My Winamp Skin

[nehalmistry]

thx for all ur comments, although not what i expected...

btw, i tried the mpg123 decoder for winamp, and i found no difference in quality with the regular one, both are cd quality.....

although mpg123 took slightly higher cpu power (probably because its not optimized for mmx)

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P5A-B AMD K6-266@300
Matrox Milleniumm G200 AGP (oh, lets party)
Creative SB Awe32 (a classic, superb card)
Realtek 8029A NIC Card
64meg Ram
Ali V agp chipset
ICQ UIN: 24730025

[spoogenet]

Any time you have compression, you have loss. MP3 uses such a higher compression, it is definitely lossy. I would take a CD copy over an MP3 any day, given the opportunity.

While one may not notice the difference all that much, and may *think* that the MP3 sounds just as good as the CD version, patch it out to professional studio monitors and tell me if it still sounds as good.

Quite frankly, CD audio on professional studio monitors, in my experience, has ALWAYS sounded better than a corresponding MP3, even if the MP3 is recorded at 192kbps.

But then again, that's just my experience. Your mileage may vary.

b

[Wombat]

Rags is getting techical. Yes, technically CD's are lossy, but they're sampled faster than you can hear, and over a frequency range higher than you can hear. Good enough for me. I'll take a CD over an MP3 any day, but MP3's are much more available. If my songs on my home machine, I can have them @ work in a few seconds.

[mj12]

I've converted most of my 400+ CD's to mp3 and am very happy to just pull up a song at will on my server and not have to dig through CD's. As for quality, I am very happy with my results after doing lots of research. I encode using two tools. The first is Exact Audio Copy which I use to rip to wav and to encode from wav to mp3 I use Audioactive. I encode all my mp3's at 192kbs/44khz and it songs really good. Arstechnica did a good review of different encoders and it's worth digging up. To get good results with EAC you must set it up properly which takes a little time the first time around. If you need help just ask.

[impact]

Eww nehalmistry that's really weird (and that's being said very in a pollitically correct way) skin.


This is what I call a skin. Completely redone, dark and retro looking.
http://www.winamp.com/customize/deta...mponentId=4162

And read the review! He's absolutely right.


[This message has been edited by impact (edited 02 October 2000).]

[HedsSpaz]

Try encoding something and listening to it in Ogg Vorbis. I've been using Media Jukebox lately for this purpose. It does a pretty nice job. Current implementations allow up to 384kbps but in theory there is no cap on bitrate. Further more it uses a totally open-source compression scheme. I've been ripping to wav's and then compressing to .ogg's and my honest opinion is that the .ogg sounds as good as the original CD and in some cases it even sounds better.

As I understand it, and I don't remember where I read this, it may have been on /., but using the ogg format, after the wav has been compressed the encoder goes back through and re-adds some of the accoustics and tonal quality that is lost in the compression. Also, some of that is what was lost when the audio was originally compressed onto CD. So the result is that it is feasibly possible(because you can mathematically calculate what a given tone should sound like) to restore an audio track to a quality that surpases a CD.

Anyway, heres some links. http://www.vorbis.com http://www.xiph.org/ogg/vorbis/index.html

Ian

[Liquid Snake]

I use EAC as well, and encode my MP3s at 256kbps Stereo using LAME. Most 128kbps MP3s sound horrible. 192 is good, what I would consider near CD quality.

[nehalmistry]

remember people, that everyone's hearing is different from each other, and that where some people may notice a different, others may not...

btw, i use easy cd-da extractor, its shareware so you get a message when you startup, but thats ok... you can choose different encoders, at every bitrate, at 3 different qualities(-speed) for each bitrate, you can rip, and you can decode.... i like it...!!!

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P5A-B AMD K6-266@300
Matrox Milleniumm G200 AGP (oh, lets party)
Creative SB Awe32 (a classic, superb card)
Realtek 8029A NIC Card
64meg Ram
Ali V agp chipset
ICQ UIN: 24730025

[Liquid Snake]

Yeah, my hearing is terrible, and I don't have the best equipment in the world (but its somewhat decent). In fact, sometimes, 128kbps and 192kbps sound the same to me.

[Ghydda]

What a load of BS this thread has to offer!

Especially the parts surrounding that MP3's can sound better than the original CD they were encoded from. B***S***! How can a lossy format create something more accurate than the original? It cannot be done.

And to HedsSpaz - the Ogg Vorbis format does not give better sound by "predicting" how the original analog wave looked like before it was sampled. It is pure speculation. If I rip out every 3rd letter in this post, you proberly still could get the essens out of the text, but U have no way of knowing what letters were removed! U can only make a somewhat qualified guess, and in my book, that does not count as restoring the soundwave to it's original shape.
What you get is another piece of music/audio which does not sound the way it was intended to.

B***S***!

That said, the compression schemes used by the MP3-format and others does a really good job in saving bandwidth and preserving as much as possible of the original.

But don't give me that crap about it being equal/better than the source it was compressed from!


Ghydda - taking yet another step to clear the glasses of the mob, which has been bluring their vision for so long...

[nehalmistry]

Ghydda, first of all, take it easy, calm down...

secondly, off course you can't make a mp3 better than the original but i refuse to believe you cant make it equal quality.....

the way a mp3 encoder works is, in lamen terms, it takes away any sound that the human ear can't hear. and if you use the right encoder, it can do an excellent job of this,

also *THE SOUND CARD AND SPEAKERS THAT YOU ARE USING IS A VITAL FACTOR* which none of you really mentioned.... i have a good sound card and i connect my sound card to my stereo, where i play my cd's.... so i can make a good judgement but not ALL of you can ...

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P5A-B AMD K6-266@300
Matrox Milleniumm G200 AGP (oh, lets party)
Creative SB Awe32 (a classic, superb card)
Realtek 8029A NIC Card
64meg Ram
Ali V agp chipset
ICQ UIN: 24730025

[Ghydda]

nehalmistry, I totally agree with you in the points regarding soundcard and the rest of the analog equipment used to get the sound produced. This must reflect some level of quality also, or it would defeet the point.

But I still disagree with you on the MP3 thingy. You dead-on right, when you say, that the job in laymens terms is to remove the sounds you can't hear anyway. However, the idea with MP3, is to use LESS bandwidth than the original source, and if you were to make an MP3 egual in quality, then it would use alot more bandwith than the source, and that would pretty pointless.

So, in real life, MP3 will never sound as good as the source.

The next question everyone should ask themselves would then be; Does MP3 sound good enough for me?
Only you can answer that, and I say: For now, NO!

Here's whats wrong with MP3 to qualify as a real good listening source so far:

When you have a simple sound setup (and no, I don't mean your stereo an computer equipment) with few vocals and few distinctive different instruments, then MP3 can be used to a somewhat addequit (spelling?) level.

But throw in a complex sound setup, i.e. a chorus or a classical piece with multiple similar instruments and MP3 does horroble things to it - you loose all perspective and depth information and you cannot tell where what instrument is placed anymore. One word sums it up: Messy! And 5 minutes later you delete the damn file.

Of course, encoding@384kbit helps a lot, but then the compression is low, and a non-lossy format could do better.

But of course, MP3 is sufficient if the only thing you use it for is entertainment while jogging or cleaning arround the house.

Ghydda

[This message has been edited by Ghydda (edited 06 October 2000).]

[nehalmistry]

ghydda, i still dont agree with you, you must be doing something weird, i can get full cd quality at even 128kbps... somewhere you must have something that reduces quality, either your decoder or whatever!

btw, what sound card you got?

------------------
P5A-B AMD K6-266@300
Matrox Milleniumm G200 AGP (oh, lets party)
Creative SB Awe32 (a classic, superb card)
Realtek 8029A NIC Card
64meg Ram
Ali V agp chipset
ICQ UIN: 24730025

[SteveC]

I thought I used to get full CD quality at 128kbps on my machine. But then I burned a CD and played it in my car after massively doing up my sound system and I could tell definitely that MP3s are NOT CD quality. Play back an MP3 on a properly set up sound system.

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Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[DentyCracker]

Fact: some 128kbps encoded sound very good, better than some 192s. This is because not all encoders were created equal. The fraunhofer codecs are the best to use. I believe EAC and audioactive use them. I use the Fraunhofer codec to compress my wav files as I use Audiocatalyst to rip to wav. sometimes I use CDFS.vxd (courtesy of Plextor Manager or use BeOS. I user sndrec32 to open the wav file then change the compression to 160 or 192 kbps 16 bit 44.1 MHz sampled audio and save the file. I then change the extension to mp3. this gets the closest to the original sound that I've heard. Even on my Klipsch/SBLive! it is difficult to impossible to tell the difference between 160/192 and CD, whereas it is easier to do below 160