Let's face it, Mp3 is OBSOLETE !

[mahadev]

Ok, I am in ranting mode, bear with me !

Mp3 is crap. It always was and it always will be. It is an infernal compression system designed by the helpers of Satan with the intention of destroying real music, corrupting everybody's hearing and making us forget what music really sounds like.

Bye bye MP3. Goodbye and good riddance.

'....but I have whole hard drives full of beautiful music encoded at 128 kb that I listen to on my iPod with my iPod earphones .....like millions of my friends...

Ok, mate, if you use these awful dreadful ghastly-sounding earphones supplied by Mr. Jobs (are you reading this, Steve ? ) and you think that 128 kb still sounds good then all is lost for you. Keep listening and be happy. Poor s...d.

Why am I saying this ? Because I always hated Mp3. It is bad. No such thing as a free lunch. You cannot discard 80 or 90 % of audio information and expect that not much will happen. At 64 kb it is unusable. At 128 kb it is bad, not as bad as 64 kb but still with audible compression artefacts caused by the system running out of bits and filling in the blanks. Higher bit rates reduce that problem but even at 320 kb where artefacts are barely audible the sound quality is much reduced because of the markedly lower resolution compared to an uncompressed recording. Now if you use earphones supplied by the above mentioned Mr. Jobs you will be hard put to notice the difference. But put your recording through a good speaker system and compare it with the uncompressed version and you will go..what ? I never realized it is so bad....etc.

Some years ago I did some tests with Acoustat electro-acoustic speakers and I used all bit rates and did A B comparisons. Only then did I fully realize how bad Mp3 really is.
Now that was then. Today, in the age of terabyte hard drives and fast internet Mp3 is obsolete, plain and simple. If you value your music, that is.
For us in the ICM community who often deal with archival recordings and are passionate about preserving the music of the great masters Mp3 has no place anymore. Once you have encoded a recording with Mp3 you have damaged it forever. Which deprives any future audio or music buff of the chance of ever restoring that recording. Any recording that has been mangled by Mp3 is a lost cause .

What has brought on this sudden fit of rage ?
My dear friend Carleton sent me a recording of what I consider to be one of NB's benchmark performances. It turned out to be much better than my own recording and the original tape was clearly not bad at all. But, it had been encoded with Mp3 at 128 kb. I shudder to think that many important recordings have been ruined with Mp3 and gone into circulation and that one day that may be all we have.
That is tragic.

I earnestly appeal to this community, please , if you transfer recordings from tape or LP or CD do not encode them with MP3. Take the time it takes to send them as .wav files, buy a big hard drive and just do not use Mp3 , period.
Future generations of ICM lovers will appreciate your efforts.

Yo. Thats it.

Greetings to you all .

[John]

Hear hear!
(pun intended)

Probably worth mentioning that you can't 'convert' mp3's to WAV's expecting the quality to be restored, as some seem to think. Compress and be damned!

[nicneufeld]

99% of the music I listen to has been compressed to one level or another, in some codec. Whether downloads on Mediafire (which would not be feasible at uncompressed file sizes) or listening to online sources via Youtube, Pandora, musicindiaonline.com, etc., I've been exposed to, well, a whole lot more music than I would have been sans compression. Some of the first Indian music I ever heard was off a worn library copy of a VHS tape of the Ravi Shankar documentary "Raga". Not exactly a faultless medium I assure you!

I do see your point particularly regarding those cases where you may be preserving extremely rare copies of music. I don't think I have any such treasures though! Without MP3 and other forms of unfortunately lossy compression, I would not have ever heard a huge variety of music, and ICM would be an even nichier (if that is a word) genre, where a handful of purists listen to pristine music but the rest of us proles just wonder what that buzzy twanging on Sgt. Peppers was all about!

So it has its pros and cons. Give me 128kbps of a great player and great music, vs lossless encoding of bland music, anyday! Just like the encoding of Ust. A.H. Jaffer Khan I've been listening to lately...full of pops and hisses from the vinyl and assuredly compressed, albeit at 320, the music is amazing to me and I can't stop listening to his playing. If I had a four-figure stereo system and I listened to a lossless transcoding against the lossy version, I'd probably prefer lossless, but most of my listening is on cheap headphones anyway, because I don't have the money for the stereo system, nor the time to sit and devote myself to it, sadly.

But reiterating my point of agreement...if there are cases when a rare recording is available, keep the original in the highest quality possible!!! Every transcoding can be slightly destructive to the original, so make one of the best quality, and then if you must resample with encoding, do so from that point, not from the original analog.

[coughcapkittykat]

I couldn't disagree more but whatever.

Anyone who listens to 128kbps exclusively probably wouldn't know or care about the difference between that and wav.

I'm willing to bet in blind tests with well encoded 320 or v0 most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference, however much of an audiophile they think they are.

How far do you take it though? 16bit 44khz wavs are effectively lossy as well. If it was recorded in 24bit 96khz (not uncommon these days) a lot of the data has been reduced by the time it reaches CDs.

In recent years, especially with dance music, the mp3 encoding the least of the worries. Mixes that are compressed and then limited, as well as sidechained on the master channel, often by people who are not qualified for mastering, are more of a concern. And this trend, particularly the limiting, is creeping in to more and more genres.

Quite honestly, most recordings I hear of ICM is not recorded or produced with the fidelity that requires lossless.

The ironic thing is that for most of the time when people used lossless formats exclusively they didn't have good enough equipment to appreciate it with everything from the player to the amp to the speakers to the room affecting the recording.

[cabernethy]

right on mahadev.....

This is one of my most precious passions. I am a big fan of 24/96 (which BTW I would be more than happy to transfer any forumite's analog to for free). The problem as I see it (albeit rather simply) is that the general population are happy living is ignorant bliss and listening to kak. They don't care about the quality of the reproduction and most modern music is so overdriven digitally that it is now common place to use digital distortion as a 'fattener' - the horror !!!!

Availability is more important to the masses than quality - as long as it's quick to slap onto an iPOD all's good in the world - sad but true.

In answer to a previous post, my ears can absolutely tell the difference between MP3, WAV and Analog - and there are 24/96 commercial releases available, you just have to have enough passion to seek them out. They are sparce tho , I think that in all of my ICM audio I have one recording at 24/96 but a lot at 16/44 which is my preference.

Once the air from a recording is removed by downscaling it is lost forever as you say.

[cabernethy]

Tut tut Max......

How comes your echoes project audio is only available as a MP3 download ?

http://www.maxflury.com/id6.html

[John]

In recent years, especially with dance music, the mp3 encoding the least of the worries. Mixes that are compressed and then limited, as well as sidechained on the master channel, often by people who are not qualified for mastering, are more of a concern. And this trend, particularly the limiting, is creeping in to more and more genres.

Don't get me started on that kind of compression!

Anyway...

In my mixing room at work, I can hear the difference between mp3, PCM & vinyl, but elsewhere, no... and I certainly don't claim to be able to hear the difference between £400-a-metre speaker cable and 12-gauge stranded mains cable. I don't have an expensive system at home and never will.

Even amongst other perceptual codecs, mp3 is outdated. Its a bit like making VCDs from uncompressed HD when you have access to Blu-ray.
There's always going to be an argument for and against perceptual encoding, but when it comes to restoration of archive material, in the absence of the primary sources (i.e master tapes) unless you have a decent PCM recording, you're fighting a losing battle. Its a big part of my day job. If somebody comes to me with an mp3, I wont even listen. There's no point. Even with Pro Tools, Cedar & RX.
Some of the best music in my possession is also some of the worst sounding and I know I could improve it if I had access to the original bootleg tape or at least a PCM version of it.

[theprosperone]

While MP3 is a lossy file type, I think you're exaggerating how bad it is if its used PROPERLY. Nobody with any self respect uses a straight 128 mp3 anymore anyways! You do realize you can have poor quality Wav files as well, right? The problem is not the mp3, its the person who rips it. People can stupidly create poor quality WAV files as well if they aren't informed on what they're doing and just keep clicking "ok". Have you ever heard of VO or VBR Mp3 files? They can be high quality and I'm willing to bet most would be unable to tell the difference side by side through a pair of average speakers(lets all face it, we aren't all jamming studio quality monitors or Bose speakers) when compared with a good quality WAV file. The problem is that anyone who encodes MP3s at 128 are behind the times in the world of digital audio format. Most audiophiles will store their audio rips as FLAC anyway, not WAV. Flac is also lossless, can hold tags, you can easily convert them to WAV if needed with no loss and its an open sourced file type. There are several other types of lossless audio files out there but none of them are very convenient either.

I can see why you might be upset but be mad at the guy who ripped it at 128! I think the MP3 has been key culturally to opening a lot of folks up to music they'd have never heard before. It has helped music spread the globe that was otherwise stuck on rare tapes/records halfway across the globe. Its also key in bringing music back into the life of the average adult. Before mp3 players, most people just listened to music at work, on tv and in the car. Now everyone I see on the train or street is jamming some tunes! There is a time, place and reason to use MP3 files, you just have to know what to use and when. Regardless, for storage and ripping of important files I'd use FLAC over WAV. Any INITIAL rip should be done as FLAC and then converted whenever its needed to the appropriate size/file type.

Other thing I find a little funny is that its easy for folks to just on the anti-mp3 bandwagon and talk as if they sound just AWFUL but at the same time listen to those recordings from tape or reel to reel that sounds like someone dragging a coke can full of nickels down a gravel road while claiming the quality doesn't detract from the music! I understand how one can say the music can shine through horrible recordings but to me, it just doesn't even sound like a sitar. Its like listening to someone play sitar with film under their jawari. It becomes annoying and it sounds nothing like what a real sitar sounds like. I think its super unfortunate that many recordings of the great masters exist only in this format but then again, I've also accepted everything on this Earth is finite. I can't hold onto these recordings forever no matter how important I think they are, noone can. I do know I'd take a clean 128MP3 over the quality of these very old recordings anyday! Lets not even get started on how the art of mastering is dying and being forgotten anyway, which further impacts the quality of recorded music....alas so many battles to fight and I'm just not interested. Spend too much time wasting away at work as it is and too little time practicing!

[cabernethy]

Beg to differ......pre mp3 players / iclod people listened to portable Cd players (remember those ?) and even, wait for it....walkmans !!! - good old analogue tape. I Would take both of these formats over MP3 in any form. In my view MP3 with VBR etc, etc is all just sales hype, trying to make you believe (and they are succeeding) that MP3 can be 'CD' quality - well it can't and never will.

[theprosperone]

LOL I think you forget how horrible tape sounded in walkmans. I loved when it got all warbly when you put it in your pocket or on your belt and tried to run around. Not to mention I remember how stupid it was to try and carry around a whole case of tapes with me! Oh yea, and that time my Ride the Lightning tape got eaten on the school bus home! Portable CD players? You mean the ones that skipped when you sneezed? Oh yea those were great. Not to mention all your cds got ruined because a few scratches would screw the whole thing. EVERYONE has an mp3 player, I was the only kid on my school bus back the day lucky enough to have a walkman and backpack full of tapes. Portable CD players were even worse because they cost twice as much and their medium was way more likely to get messed up! Not to mention, when you're talking about archives and passing around audio files, at least when you have a FLAC or other lossless file type and pass it along, your friend can pass along a copy of his file and not loose quality. Try passing around music back when tapes were the only thing! Quality would get less and less each time its copied from a tape that wasn't the original so unless the original tape itself survives, you'll not be able to get that quality back. You make a flac file and pass it out to 50 people, 10 years down the road you lose your flac, you can get a copy from anyone you gave a copy to and have it be the same exact quality, quite a nice feature if you ask me. Oh Nostalgia, how it blurs the facts of the past...

Also where did I say MP3 was CD quality? Regardless, till ya come to Chicago and take place in my blind-folded listening test, I can't take your word for how accurate you think your ears are! I promise tasty Chai, snacks and plenty of good music though so anyone please take me up on the challenge!

Also VBR and VO as sales hype? Who sold it to me? LOL These are decisions that were made because of experience within several internet music communities, not sold to me by Steve Jobbs or Bill Gates. You can HEAR the difference between a normal 128 mp3 and variable bit rates. Regardless, my point was that all file TYPES have their appropriate use. Its most important to be an informed user and use them for the right reasons. Anyone that is using 128kps Mp3s to rip and store their analog audio collection obviously needs a little help figuring things out.

If someone is looking for an answer to the lossy digital format problems, the answer will not be going back in time to use records/tapes/reel to reels or whatever else you remember from the "good ole days". It will be FLAC or a similar lossless audio format. The days of physical media(if we like it or not) are going away and we are going to have to adapt and move forward. Hold on to the past for too long and you'll find yourself stuck in it...

[cabernethy]

True, True but we clearly have very different histories

When I was at school, pretty much everyone had a walkman variant and with decent tapes (i.e. Cro2) I can honestly say that they sounded warm and rounded - 2 points on which MP3 fails miserably. Also, it was common activity for students to make mix-tapes which they constructed with thought and shared/swapped frequently. At this very moment, I'm listening to a tape that is about 25 years old and it sounds great to my ears. I Have taken the blind test many times my friend and in very controlled surroundings and have identified the inferior coding every time.

You are right about CD players skipping but this is part of my gripe....so you can't jog with a CD player, but sit in the middle of a park with one and decent headphones ahhhh.....Just goes back to what I was saying, modern consumers want availability over quality and are over the moon about it

Just so you know, I am a bit of an audio-geek. I have a 24/96 rig at home with lot's of valves and 1/2' tape

Just as we have to be mindful of moving on, we have to learn from the past and where we can, improve on it - not go backwards because it suits a technology marketing strategy.

[coughcapkittykat]

In my view MP3 with VBR etc, etc is all just sales hype, trying to make you believe (and they are succeeding) that MP3 can be 'CD' quality - well it can't and never will.

Sorry but that is ridiculous. Have you looked in to what it actually is? There is a distinct difference and just saying it is sales hype is a sign of ignorance on the matter.

I believe your problem comes down to one word...belief. There is not much belief needed. You should do blind tests and then it eliminates belief.

Do you think that most consumers had the audio equipment 10-20 years ago to notice the difference? If you look at frequency chart comparisons the difference is at the very top end and until quite recently (sometimes not even now) average consumer equipment was not good enough accurately reproduce this area of frequencies.

Wav 24bit


MP3 320kbps

The frequency charts are identical, but as you can see the 2nd frequency chart (representing the mp3) has a steeper roll off after 16khz. The null test reveals the sonic difference between the two files. Not all of this represents loss of sound – it represents change in sound. The mp3 quantizes differently, which is not a loss of sound – just a micro-auditory restructuring of sound. The loss is broadband information which is harder to perceive than designated frequency information. However, if you notice the biggest difference exists where the snare drum is hitting – and it’s no coincidence that snare drums contain the highest content of broadband sound.

If you're over 30 or 40 the chances are that you can't even hear 16Khz anyway. If you look at the chart it actually looks like the steepest roll off difference happens even higher than 16khz, maybe around 18khz. So, as I said, I believe that in blind tests most people won't notice the difference unless you have a) very good studio/mastering grade monitors and a studio environment to listen in b) good enough ears to hear these very high frequencies.

[cwroyds]

To be fair to that poor 128 MP3, it was a really old one from years ago.
I got it from this forum at some point, probably from an Esnips download.
The original recording was no pristine gem, so I doubt that a high end MP3 would have made a huge difference in this instance.

I do agree though that one should try to get MP3 or other digital formats in the highest quality form possible.
Yes, it does make a difference.
For one thing, the low quality MP3s cut out all the good low end bass.
The only reason you would want a low quality MP3 is to save space on a hard drive.
I just get the largest capacity MP3 player / ipod / iphone / hard drive that I can so that I don't have to think about these things.
There are good lossless audio formats these days.
We should try to use them whenever possible.

[cwroyds]

While we are on the topic, what is the best format for a digital file.
Digital music is here to stay, so what is the goal for our digitizing adventures.
Anyone have a holy grail of audio file format?

[theprosperone]

FLAC file type. Its what you'll see almost all audio of live shows uploaded as. Its also what most audiophile digital hoarders rip their stuff as. It holds tags for album/artist information and I believe WAV does not. Its also a smaller file type than WAV even though its just as high quality. Also you can transfer a FLAC file to WAV without any loss in format so whenever someone needs the files for something FLAC won't work for, they just convert to a lossless WAV. There are several programs out there made to handle flac which will burn it to CD for you and so on.