I work in a small radio station and we about to move from backing up our programmes from Video (it's cheap) to a computer system. Some person who's trying to sell a logging & back up system for 8000 Euro
has convinced the manager of the station that MP2 is better than MP3 (something about 2 being higher that 3!.)
So I need a easily understood explanation of why MP3 is better than MP2, as the Manager won't believe me.
(Has to be easily understood as he's 62)

And if anyone works in a Radio Station, Can you tell what you use to back up programmes &
what software you use.

Thanks For Any Help.

if kept at high bitrates (like, >=256) than mp2 can be as good or better than mp3.

at those bitrates you might as well use musepack, tho - which is essentially an improved mp2 codec.

the dude that said that mp2 is "higher" than mp3 was referring to mp2's usage of the 384kbps bitrate that mp3 lacks (unless freeformat)

with freeformat, mp3 can scale ridiculously high (640kbps iirc), but in turn is often not supported by decoders

the best OSS mp2 encoder is probably twolame/toolame: http://www.twolame.org/ http://www.eftel.com/~mikecheng/planckenergy/
here is the musepack website: http://www.musepack.net/
wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-1_Audio_Layer_II


later

How about telling him that MP3 is more future-safe. Ask him if he's ever heard of an MP2 player. There are a lot of non-sound quality reasons to go with mp3. mp3 has been more extensively tested, so there's likely to be a reduced level of encoding flaws.

However, I honestly can't tell you that mp3 is any better than mp2 from a sound quality perspective. I've never directly compared them, and even then a comparison will only be as good as the bitrates used and the implementation of the codec.

any sane mp3 (MPEG1 LAYER3) "player" will decode mp2 (MPEG1 LAYER2)

*points to MAD*
http://www.underbit.com/resources/mpeg/audio/compliance/


later

Because it was designed to be.

When MPEG designed MPEG 1, they made 3 codecs:

MPEG 1 Layer 1
MPEG 1 Layer 2 (MP2)
MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3)

of increasing complexity (MP3 being the most complex) and peformance (MP3 having the highest performance).

The wikipedia article linked to earlier has more in depth technical information on the differences.





I wouldn't bet any money on that, though. What most likely will happen is that they will both be indistinguishable.

Now, if the choice is between a 256kbps MP2 solution and a 256kbps MP3 solution, then I would pick on practical considerations: which system is cheaper, easier to operate, more flexible, ...