustrated.

I remember getting 56kbps (stereo!) classical music recordings from someone. "It's mp3 so it's CD quality!" he said. Yeah, sure.

Usually people who download the old Xing 128 kbps mp3s can't tell the difference since they don't have the original to compare with....so they think that ringing, metallic sound, or warbling was part of the music

True. I guess I was just one of the few weirdos who thought that there was something wrong with how those mp3s sounded. Oh well if everyone was an audiophile music piracy would pretty much cease to exist Or everyone would trade .mpc files.

Do not confuse me with the facts, I have made up my mind.


Yes, sadly some people will simply never be convinced. To be wrong is simply not an option.

Wow. I actually had someone ask me today to teach them how to rip a CD properly I guess not everyone is either deaf, stupid or both. He was pretty specific too, he wanted to encode to Ogg Vorbis so I gave him Megamix II, and he actually plans to use a higher quality setting than I do. I guess for every 1000 people who don't care there are those who are ok with learning something new.

Wow today I just encountered one of the greatest displays of idiocy from someone who claimed to be a "professional encoder" for some mp3-distro group. No I wasn't in this group's IRC channel but he was in one of my regulars. He had the nerve to say I was wrong on many points such as VBR being higher quality than CBR at around the same bitrate and that VBR's only use was reducing filesize. He also said that I was an idiot for using both Ogg Vorbis and Musepack because mp3 was as good as anyone ever needed and as good as it was really going to get. After he managed to get everyone on his side with his blatant misguided talk about audio encoding, I left unwilling to deal with it anymore. If someone has the nerve to tell me I'm entirely wrong about concepts I try to research and understand, and tells me it would be in my best interest to shut up since I lost I'm just not going to bother.

It is a sad time we live in when people will not listen to facts.

In dealing with the misinformed, be patient. Counter his/her points one by one with specific examples that anyone can understand, or at least grip. Try not to sound accusative, but do point out that all the real experts agree with you.

Edit: and Do Not Despair.

I did. They said the experts were wrong since they didn't listen to the encodes and that they were right

Which proves that they know nothing about what the experts do.

Sound quality is subjective, end of story. There's no way to code and tune lossy encoders unless you listen to the encodes.

Well of course I told them that, but they were so set in their ways that they didn't care. You can't teach them all and they have to be willing to learn before you can help them.

It's true it can get tiring. As a last resort, you could point them to Hydrogenaudio.

Very true. I think from now on those who start saying their way is best will just get a www.hydrogenaudio.org link sent to them.

Welcome the the world of the misguided and misinformed. If you get in the mud with pigs, you just get dirty. Giving them the HA link seems wisest.

I just feel sorry for the admins and mods here when they do come along.....there will be plenty of trolling, flaming, and not to mention, TOS #8 violations.

Yes, the poor mods and admins. Well maybe some good can come out of it. Eventually we'll have these so called ripping groups with stuff on their sites like "Winamp musepack plugin: download here". I can dream I guess.

It would be quite funny if one day the music industry is trying to fight people and their .mpc and .ogg filesharing on p2ps. That will be the day when mp3 has died, which will never come Nothing against the format; I just have no use for it anymore.

The mods should keep a tally of how many TOS #8 violations this site gets. It would be an interesting little count to read.

I mentioned HA as a last resort..

There's a saying in Korea that goes, "You don't avoid muck because you're intimidated; you avoid it because it's dirty." It's usually used to say that you're getting annoyed, and would like to maintain your dignity by staying out of fights. I tend to disagree, and so I always try to say to myself, "Somebody has to clean that muck. If anybody can do it, I will."

Nevertheless, I can see how a newbie rush could be a problem. Hm... I'll have to think a little more about that.

Knowledge and experience, and a willingness to be wrong, are the only cures for ignorance.

When the Duron 800 was new and shiny (in a greased aluminum kinda way), and the closest any PC around had to hi-fi was a generic Yahama GX soundcard, Xing had the answer. Audiograbber and a fast encoder.
Then my dad got a Hercules Game Theater XP (6.1). Then I got an odd motherboard with nice onboard sound (by onboard sound standards, that is ). I knew I needed better, but no $. Also, it was at this time I stopped any p2p dealings, as I dislike the typical quality as much as I dislike paying $15 for a CD. Yay for people giving their used CDs up for me to buy cheap .
Then I finally got the $, and researched for a few weeks, coming up with the Philips Aurilium as my best bet, and about the lowest headphones recommended anywhere, the KSC50.

All was well, and I'd been lurking here for awhile. I had troubles encoding EL&P's Brain Salad Surgery (remastered). A few places in Karn Evil 9 - 2nd Impression, and 8 seconds into Jerusalem, sounded terrible. Thanks to testing methods partly learned here, I did my own personal AB testing, and it came out that in Ogg, the quality needed to be very high, else it sounded muddy, while in MP3, anything less than APE had a scratchy sound to it, not unlike the CD normally playing in a cheap setup (the synthetic organ bits can sound pretty strange on cheap speakers). With hardware compatibility, LAME 3.90.3 w/ APE it was.

Transparent lossy sound is just impossible, though. I don't care if you have golden ears or not, with a nice setup, you can hear the difference. This is quite possibly the hardest thing to convince anyone of without proof. Once I move out, I'll be using this site and others even more, as I must replicate, or improve upon, what my father got quite a few years ago. And maybe use some other sites to find the money for it . Nothing but the real thing sounds quite right...but it also cost a pretty penny way back when.

Recently, I began to re-encode the entire combination of my dad's and my own collection of CDs (I haven't counted recently, but it was over 300 the last time I did count, around '94, so probably near 450 now).
After hearing some of the results, I figured I could stop lurking. I also have a weapon in converting anyone still using low quality xing encodes: Cosmik Debris. No song I have yet ripped has had such a difference made to it (nor has any album been as big--with APE, Apostrophe averages 290kbps). If you have the chance, encode it. Xing 128k vs. LAME APS or APE. It will put an immediate end to the misbelief of those things being CD quality--or even general listening quality--and won't require a long explanation of testing procedures .

Though I do wonder...how can anyone believe that today? Have they never encoded something with the Xing encoder and experienced pops or chirps? 128k is one things...Xing 128k is another beast entirely, and much worse at grooming.

TOS #8. Do you have any proof?

edit: I was under the impression that the setup doesn't affect the detection of artifacts more than previous listening experience does. To make an analogy, you can't see through a magic trick on TV just by getting a bigger TV set. However, a professional magician might have no trouble spotting all the tricks on a 4 inch LCD screen.

edit2: Lossy audio is perceptual audio. There are perceptual limits to the human ear that cannot be helped by getting a bigger, nicer, setup. For some people, getting a new setup might not have any benefits whatsoever.

As far as I can tell all of my lossy encodes are transparent to me on any setup. I'd say except on all but the most tricky samples all of the modern codecs are transparent in general at around 200 kbps. And the reason I buy CDs for everything I want is the low quality of most downloaded songs. Well that and I'm just not a thief.

Gah! I finally got a copy of BladeEnc and encoded a 128kbps file since I'd always heard how bad they are. I have no doubt in my mind I could ABX that file no matter how many times I tried. Such notable distortion in the intro of the song...

Absolute, no; and on 80% of songs, conservatively, I should not be able to tell a difference (if the bitrates APE is suing for some of this stuff, maybe even more). There are just a few that I can.

If I were to invest in better headphones, I might notice it on them, as I also can't hear a difference through them on the GTXP or output from the reciever, but both sets of speakers make it noticeable. I may simply need to get used to the headphones a bit more, too, as they do make for a different experience than speakers (or maybe better headphones, too, but I've not used any, so don't know about that yet).

So far I can tell the difference on my father's PC setup (GTXP, decent speakers) and main system (MP3->CD and CD->wav->CD on a CD, played through DVD player; old denon reciever, nice DIY speakers), but even then only if I really listen to the few parts that LAME 3.90.3 didn't do quite right with APS. With LAME using APE, there's kind of a 'ringing glass' sound to the synth organ in Jerusalem, about 8 seconds in, that the MP3 doesn't quite get, and a similar sound in Karn Evil 9 2nd Impression. Nothing I can notice without really listening, and it doesn't detract from listening. Ogg had different problems with the two songs, making them sound less powerful, rather than scratchy, with any of the standard settings less than q10.

I wouldn't be suprised if I'd never even bothered to do all the listening I did, and may have not noticed anything at all, had the first problem not been 8 seconds into an album.

I'm learning more and will be working on good proof in the future.
I may spring some listening tests on friends when they come over (they're all geeky enough to go for it).

edit: it looked like one big paragraph, eek!

And this I will be testing, if casually, with a neighbor. He can distinguish a nice encode vs. a Xing one now, but doesn't think he can do any better. And since he is about to re-rip all of his collection non-Xing in the near future, I know he'll be up for it.

I also wouldn't be terribly suprised if someone else can hear better than I with these KSC50s than I can. Too bad they are so comfy, or I might be tempted to get some senns.

I think you should encourage your friend to use a lossless format for archiving - and whatever he feels fit for casual use - perhaps convincing him about different storage strategies you could effectively have a good work around for his stubborness.

Ruairi

Using version 1.1rc1 of the ogg vorbis encoder at q1 on the overture of carmen (which yields an ~80kbit/sec sample). During ABXing, I can't tell the difference between that and the original. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing . However with Disco samples, like Come on Eileen, I can mostly succesfully ABX at much higher bitrates.

I still rip to lossless for archiving purposes though.

I'm always the gullible friend who gets called over to help fix people's computers or iPods or whatever, so I've seen a good deal of the types of music people have on their HDD's, as well as bitrates. I can't tell you how many people I know have entire collections ripped as 64kbps WMA8. When I attempt to explain things to them, their eyes glaze over and they usually reply "who cares, it's just music!"

The funniest thing: my PhD advisor called me over to her house to get her iPod working (a gift from her husband). She couldn't figure out why her 400 CD's she has ripped wouldn't go onto the iPod. The reason: they were all ripped as 64kbps WMA8 with DRM enabled