hi,
i was downloading an album via a peer-to-peer software. then the user i was dl'ing from went offline. i found other users that had the rest of the album. so what i got was,
first two tracks: 128 kbps stereo mp3,
the rest of the album: mp3 variable bit rate (236-260 kbps) Joint stereo...
by chance, second track(128kbps S) ends with rain sounds....rain drops dropping on the soil... very clear sound...both at my computer and on my portable mp3 player. third track(249kbps JS) starts again with those rain sounds... but despite the track being larger in size, being in variable bit rate, a higher bit rate, it lacks quality obvously... how come that??
i think it's because of Stereo ve JStereo.... i tried this with other mp3 files on my PC, and found out Stereo encoded tracks sound distinguishable better than JS encoded tracks... does anyone have an explanation for this??

(edit: i've done replaygain scanning for all the tracks of the album)

beware: some p2p files are made with crappy encoders or even transcodes from low bitrates
For judging quality, do your own encoding, so you can document encoder & settings used

Jstereo has nothing to do with it esp at such high bitrate. Most likely transcoded files or placebo effect.

This topic has been done to death.

thanks, you may be right, it may be deriving from transcoding. thanks..

You might want to check the encoder used with Encspot or foobar2000. My guess is that the crap-encode was lame 3.90 or GOGO encoder (some tweaked lame encoder to provide faster encodes).

I'm through with sucky downloads. Usually I can get cheap CD's off eBay or other online auktion sites.

Yes p2p consist of mostly crap rips that is my experience.
use Audio identifier to check what codec it uses. I think it is better then encspot. I do not use Winamp, but I know there exist plugins that will show the codec information directly during playback, might be more flexible for you...



Since when is 3.90 a crap encoder ?
It has for years been the best encoder, but of course not as good as 3.97.

Normally we only discuss perceived quality of a particular encoder when the uncompressed original sample is available and the encoding parameters involved are known.

That is true, you need a reference point to compare too. But I would say that every encoders has it is very own characteristics/weakness, with this awareness you can get a sense of the "quality" without a specific reference point. Lame 3.97 is at least for me quite transparent, but with more complex/linear musical forms such as ambient music (steve roach, robert rich, Nick Parkin,etc) with a lot of depth you can hear that mp3 is not at all transparent. In harder music such as metal it is hard to determine any kind of difference or "quality" since so much distortion is involved in the sound picture.

This neatly sums up this thread, which is completely useless. Additionally, you should all know better than to discuss P2P on HydrogenAudio.

Thread closed and several posts removed.