INTERACT FORUM
Windows => Third Party Plug-ins, Programs, and Skins => Topic started by: datagram40 on May 21, 2003, 12:17:34 am
-
What is the best encoder format to use? I'm looking for something that is possibly smaller than mp3 with the same or better quality.
Right now I have 3 gig's of mp3's and I'm looking for a way to compact it into a smaller space without any loss in quality. I just recently tried using OGG and the quality is pretty good.
-
>> I'm looking for a way to compact it into
>> a smaller space without any loss in quality.
can't be done, when converting from a format to another you will always lose somthing.
1. buy a bigger hard drive.
2. no other answers found in my memory banks
-
Agreed, once in MP3 you really should not compress further, as it will completely obliterate your quality all together. Get more space, it's cheap these days.
-
Right now I have 3 gig's of mp3's ...
3 gigs? How I long for those days... The good news is HDDs are about a buck a gig for ATA drives these days, and much less if you catch a good sale, S-ATA drives run about 1.50 a gig. HDDs and RAM are two things easily run in abundance.
And as everyone has mentioned, MPEG is a lossy compression algorithm; therefore, recompression is ill-advised, even if they are originally recorded in a high bitrate. The problem lies in the fact that you will have a very noticeable drop in resolution in the high end of the sound spectrum creating a muddy-sounding music file. If you encode originally at a bitrate of 256-320, it won't be quite as dramatic after recompression, but noticeable nontheless. Anything originally encoded at less then 256 will sound horrible and a source at 128 or less will give useless garbage that sounded like it was recorded in a train tunnel. Grab the source material and re-record if at all possible. Over the course of a CD you may save a few megs with OGG, but mileage may vary.
I haven't played with OGG files in about a year, but they were giving about a 10% advantage in file size, give or take a few kilobits. The main advantage to OGG is the fact it is a free standard, but things might have changed, the algorithm might be better than mp3 now -- I don't pretend to be a complete expert on this, and the topic is long debated.
The bottom line is this: you want good quality audio, you need more drive space to handle larger files. It's cheaper then a drunk prom date these days. I'm up to 160 GB and I know some of these guys probably have arrays close to a TB.
-
uuhhgg, imagine defragmenting a terabyte :o especially if you haven't defragmented in a long while!
Well, thanks for the help. I do happen to have a memory upgrade along it's way :-).
-
I'm helping my dad put together a system for audio playback with close to 800GBs of storage... with all data being duplicated for backup. I had him order a 4 bay firewire enclosure with removable trays for the HDs.
200GB drives run about $120-200 (depending on rebates).
He's going to be ripping to APEs and then playing them back through an (as yet to be determined) sound card.
kiwi
-
There is a lot of discussion about various compression formats at hydrogenaudio.org.
There are many extremely knowledgable people about various codecs and formats available.
But the advise already given is good advice. Once your audio has been encoded into a lossy format (ie MP3) it is ill advised to recompress it again.
-
imagine defragmenting a terabyte
I have a 1TB RAID-5 6-drive media array. Just doing a monthly synch takes 36 hours of churning.