Originally Posted by P057
notladstyle really answered a lot, i knew mp3's fked up my stuff but i didnt think to that extent, too bad i dont have the originals of the music i have, its hard to find so im kinda stuck with it. i guess good thing is the more recent the release the better the bass.
I wish i knew some good music to really get the bumpin going.
A lot depends on how the MP3's are encoded. The secret is in the bit rate. Higher bit rate = better sound. Problem is that higher bit rate also takes up lots more room. The answer is variable bit rate.
I use two programs, both free. The first is called exact audio copy. This program makes a copy of any CD. The neat part is that it uses error checking to make perfect copies, even from banged up CD's. It won't work with seriously trashed CD's, but most scratches, etc. seem to be fine.
The second program is called LAME. Its an MP3 VBR creation algorythm created by some guys at MIT (I think). Its built in to EAC. It basically goes through and assigns bit rates based on musical content. The higher the complexity, the more bit rate it gets. This gives high sound quality, in small spaces. I've got an IPOD full of VBR tunes done this way, that I'll be happy to let you all listen to on Saturday. Some of it is pretty complex music, and I can't tell any difference from the original CD.
One more thing to note, this applies to MP3's only. The Itunes stuff is actually AAC, which is the audio Codec of MP4's (movies). A 128kb/s AAC is significantly better than a 128kb/s MP3. For MP3's, you need to be in the 300+ Kb/s to sound good. LAME encodes up to 600 something. That's the problem with most peer to peer song shares...big bit rate = big size = long transfer time...so most rips are of very low bit rate.
Toby